Perhaps the most frightening of the creatures encountered are the felinoids: during the course of a conversation with Spanish parapsychologist Eduardo Gregorio, he mentioned that a successful summoning of some nameless entity had produced the materialization of a hideous feline shape that darted into the surrounding darkness, much to the dismay of the would-be warlocks. Their dismay is quite understandable, given the fact that the very same thing had occurred to a famous occultist of the past. In his book The Goblin Universe (Llewellyn, 1987), cryptozoologist F.H. "Ted" Holiday describes the efforts made by the infamous Gilles de Rais, Joan of Arc's companion-in-arms. Rendered nearly penniless by his profligate lifestyle, the French nobleman sought to find wealth through sorcery. A necromancer named La Riviere seems to have conjured "a demon in the form of a leopard" which could allegedly be heard by servants as it walked on the castle's rooftops.

The United States has had its own felinoid cases: in the summer of 1996, a caller to The Laura Lee Show mentioned seeing a thin, shadowy figure like that of "a human cat" race across her backyard. In 1991, Strange Magazine ran a letter from a reader in Maryland concerning a creature known as "The Cat Man" which allegedly haunted a dumping ground near the city of Salisbury. The entity was described as black, hairy and having claws or hook-like fingernails; glowing yellow eyes completed the nightmarish ensemble.

Encountering one such entity is bad enough. Who could remain sane in the face of an infestation of said creatures? The question is not rhetorical: in 1985, residents of the communities of Rafael Calzada, Quilmes and San Francisco Solano (suburbs of Buenos Aires, Argentina) were forced to contend with precisely such a phenomenon.

According to researcher Gustavo Fernández, accounts of the felinoids' attacks were initially circumscribed to the police blotters of local newspapers. "One or more persons in feline disguise," standing almost 6 feet tall, had sexually accosted a number of local women. Victims and eyewitnesses had coincided in their descriptions, stressing the speed and agility of these figures.

As the number of cases increased, the police was prompted to take action. Over 40 law-enforcement agents at a time tried to capture one of the swift, shadowy figures without any success. On one occasion, the policemen converged upon one of the perpetrators in an empty lot, believing it to be hidden behind some shrubbery. When they ran toward it, the figure disappeared.

Fernández states that the number of creatures believed to prowl the suburbs was almost one hundred, and multiple reports were coming in from locations separated by considerable distances. As would occur with the Chupacabras sightings in Puerto Rico a decade later, locals began taking their own measures upon seeing the police's inability or unwillingness to capture or slay the creatures. During one incident, relates Fernández, two men "opened fire against a thin, black, hairy silhouette at a distance of 5 meters" and saw it fall to the ground following the bullets' impact, only to rise up to its feet once more and run away.

Fernández found himself drawn into the situation when his expertise in the occult was requested by locals who complained of the inordinate number of "possession" events taking place in the community. Catholic and Protestant clergymen were being called in to exorcise homes and individuals more than ever before. Although Fernández believed that the "cat people" were probably human terrorists, he was interested to learn that the appearance of the bizarre silhouettes coincided with the opening of several Umbanda temples (terreiros, in Portuguese) in the local woods.

The occultist investigated the case of a local family whose daughter, Elena, would awake every night at two o'clock in the morning screaming, weeping and convulsing. Standing guard outside the girl's room while she slept, Fernández was startled to hear her cry at precisely 2 a.m.. Barging into the room, he became aware that "something" had dropped off the roof of the house and onto the ground outside the open bedroom window, "a shadowy shape darker than the night sky".

Instinctively, Fernández --a practitioner of the martial arts--thrust himself at the window and rammed his left fist at the hairy figure. This is how he describes physical contact with a non-human entity: "The fact is that I felt a repugnant sensation under my left hand. Its body was very cold, colder than its mammalian exterior would suppose, and was soft. The best tactile image I can give you is that of a leather bag filled with jelly. Its bristles were hard and almost perpendicular to the skin, or at least so it seemed to me." The entity turned and ran as the researcher leapt out the window to chase it to no avail.

The paranormal infestation ended as abruptly as it had begun--a constant in most cases involving entities of this description. Reflecting on those utterly strange days sixteen years ago, Gustavo Fernández believes that the felinoids were the "byproduct of goetic activity" in the area and that their activity was strongly reminiscent of the Medieval incubi, who would materialize physically to sexually accost humans or disturb their spiritual harmony.

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