Anyone else seen a big black cat in the rural areas outside Asheville NC?

Never been to Asheville myself but we get loads of big cat sightings here in Wales too, so I find this stuff really interesting. Black panthers (or whatever they actually are) seem to pop up all over the place in rural areas and nobody ever gets proper proof.

What did it look like exactly? Like genuinely big, bigger than a dog? That's usually the thing people mention first, just how massive they are compared to what you'd expect.

Would love to see any photos if you managed to get any. Even a blurry one is better than nothing honestly. And did anyone else in the area report it or was it just you?

Based in Wiltshire and we get the exact same thing here - big black cats spotted around the Vale of Pewsey and out towards the Marlborough Downs fairly regularly. There's a decent body of photographic evidence from across the UK if you dig into it, though most images are frustratingly ambiguous due to lack of scale reference. My working theory is that a lot of these sightings on both sides of the Atlantic are escaped or released exotic pets from the 70s and 80s, populations that have quietly established themselves over decades. The Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976 caused a load of people in the UK to release their big cats rather than pay for licences. Worth looking into whether North Carolina had similar legislation that might have triggered the same thing.