The Beast of Green Drive (Beast of Lytham)

Lytham sits on the Lancashire coast, beside St Annes. On its edge runs Green Drive. A private road and wooded beauty spot, it threads through farmland and woodland to Lytham Green Drive Golf Club on Ballam Road, next to the Lytham Hall estate. In the spring of 2005 it gave its name to a mystery.

28 April 2005, about 11 pm. Sandra Sturrock was out walking her dog when she caught sight of "something large". Collie size, she thought. "Light coloured, with sticking up ears." It sat on a dune watching her and her dog for several minutes, then ran off into the scrub as she slowly approached. Afterwards her dog was going mad, sniffing around the area.

Accounts differ on where this happened. The local paper she spoke to placed her on the sand dunes at St Annes, opposite King Edward VII and Queen Mary School. The Daily Mail placed her on Green Drive.

The Lytham St Annes Express ran the story on 5 May 2005. The next day the Daily Mail, in a piece by Jaya Narain, called it "The Beast of Green Drive". More than twenty sightings reached the Express.

Willie Davidson, 59, a painter and decorator, was playing bowls near Green Drive when he heard a snarl behind him. "It was like a monster out of Dr Who and it needs tracking down," he said. A woman in the fields beside Green Drive said it was the size of a Labrador, but "looked more like a hare". It was, she said, "surreal".

The picture that formed was strange. Dog-like but not a dog, with pale fur, large ears sticking up, a strangely enlarged mouth and a lolloping gait. It did not bolt like a fox or a deer. It sat, watched, and left when approached. Illustrator Sam Shearon interviewed several witnesses and drew a composite: "I have based my drawing on all the accounts mixed together including those printed in The Express."

Lancashire Police checked. "We have checked local zoos and farms, but nothing seems to be missing," a spokesman said, calling it "very bizarre" and passing the matter to the RSPCA. Chester Zoo staff studied Shearon's drawing: "It does not look like any mammal currently alive. It looks more like a mythical beast to us." No photograph of the animal was ever produced. After nearly a month, it seemed to vanish.

The first theory was a muntjac deer, a survivor of a herd the local squire brought to Lytham Hall over a century ago. Its tusks might explain the mouth. Beastwatch UK suggested a wallaby, or an escapee from Southport Zoo, which had closed some years earlier. The public offered a lost greyhound, a big cat, a lynx, even a chupacabra. Some locals suspected there had been "too much of the amber nectar flowing freely".

Then, in 2007, the story seemed to end. Gilda Easton photographed a sick animal she believed was the beast, Suki Woodhouse of North House Lane, Lytham, trapped it, and on Sunday 2 September 2007 RSPCA officer Nick Green collected it. It was a fox, almost hairless from mange, very underweight, confused and struggling to see, "the oldest fox I've ever had", he said. A local vet put it down. The Express declared: "The Beast of Lytham is Dead".

Not everyone accepted that ending. Karl Shuker argued that muntjac bear "scant similarity" to the descriptions, and that a dying fox found two years later was unlikely to be the larger, livelier animal of 2005. In 2022 Andy Owens, writing in The Skeptic, called it the monster that almost certainly wasn't: ordinary animals, magnified by press coverage and a composite drawing. Either way, the Beast of Green Drive has never left Lytham folklore.