The Coatesville Creature

Loren Coleman reported on Cryptomundo on an old account of something near Coatesville, Pennsylvania - from the Lebanon Daily News, February 15, 1939:

A mysterious animal - described by witnesses as having a small head, a neck a foot long, the jumping ability of a deer and a scream like that of two cats - was reported prowling through Chester county woods today.

There were some who received the reports with skepticism, but Sylvester Scott, 31-year-old farmer, vowed he saw the what-is-it and three times had heard its eerie wail echoing over the countryside. Others said they had been “gunning” for it.

Scott declared the creature appeared one day in a field where he was spreading fertilizer.

“It stood two or two and a half feet off the ground,” he said. “It was colored like a deer in front, with white on the flanks. It had paws, remember, and not hoofs.

“It jumped just like a deer, about two feet up in the air. It had a very small head on the end of its neck, which was a foot long anyway. It was a fast runner, all right. It ran away from my dogs - beagles - and they didn’t seem to want to follow. Neither did I.”

One hunter said he thought it was a charmois [chamois], while others declared it might be some sort of a African Springbok.

“It screams only at night,” said Scott. “Once I fired my shotgun at the place where the noise was coming from, but it got away. Others have heard its wail, which does not seem to come directly from the monster itself, but issues in an unearthly scream all around you.”

The periodical Doubt (the account is repeated in Pursuit) places a "monster described as a cross between a giraffe, a dog and a deer, that wails like a woman" in Coatesville in February, 1946. Whether it is an error in transcription of this account or whether it is a separate one, I don't know.