MONSTERQUEST: Vampire Beast

History Channel - Original Air Date: 6/4/08

Is there some kind of terrible vampire beast lurking in North Carolina?  Pets are dying and there seems to be some resemblance to a similar series of incidents in the 1950s.  Witnesses describe the thing as a cross between a dog and a cat with vampire-like fangs.  Victims seem to be largely dogs and goats.  One man buried his dog only to find the carcass back in his yard the next morning.  Four-inch tracks found at the scene resemble those found 50 years earlier.  A track expert suggests the prints look dog like, and local hunters decide to set camera traps.  Another man decides to dig up his mysteriously killed dog and have it given a necropsy.  One expert suggests that the most obvious suspect to have killed these pit bulls would be another pit bull.  One hundred miles north, the victims are goats, not dogs, but the cases are similar.  Pictures of the dead goats suggest coyote attacks; one expert disagrees, though she offers no better explanation.  The forensic expert says that the dead pit bull must have been killed by a large animal -- possibly another dog or bobcat (though bobcats seem too small). A sound expert sets up a series of sound tests to see if any cries of known animals match the cries of the supposed vampire beast.  One of the witnesses says the cry that comes closest is that of a tiger; another witness pegs the sound as "catlike."  A cougar would be a good candidate, but they're believed to have been gone from North Carolina for 100 years.  Yet, they continue to be sighted.  And, after all the team has done, it remains to an amateur to, months later, take a cell phone picture of a cougar -- supposedly from the same area.  The hunters agree, this makes sense.  (In early 2008, a cougar was found in Wisconsin, where cougars have been gone for decades.)  Some insist, though, that the vampire beast remains unknown to science.