La Bête de Noth: the phantom big cat of the Creuse

Noth is a village of about 450 people in the Creuse, north of Limoges. In the Cazine valley stands the Château de la Fôt. In early November 1982, a worker there heard a growl in a farm shed at night. Afterwards, paw prints were found. They were ten centimetres long and twelve centimetres wide.

4 November 1982. A farmer, named in later accounts as Marcel Jinjaud, approached a misty field and saw a large animal lying there. It sniffed the air, got up, then loped off like a cat and took refuge in the nearby woods. The back end was thin, but the neck looked like a bull's. "And the way it walks. It's like some kind of cat!" One account says he stayed in shock for two days.

The mayor, André Lalande, and the lieutenant de louveterie of Dun-le-Palestel, the official charged with controlling wolves and other pests, raised about 30 men, joined by gendarmes, federal game wardens and hunters. One hunter, known only as Rémy L., came face to face with it. The beast loomed up five metres in front of him. His whole body shaking, he aimed and fired, hit only the cabbages, and fled.

A severe storm brought down power and phone lines as fear spread. Then the kills began. On 10 November, a young bull and a heifer of about 400 kg each were killed at Maison-Neuve; on 19 November, two sheep; on 3 December, a ewe at Maupas; and on 9 December, a heifer at Le Grand-Bourg. Witnesses in Haute-Vienne described an animal much bigger than a dog, with a long tail and a burnt-sienna coat. On 11 December, two witnesses said they saw the beast deep in the forest beside a man.

The mayor gave casts of the prints to Dr Michel Klein, a Paris vet and television animal commentator. His verdict was brief. "Ce sont celles d'un lion ou d'un puma." They are those of a lion or a puma. Taken together, the witnesses described a puma-type cat, or a young lion of 80 to 100 kg, carrying its head down and its back rounded, with a coat of reddish brown or cream. No hair, photograph or film was ever reported. In early 1983, the beast disappeared as mysteriously as it had come.

Village talk turned to the château. Suspicion fell on its owner, the Marquis de Vasselot de Régné, who was rarely there. Rumour said he kept an illegal menagerie, or had brought a cat back from Africa. "Il a perdu son lion et il n'arrive plus à mettre le grappin dessus." He's lost his lion and can't get hold of it again. The accusations were never substantiated.

Michel Meurger, who investigated at Noth with Jean-Louis Brodu, suggested a lynx quietly released in early 1982 to control a disease among roe deer. The sociologist Françoise Reumaux saw old tensions between peasants and aristocrats, replayed through the story of a beast. Others have compared the affair to the Bête du Gévaudan.

Meurger and Brodu published their fieldwork in Les félins-mystère in 1984, and Meurger returned to the case in a 1990 study of exotic cats in French legend. The animal's identity was never established. The Beast of Noth remains unsolved.