Records of an enormous wolf-like animal in North Wales date back to 1790, when a stagecoach travelling between Denbigh and Wrexham was attacked and overturned by an enormous black beast almost as long as the coach horses.

The terrifying animal tore into one of the horses and killed it, while the other horse broke free from its harness and galloped off into the night.

The attack took place just after dusk, with a full moon on the horizon. The moon that month seemed blood red, probably because of dust in the stratosphere from a recent forest fire in the Hatchmere area.

The locals thought the moon's colour was a sign that something evil was at large and the superstitious phrase, "bad moon on the rise" was whispered in travellers' inns across the region. In the winter of 1791, a farmer went into his snow-covered field just seven miles east of Gresford, and he saw enormous tracks that looked like those belonging to an overgrown wolf.

He followed the tracks with a blacksmith for two miles, and they led to a scene of mutilation which made the villagers in the area quake with fear that night.

One snow-covered field was a lake of blood dotted with carcasses of sheep, cattle, and even the farmer's dog.

The farmer was found locked up in his house in a terrible state. He wasn't harmed physically, but he was terrified. He had barricaded himself in after witnessing an enormous black animal that resembled a wolf ripping the throat out of his sheepdog.

The animal had then gone for the farmer, but he had managed to run into the farmhouse in time. He had bolted the heavy oaken door and hid under a table in the kitchen armed only with a pitchfork.

The farmer said the wolf pounded on the heavy oak door, almost knocking it off its hinges. The weird-looking animal then stood up on its hind legs like a human and looked in through the windows of the farmhouse.

Its eyes were blue and seemed intelligent and almost human-like. The beast foamed at the mouth as it peered in, then bolted from the window to commit carnage on the farm.

The church set up patrols in search of what was suspected to be a werewolf, and bands of villagers braved the freezing blizzards with lanterns, muskets and pitchforks in search of the beast, but only its tracks were ever seen.

Seven years later, two men walking across the Bickerton Hills in Cheshire saw something that sent them running for their lives.

They rushed into an inn and refused to continue their journey until morning. At dawn on the following day, the mutilated bodies of two vagrants were found in a wood just five miles from the inn.

The attacks by the large black wolf gradually died out, and the people of Cheshire and Wales breathed a sigh of relief.

But two centuries later, attacks by a large unidentified animal were reported again.

In February 1992, a national newspaper reported sightings of a strange bear-like animal that had been seen across Wales. In the north of the country, a farmer who had spotted the animal on the night of a full moon said he had afterwards found two of his lambs had been killed.

And in 2001 the local newspaper, the Evening Leader ran a series of articles about sightings of big cats, like a puma in Treuddyn, near Mold, and Bangor-on-Dee, near Wrexham.