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Paul Nealey, Bill Arthur and Alice Adkins
Although it happened several years ago, Paul Nealey remembers the fleeting moment like it was yesterday because it frightened him so.
“I was driving out Gates Chapel Road, and right about where the Methodist church is a black panther ran across the road in front of my car,” said Nealey, a retired Ellijay businessman. “Even though I knew it couldn’t get to me, it still scared me so bad the hair on the back of my neck stood up.”
The Times-Courier reported the firsthand account of one of its employees seeing a black panther in Cherry Log eight years ago. Alice Adkins is a longtime proofreader, and knew something in her neighborhood had been preying on cats. For those who doubt her eyewitness rendering, there are other alleged sightings as well.
In the autumn of 2021, Kimberly Swinney said she saw a black panther in Cohutta on Bryant Road (off Cohutta-Varnell Road).
“It was crossing the road onto our property, and it was mid-afternoon,” she detailed. “It was huge and had a solid black smooth, silky coat.”
Although it occurred when he was a teenager, U.S. Marine veteran Bill Arthur remembers the incident like it was yesterday. He was riding his motorcycle, girlfriend on back, and had veered off Legion Drive in Dalton onto a dirt lane with overgrown brush on both sides.
“Back then there was no bypass around Dalton, and (it’s now) Veterans Drive,” he recalled. “Almost directly across the street from the fairground was the slaughterhouse, and probably some stock pens.”
The area was not as commercialized as it is these days. At one time, there was a radio tower at the end of the dirt lane, and a cable and padlock attached to steel posts kept unauthorized vehicles out. But not a resourceful teenage biker.
“I rode a small Ducati street motorcycle and was dating a girl at the time, and there was plenty of room to pull the bike around the barrier and ride down the lane. So we would do that sometimes to be alone — ‘nuff said,” Arthur confessed.
Then one evening those plans were interrupted.
“We pulled around the barrier and had gone maybe 50 to 75 yards down the lane when a black panther ran across in front of the bike,” he continued. “It ran across just inside the range of the headlight, and there was no mistaking what it was.”
The big cat disappeared into the brush as quickly as it had emerged, and Arthur said after the initial shock — his girlfriend had not seen it — he “figured that wasn’t the place for us to be right then.”
“I stopped the bike and calmly turned it around and said, ‘I’m kinda hungry, do you mind if we go grab something to eat?’” he recalled. “So we left right away.”
Arthur, a 1971 Dalton High graduate who would later enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps and is now a member of the local Marine Corps League, couldn’t get his mind off the cat. He had an idea.
“The following evening I took my rifle and slipped back in there looking for it,” he said. “I found plenty of its tracks but never saw it, and after being there for awhile I suddenly got a strong feeling I was being watched. I stuck around for awhile and looked the area over without moving around too much, and the feeling wouldn’t go away. So I very carefully slipped back out of there and let the cat have his space.”
He called the panther, the only one he saw, a “big healthy cat” for obvious reasons.
“I always figured it was living pretty good off of what it could get at the slaughterhouse,” he believes. “The place I saw the cat was still well within the city limits, just a few isolated overgrown acres near a good food source.”
In the fall of 2014, Adkins said she still had not gotten used to the biannual time change and was up early one morning around 4:15 to smoke a cigarette. She had just put out her cat and kitten and they had begun to feed, but suddenly they were gone.
“I noticed something coming down the bank, and it was jet black,” said Adkins, who was standing outside. “I knew it wasn’t a bear — I’ve seen them here before — and I thought, ‘That’s an awful big house cat.’ Then I saw its tail. The body was about 3 feet long, but its tail was even longer. I knew what it was then.”
She believes what she called a “juvenile” panther smelled her cats, and may have taken one of the kittens around three weeks earlier. But then the big cat sensed her, possibly smelling the smoke.
“It looked at me, and it had big yellow eyes,” she told an Ellijay newspaper editor in the Nov. 13 issue that year. “The porch light was on and it was a full moon, and I could see it perfectly. It had beautiful black fur and there wasn’t a blemish on it. Those eyes were the only color.”
After they locked eyes for just a moment, she said the panther screamed and took off under the porch after her cats. It had been standing where there were steps leading up to the porch.
“I guess it could have come after me,” she said. “I was paralyzed, but when it screamed and took off it broke my trance and I ran in the house. It scared me so bad I had to lay down on the couch.”
Adkins said she heard the panther screaming some more under the house, but when she went out later after daylight none of her cats were missing. But other cats in the neighborhood had disappeared, she noted.
“I’m definitely going to be more careful when I’m outside, especially after dark,” she said.
Adkins, an Air Force retiree, was asked if she believed reports published in the newspaper a few weeks prior that panthers were in Gilmer County — and what she thinks now.
“I believe it when people said they had seen them,” she replied. “I’d never seen one myself, but now I really believe it — I’m 100 percent positive!”