Winged cats
There are around 138 reported sightings of winged cats. There are 28 documented cases i.e. with physical evidence and at least 20 photographs and, in recent times, one video. Several bodies and living winged cats have been examined. There is at least one stuffed specimen, but this may be a nineteenth century fake.
Possibly the earliest report of a winged cat is that by Henry David Thoreau: "A few years before I lived in the woods there was what was called a 'winged cat' in one of the farm-houses in Lincoln nearest the pond, Mr. Gillian Baker's. When I called to see her in June, 1842, she was gone a-hunting in the woods, as was her wont ... but her mistress told me that she came into the neighbourhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was finally taken into their house; that she was of a dark brownish-grey colour, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a large bushy tail like a fox; that in the winter the fur grew thick and flattened out along her sides, forming strips ten or twelve inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff, the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her 'wings,' which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists, prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and the domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to keep, if I had kept any; for why should not a poet's cat be winged as well as his horse? "
An undated case from Leeds in the early 1900s involved a winged cat at the centre of a custody dispute with one party claiming him to be their cat, Thomas, and the other claiming it to be their feline, Bessy. Thomas/Bessy was born in 1900 at Bramley Workhouse and when he died he was exhibited at fairs in a glass case. The last sighting of taxidermised cat in his display case was at a pub in Scarborough owned by a Mrs Clague the daughter of the last showman to have it.
