Never been to Asheville myself but big black cat sightings come up constantly in areas where they're supposedly not meant to exist and it's one of those things I find genuinely fascinating. Over here in Norfolk we get similar reports - big cats, usually black, usually dismissed as misidentification. The thing is the sheer volume of credible sightings across different countries suggests there's something real happening, whether its escaped exotic pets that bred in the wild or something stranger.
Has anyone managed to get footage or even clear prints? That's usually where these cases get interesting. Track casts can be pretty definitive if the conditions were right when you found them.
What size are we talking roughly - like a large dog or noticeably bigger? The scale descriptions people give often tell you a lot about whether it could actually be a known species.