The Hound of the Baskervilles is a true story!
Well, not really, but Arthur Conan Doyle did base his Sherlock Holmes novel on the Dartmoor legend of the Beast of Bodmin. Doyle stayed a while in Princetown, Devon, on the moors, and heard the legend of the ‘Beast of Bodmin Moor’ from his pal. Bertram Fletcher Robinson.
There have been sixty reported sightings of the Beast - a five-foot long black panther-like creature with yellow eyes - and coupled with the numerous reports of mutilated livestock, the police decided in 1995 to investigate its existence.
Of course, they found nothing. Monsters don’t exist. Ha! It’s all just stories.
But then, not long after the po-po concluded that there was no Beast, a young boy found a leopard’s skull on the banks of the River Fowey in Cornwall.
Oh my Dog! Monsters DO exist! It’s all real.
Then the Natural History Museum discovered that the skull had made it into the country as part of an imported leopardskin rug.
Spoilsports.
But then Benjamin Mee, the owner of Dartmoor Zoo, said that in 1978 he was expecting a delivery of five pumas from the closing-down Plymouth Zoo and only two arrived. The owner of Plymouth Zoo, Mary Chipperfield, apparently had a breakdown of some sort and couldn’t bring herself to give over her favourite pumas to another zoo so she released them into the wild.
This was okay, because it was 1978 and releasing ‘exotic species’ into the wild wasn’t illegal until 1981. Good thing it wasn’t these days - Imagine the twitterstorm after she tweeted it on Twitter, the twit!
Her husband denies the story, and Mary passed away in 2014 so she can’t argue.
Even now police get reports of “a tiger on the loose” or a “beast digesting its dinner in my back garden” in Axminster. A Google search will reveal dozens of photos and videos allegedly of the Beast. In October 2016 giant paw prints, 4 inches wide like those of a lion, were found in Cornwall.
But Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t hear any story about an escaped zoo animal. He died in 1930 - long before Mary Chippenfield claims to have let the cats out. So what Beast was his mate talking about?
YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE:
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