Bags, dogs and cats

I was intrigued to read of Alison Wragg’s encounter with a flapping black bin bag that apparently transformed into a large black dog [ FT413:72]. I recalled that Yorkshire shape-shifter the Holden Rag, which was seen “sometimes in the form of a great black dog, and at other times as a rag of white linen on the thorn”. (Jeremy Harte, in Explore Phantom Black Dogs, ed. Bob Trubshaw, Explore Books, 2005.)

The study of these shapeshifting creatures inevitably leads to speculation about the extent to which subjective perception and external object interact. I pursued this inquiry in the chapter Eyesight v. Vision of my book Mystery Big Cats (2006), particularly in the section titled ‘The Black Plastic Vision’, where I noted instances similar to Alison’s – where what is first assumed to be a bin-bag on closer inspection turns out to be a panther-like black cat. At that time I wondered “if the rise of sightings of black panthers since the late 1980s could be attributable to

the rise in black plastic bin bags over that period” – or perhaps to “fragments of black silage wrappers which, animated by a breeze, can perform the pathetic, despairing struggles peculiar to black plastic”.

But where one might assume that this could lead to people mistaking bin-bags for animals, with anomalous big cats the opposite is in fact more often the case. For example, gamekeeper Alan Newsham of Freckleton in Lancashire thought he saw a black bin liner lying on the ground, but when he went to pick it up, a black cat leapt to its feet. “I thought, oh my God! It gave me a hell of a shock. It must’ve leapt about 10 feet [3m], like you would expect a deer to, and disappeared into the woods.” [ The Blackpool Gazette, 29 Aug 2003]

In the spring of 1987 farmer John Bragg assumed that the object he saw moving across the neighbouring field was a plastic bag being blown by the wind; he then realised that it was a large black cat. Two people visiting Breedon churchyard in Devon noticed what they also at first thought was a black plastic sack on the drystone wall, but when they opened the car door a big cat – “black, shiny and as big as an Alsatian” – jumped down from the wall and loped off.

Merrily Harpur

Cattistock, Dorset

Alison Wragg’s sighting of a possible shape-shifting black dog sounds distinctly similar to the ‘magic dog’ account from a book called Uncanny stories – Weird happenings to Daily News readers, (published in about 1926, and reproduced in FT48:17, Spring 1987). This story described a revivalist minister’s encounter with a black dog that transformed into something like a bed quilt before drifting skyward. This seems to me the reverse of Alison’s experience: she describes what appeared to be a ‘bin bag’ becoming a dog. So had this entity just flown in before she witnessed it?

Nick Maloret

Milton, Hampshire