Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-31790225-20180908212530

In the small fishing town of Greenock Scotland, there’s an urban legend about a man living among the rats in sewers. Legend says the man travels underneath the city in secret tunnels, and he only comes out at night. Often appearing in dark alleyways, the man has reflective, glowing eyes, and an appetite for giant rats. His appearance and behavior gave him the nickname “The Catman” and the story of his existence carried on through the town, growing like a game of telephone.

The story has changed and had many variations over time. A popular theory was that the Catman was a Russian sailor who got stranded in Scotland in the 70s. Without any money or family, the Catman was forced to live on the streets. He fed on rats because it was the only thing he could catch to eat.

Another version of the story was that the Catman was a mentally disabled man who escaped from a mental hospital. He crawled and lived in the forest and sewers of Greenock to avoid going back to the madhouse.

Then there was the story that the Catman was simply a man badly beaten by the mob. His legs were severely injured in the attack, and so he crawled everywhere to get around. He lived on the streets of the town to avoid being found. For many years, the only evidence of the Catman were second-hand tales of glowing eyes in the darkness, or a friend who swears he had seen the black figure crawl out of a drainage pipe, a dying rat dangling from its jaws. To some, the Catman was a cryptozoological beast, the last of its kind living on the edges of society. To others, the legend of the Catman was the work of local pranksters intent on scaring the drunks stumbling out of the pub at night. Even the police, who often fielded reports about Catman sightings, were unsure of what to make of the stories.

Then in the late 2000s, a pixelated video captured on a cell phone changed all that. The Catman was real.



The clip showed that Catman wasn’t some kind of undiscovered monster, but a human after all. As the cameraman spoke to him, Catman lifted a dead rat to his face, black with ash and dirt, and bit into it, the disturbing image somehow disarmed by Catman’s gleeful “thumbs up” gesture.

As you can imagine, the video was passed around between the youth of Greenock, becoming the hot topic of local discussion, before being uploaded to the internet where it quickly became the talk of message boards and email chains. The Greenock Social Work department even took notice of the video, telling the local papers that they’d sent one of their case workers out searching for him, though they wound up empty handed.

No one is quite sure how long the Catman has been lurking the alleys and tunnels of Greenock, but some of the earliest reports date back to the mid-70s. Despite the wildly varying backgrounds earlier in this story, a few details always remained the same: Catman always crawled, rarely spoke, and was always eating rats.

One report from 2010 lends more credence to his cat-like traits:

''Catman is definitely real. He gave me a hell of a fright. The first time I saw him it was just getting dark, and all I saw were his eyes. His face is totally black like in the video. He would lie at Scotts Lane path in the bushes behind the fence, pointing at cat meat that was left for cats, asking me to pass it through the fence. I think he was scared to go onto the path for it. I used to go buy donor kebabs for him when coming home from dancing. He hasn't been seen in ages now, since the council put corrugated iron up so he couldn't be fed.

He is definitely real, not a myth. I heard young boys gave him a heavy kicking. Young lads in Greenock are evil.''

As the legend of the Catman grew more and more into a reality, the media began to take in interest in the story. In 2010 a local documentarian set out to uncover the truth about the local legend, but was met with roadblocks at every turn. No matter where he went, those who allegedly knew the true history of the Catman refused to speak on camera. What was supposed to be a feature length documentary ended up being a five minute segment that posed more questions than it answered.



To this day, it seems that no one knows, or will reveal, the true identity of Catman, where he’s from, or how he ended up living this way in the tunnels of Greenock. His survival for half a century is shocking enough, but maybe not as mysterious as one might think when considering the kindness the locals who’ve attempted to help the man throughout the years.

The Catman is still alive, if not well, with images of his blackened face surfacing as recently as April 2015, courtesy of his Facebook Fan Page. Yes, that’s right, he even has a Facebook page, one that, perhaps cruelly, classifies him as a pet. It’s the same page where, just days ago, it was reported that Catman was sent to the Ravenscraig Hospital.

After his first appearance in Greenock over four decades ago, perhaps the mystery of the Catman will finally be solved. 