As a very young kid I still swear to this day that I saw a mountain lion in my back yard in Whitefish Bay (for those of you not familiar its not the habitat you’d find them in. Can still picture the whole thing clearly in my mind. My parents still laugh at me for it...but at least now I know there’s at least a few others out there as nuts as I was then apparently.
I’ll believe you. In ‘93 during the big Mississippi flood thought I saw one in southern Iowa. Years later I happened to bump into a conservation officer at a gas station not far from there and told him. He told me I was one of several who had reported one in the area.
I really did have a lion in my CA neighborhood when I was a small child (4). There was an assistant zoo keeper who lived a few blocks way, and he used to bring home animals (for what prpose we did not know). He kept a half grown African lion in a cage in his back yard. My mother and I would walk over and peer through the hedge to catch a glimpse in its cage.
Many years later, in TX, when I worked for a small, local newspaper, I covered the case of a scam artist who kept a full grown mountain lion at his house. The animal used to escape from his fenced yard from time to time and was spotted walking along the tops of fences and climbing on roofs, much to the alarm of the neighbors.
I took my son out there to meet this “tame” lion and to take some pictures. The house was a very nice rental, with a pool, and I watched this couger swimming in the pool. The owner claimed to be a member of Mark Spitz’ famous Olympic swim team that won had 8 gold medals in the 1970s — now retired. I asked to see the medals, thinking that I could get a really good picture with the lion and the medals. He demurred, saying that the medals were “under the bed at his mother’s house”. The lion was not all that tame, either. My son, who was an animal lover, was very nervous around him.
I went back to the office and started making some calls to check his story. Everything he told me was a lie. My sympathic feature story was modified before it went to press. He wound up skipping out on his rent and vanishing in the middle of the night. He took the lion with him.