Imagine eyes like ice. They really were like that.
Appalachian folklore is full of strange cats, from the wampus cat to the "painters" of mountain stories. This account isn't a legend, just a very odd animal seen clearly at close range in daylight, and nobody has yet been able to tell the teller what it was.
In the summer of 2012 or 2013 the teller was living with their parents in rural West Virginia, twenty minutes from the nearest town and miles from any neighbours. Every morning their mother walked their two dogs down the road. One morning, about a mile and a half from home, one of the dogs bolted into brush so thick you couldn't see into it.
From the road she could hear a vicious fight, with spitting and yowling like a cat, and the mewing of kittens. The other dog stayed at her side. Eventually the first dog came back with a deep gash across his nose. At home, the family guessed it must have been a bobcat defending a litter.
The next day the teller drove out with their girlfriend. Coming round the bend at that same spot, they found a large cat walking along the side of the road.
It was built like a bobcat, with long hind legs and big cheek tufts, but almost everything else was wrong. It was big, closer to lynx-sized than bobcat-sized. Its whole coat was a deep chocolate brown, like a chocolate Labrador, with the darker spots of a bobcat still visible through it. Its ears had long tufts at the tips, which is more of a lynx trait, and lynx aren't found anywhere near West Virginia. Its tail wasn't the short stub that gives bobcats their name; it was long enough to almost reach the ground. And its eyes were a bright, piercing blue, nothing like a bobcat's dull yellow-green.
The teller drove slowly alongside it for about ten seconds, just a couple of yards away. The cat didn't hurry or seem bothered at all. It glanced up at the car, then turned and slipped into the brush. Neither of them had time to grab a phone.
In the eight years between the sighting and their post, the teller never found a match. Their best guess was some kind of bobcat and house cat hybrid, but they found little evidence such crosses happen in the wild, and that wouldn't explain the size. If it was the mother defending kittens the day before, there may be more of them out there.