Cougar on the prowl, say residents

It was a scream that prompted Wayne Stafford to look outside Saturday morning.

It was then, he said, that he spotted a cougar.

In his shop off Dutch Chapel Road, Stafford yelled for his wife and grandson.

“We watched it for 15 minutes or more,” he said. “At one point, he was looking almost directly at us...”

The animal, Stafford said, stood only 300 feet from his shop.

A yellowish brown color, Stafford said the animal was two feet tall and three feet long with a long tail.

“It came down and it curved straight up,” he said about the animal’s tail.

Stafford’s wife Phyllis called dispatch and Sheriff’s Deputy Tuan Kreer responded to the scene.

“I spoke with Phyllis Stafford and I could tell she was probably seeing something that was not a cat or dog,” Kreer said, adding that Phyllis seemed to be in a panic when he spoke to her on the phone.

Kreer arrived at the Stafford residence around 10 a.m.

But the animal, he said, wasn’t there.

See more of this story in this week's print edition of The Cynthiana Democrat.