The Ruokolahti Lion ("Elvi")

Summer 1992. Finland was deep in an economic recession. In Ruokolahti, a forest municipality in South Karelia, the Russian border lay just to the east. Lions had never lived wild here. Circus big cats had been banned in Finland since 1980.

Tuesday 23 June 1992. About 11:20. Martti Auvinen, a forestry supervisor for Enso-Gutzeit, was at work between Kalpiiviita and Kotasalo. He saw a large animal's four legs and brown belly. The front was massive. The hindquarters were covered in smooth brown fur. The tail was long. He ruled out a lynx or an elk. It was lion-like.

"The lion passed 25 metres away," he later told MTV. "I saw a brown animal in the saplings." The whole sighting lasted about 40 seconds. The animal looked him straight in the eyes. Then it loped off into denser forest.

Auvinen ran. He got lost. It took him about two hours to collect himself. He went on describing the animal as a lion for the rest of his life.

27 June. Paw prints on a sandy forest road. Erik S. Nyholm, a large-predator researcher at the Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute, saw them himself. Tracks of a large cat that does not occur in Finland, he said. A real lion, and not some silly-season story. Experts from Korkeasaari Zoo also accepted the prints as genuine.

More reports came in. An eight-year-old boy, Tuomo Jäppinen. Two teenage swimmers who saw a lioness about a metre tall. A conscript at the Immola garrison, Timo Puumalainen, who said the animal stared at him before running off. By 29 June police had recorded three reliable sightings.

29 June 1992. Three ministries met urgently. Lions were not covered by hunting law, so the animal was treated as a public-safety threat. The Interior Ministry authorised Nyholm to hunt it. An Ilta-Sanomat phone poll found 81% of 3,849 callers opposed killing the lion. On 1 July, Agriculture Minister Martti Pura switched the order to live capture.

From 2 to 4 July, a Korkeasaari team waited with 8 Border Guard soldiers, 3 dogs and steel traps. There were no fresh sightings. On 9 July, Swedish tourists Anita and Åke Lobell filmed a large cat for three minutes from about 200 m. Border Guard captain Antti Väisänen gave the animal a name. Elvi.

No official conclusion was ever published. Jukka Salo of Korkeasaari first saw a lioness or puma in the Lobell video, then a lynx. Reports of an overturned circus truck were denied on every side. In 2017 MTV obtained 25-year-old documents. According to Nyholm, the Russian professor Pjotr Danilov reported that a Moscow circus train had derailed near the border and big cats escaped. Sceptics pointed to suggestion and media contagion, and two faked track sites did turn up. Journalist Marja Manninen put it bluntly: "I made thirty stories about a lion that never existed."

Ruokolahti made the lion its symbol from 1992 to 2012. There were T-shirts, a play, songs and a children's book. In 2017 a stone lion statue was raised on Eukkoaukio in the centre of the municipality. The animal is thought to have gone back into Russia. Nobody ever caught it.