Latest news with #CatMan
Daily Mirror
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Who is the Wirral cat man? The mysterious cat figure inspiring an online witch hunt
"I put the flash on my phone and I saw the 'Cat Man' sat there staring right at me": a mysterious suited figure has been terrorising and fascinating the people of Wirral. But who is behind it? Wirral residents may be witnessing a new urban legend in the making. Unnerving sightings of a man in a black cat costume have been reported stalking the coastal streets of Merseyside, inspiring amusement, confusion and terror. It's even turned into a TikTok witch hunt, with videos of sightings racking up thousands of views. But who is behind it? Facebook user Abbie Gilbert was walking her dog when she first heard the sound of a grown man making cat noises. She shone a torch and suddenly he was there: a man in a cat suit waving his arms at her before scarpering up a hill. She then posted the photos to Facebook, asking: 'Does anyone know who the freak in the cat mask and morph suit is at the coastal park near the harvester?' She added: 'Never been so scared.' The strange cat-ear wearing figure has since been seen prowling mainly beach-side areas: in the scrubby grass and nearby parks. Most recent reported sightings appear to place him around the Leasowe Beach, a popular local spot. On July 9, photos of the 'Cat Man' were posted to the Facebook group Crimewatch Wirral. The caption explained that they were in the Leasowe Bay area and they took a picture of the view. A social media user wrote: 'I spotted something on the picture it looked like a black figure so I put the flash on my phone on and I saw the 'Cat Man' sat there staring right at me.' They added: 'I was absolutely shaken, please stay safe although it is hasn't committed a crime.' For more stories like this subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Weekly Gulp, for a curated roundup of trending stories, poignant interviews, and viral lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. Reactions have been mixed. Many of the comments haven't been taking the Cat Man seriously, with one even joking that someone should 'put a collar and a bell on him.' However, others are a lot more concerned. 'That's absolutely terrifying,' one wrote. 'It's just weird and creepy," another said. On July 10, another Facebook user claimed that the cat-man 'was found peering through somebody's window and approaching people in a threatening manner walking their dogs on Leasowe Bay.' Meanwhile, there have been reports that the cat has been caught 'hissing' at people. But while many are afraid, others are morbidly curious. TikTokers are now posting videos of themselves hanging by the Wirral coast at night, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious figure for themselves. Some of these videos have hundreds of thousands of views, as commenters gather share their own tales of the suited cat. A group has even been set up on Facebook specifically to track sightings of the mysterious prankster, which now has over 2.2K members – though this of course has led to its own problems. Within the scope of just 12 hours, group members have claimed to have spotted him in the middle of a field, getting into a caravan, and in two separate parks. 'Everyone's lying, can't be in 7 places at once lmao,' one person wrote. Others have even made pleas to treat the cat man humanely, as the cat hunt has intensified. 'Cat man isn't going to come out if people do things to him and try to hunt him down to try hurt or unmask him,' one Facebook user wrote. Theories as to who might be behind the costume are also running rampant. Some say he's suffering from a mental illness, others believe it's an elaborate hoax. Meanwhile, a few even believe they could be a sexual exhibitionist. There may even be copycats. Vickie Cummings recently posted a TikTok of a 'Cat Man' sighting from her car, though as the suited figure approached many comments pointed out that it looked like a woman, casting doubt over the authenticity of the sighting. 'Apparently not the real cat man? So there's 2,' she later wrote in a TikTok caption.
Al Jazeera
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Jazeera
The Cat Man Eshete: An Ethiopian refugee's life on the streets of New York
The extraordinary story of Eshete, a refugee who escaped war in Ethiopia as a young man and is now a devoted caretaker of a feral cat colony in New York City. Eshete has become the heart of a close-knit community while living on the streets. Together with neighbours who help feed the cats and look out for him, Eshete's story reveals a moving portrait of grassroots community care. The Cat Man Eshete is a documentary film by Laura Checkoway.
New York Times
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He's ‘the Worst Dream America Ever Had,' and He's Out for Revenge
Stephen Graham Jones's new novel would give Gen. Philip Sheridan fits. The Civil War officer is often cited as the source of one of the most infamous sayings in American history, 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian,' and there are dozens if not hundreds of dead Indians in 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.' There's also a very long-living or, more accurately, undead one who opines: 'What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had.' Take that, General! Good Stab is an Indigenous man from the Blackfeet tribe living in Montana around the time of the 1870 Marias Massacre, when U.S. Army troops killed nearly 200 unarmed women, children and elderly members of the Blackfeet Nation, a tragedy that figures in a multitude of ways throughout this gruesome joyride of a novel. One day, Good Stab is caught in a violent encounter with a wagon train of white settlers holding a supernatural being in a cage. The strange, humanish creature is bloodthirsty, death-defying, antagonistic, charismatic and chatty. He's called the Cat Man, and he's a centuries-old vampire. During an ensuing skirmish with the white settlers, the Cat Man is freed and his blood gets mixed into a wounded Good Stab, who then becomes a bloodsucker as well. Now released, the Cat Man preys on Good Stab's tribe, which enrages Good Stab, leading to decades of conflict between the two. All the while, each is on a near-perpetual quest for vengeance against white settlers and for survival in 19th-century Montana. None of this will be any surprise to readers of Jones's past fiction, which has confidently mashed up various horror genres with pointed explorations of Native American experience. But two features stand out with his latest: first, the particular terms of vampiric living. Rather than cloaked, castled mystery and wealthy Eurotrash vibes (familiar features of the vampire story, from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' in 1897 through to Robert Eggers's remake of 'Nosferatu' in 2024), the monsters in 'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter' are High Plains eternal drifters who have to drain their victims completely to remain vital. Moreover, in a mordant deep joke on the saying that you are what you eat, Cat Man and Good Stab inevitably take on the attributes of their victims, whether humans or animals. Dante would be pleased with the situation Jones has created, though social justice-oriented readers looking for an easy-to-cheer-for BIPOC vigilante be warned: Good Stab can only defend his people and carry out vengeance on behalf of the Blackfeet by, as the novel's title suggests, killing and feeding on lots and lots of Native Americans himself. And his Blackfeet victims aren't just fellow warriors in the midst of battles, either. In one case, Good Stab gorges on a child after crawling into the lodge of a sleeping family. First he quietly bites into her throat. 'I didn't think she could scream anymore, but I didn't want her mother to have to see this,' he observes. But his remorse means little compared with his sudden insight: The younger the person he blood-sucks dry, the stronger he becomes. Cat Man already knows this, which leads to a wrenching climactic encounter with Good Stab that recalls the awful dilemma at the center of Ursula K. Le Guin's story 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.' The consequences of this showdown stay with Good Stab forevermore. He unpacks his unquiet heart decades later, and his doing so plays out through the second distinctive feature of Jones's novel: its story-within-story-within-story structure. The novel opens with a discovery — in 2012, a book hidden in the wall of an old parsonage is found by an unnamed construction worker. It turns out to be a journal, written in 1912 and belonging to Arthur Beaucarne, the pastor of the local Lutheran congregation. Inside it contains the story of his strange encounters with Good Stab, who, after years of carnage, has seemingly come to him to confess. In the novel's 1912 sections, Jones adeptly plays into the expectations we have of horror tales. Good Stab appears and disappears in the church at will; people in town are being killed inexplicably; the sheriff doesn't believe Beaucarne when he tries to tell him his suspicions about Good Stab; and Beaucarne himself has a secret past, which makes his vow to listen to Good Stab's confession with 'a good heart' increasingly suspect. Jones creates and builds a strong sense of suspense and mystery in the 1912 sections, whereas the Good Stab passages are comparatively loose and repetitively graphic, to the point of tedium. This all comes to us through yet another frame narrative — at the beginning of the novel, Etsy Beaucarne, a flailing academic and descendant of Arthur, acquires the journal. Reading it, she's curious about what she learns of her ancestor and his undead companion. As the novel unfolds, Jones moves back and forth between Beaucarne's haunting in 1912 and Good Stab's hunting in the years before, reserving Etsy's discovery of her family connection to a strange and supernatural past for the opening and closing segments of the book. What is Jones doing here, with this trifold narrative structure? He has created a novel that invites us to reflect on how the stories we tell about ourselves can be at once confessions and concealments. At the same time, he's using this framework to set up some scary, big reveals. Do the vampire math, people: The story Etsy's reading from a hundred years ago isn't finished yet.
