Mountain lion tales are coming out of the woodwork.

This week, during a brief stop at The Recorder, two people in the newsroom stopped with tales of sightings, one by reporter Diane Broncaccio, the other by the sister of the Composing Department’s Susan Smith. It all started the way most cougar discussions begin — Smith telling the story about her sister’s sighting in her East Colrain back yard, Broncaccio overhearing the conversation and chiming in with a tale of her own, one she dubbed “my cougar story,” which occurred in Heath. A similar scenario could easily unfold at the barber shop, super market, church, town hall, ballgame, tavern … you name it, the conversation could take off there. All you need is one person bold enough to admit publicly that they’ve seen a big cat and the stories begin to piggyback. And that’s precisely what has happened in this space over the past month: One teaser tale has turned into a running commentary that’s now in its fifth consecutive week; and let me warn you now, this won’t be the last you hear about it here. There’s simply too many stories for one newspaper column. More than I would have ever imagined. In fact, an interesting tale just arrived in my Inbox this morning, one that occurred eerily close to several other recent sightings. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That one can wait while we address others from the ever-growing pile of printouts on my desk.

Today we’ll begin with Rocky Stone of Orange, a typical reporter of big-cat sightings, timid but credible. An Athol native and current coach of the Athol High School football team he once played for, Stone is a class act who has “followed the recent columns concerning cat sightings with much interest.” So, add it up, he waited a solid month to throw his hat in the ring. Prior to his “coming out,” he had shared his story only with his father, Chuck Stone, a sports and news reporter for the Fitchburg Sentinel and the Athol Daily News.

Stone’s tale goes back to 1956 when, as an 11-year-old boy living on Highland Avenue in Athol, he spotted something out his bedroom window that left an indelible impression. “It was a very large cat and I assumed it was a black panther that had escaped from a zoo or circus,” Stone wrote in an email.

When sheepishly informed, his father filed his son’s report in his memory bank and, during the mid ’60s, discovered a couple of newspaper articles he thought would be of interest. One story, probably from the Rutland Herald, told of  numerous panther sightings around central Vermont; another, by longtime Maine outdoor writer Gene Letourneau, told of a cougar carcass found in New York state. The Vermont paper was offering a $100 reward for its cat. Rocky Stone squirreled away those clippings 40-some years ago and dug them out recently to contribute to this column’s cougar chase. Think of it, would a man who invented a tall tale at age 11 still be able to locate clippings his father sent him in college over 40 years ago if he wasn’t certain of what he saw from his bedroom window? Very doubtful.

“Interestingly, a few years ago I read an article (when and where I’m not sure) about mountain lions which stated that black colored varieties do appear in the species every so often,” he wrote. “So I am certain that what I saw from our house in ’56 was a black-colored mountain lion. The pursuit of the mountain lion in the Northeast is analogous to the search for UFOs, people frequently spot them but the government officials always seem to be in denial.”

Coincidentally, an earlier email sent by Donna Scott of Ashfield also described a dark-colored big cat she saw “around dusk four years ago” in Conway, off Route 116. She spotted something approaching the road and “jammed on her brakes.” The creature crossed the road in front of her and ran up a hill on the other side of the road. “It looked like a panther (grayish colored) and I was mesmerized by how graceful it was.” she wrote. … “It was gorgeous, about four feet long (minus the tail) and its back would maybe come just above my knee. It was definitely feline looking and running. Very sleek and graceful. Gorgeous!”

Excited by the sighting, Scott telephoned her father, an outdoorsman and hunter “who knows a lot about nature,” to run it by him. He told her it sounded like she had seen a cougar, but he was confused by the color. As far as he knew cougars were brown. He suggested she research it to see what she could come up with, so she went to the encyclopedia and came away convinced. “I was astonished to see that what I saw was actually a cougar, and they can be grayish,” she wrote.

“Yes,” said Tom Valiton of Buckland when told of the color issue. “Remember I told you that there’s no mistaking the brown of a cougar, that it’s unique, nothing like a deer. Well, she’s right. It’s a gray/brown. No mistaking it.”

Valiton should know. He was on the scene of a cougar kill in Texas during his years in the Marine Corps and was featured in this space last week for seeing the same big cat twice within two weeks on Hawks Road, near the Shelburne-Deerfield town line.

Because Ms. Scott owns a retail store in Ashfield, she had ample opportunity to discuss her sighting with customers. She was surprised to learn how many had similar tales to share. “Since my sighting I have had over a dozen people stop by and tell me about theirs,” she wrote. “One day when I was unfortunately not in the store someone I had never met, a hunter, stopped by and left a message that he had pictures of cougar tracks and even a picture of a gray cougar taken about two miles from my sighting the following winter. But he was scared to show the picture!”

Scot says she’s had “discussions with natural biologists, but I know what I saw.”

Along the same vein is a contributing email from John Lucas, formerly from Shelburne and now living in Cadyville, N.Y. His uncle from Millers Falls mailed him two of my columns about cougars and he dropped me an line to question why official responses to big-cat sightings try to cast doubt on the witnesses. Lucas’ most recent sighting occurred on his expansive New York state property “several years ago, when a very large cat crossed our field at a Thanksgiving dinner. Fortunately we had several friends and relatives here and it was seen by all of us. There was no question it was a mountain lion.”

Lucas reported the sighting to a local outdoor columnist “who claims to be an expert on outdoor life,” and the scribe tried to tell him it as a fisher cat. Then, following several other reported sightings in the area, the same columnist dismissed them as nonsense.

Last fall Lucas says he was walking his dog through a field he owns when a mountain lion passed 50 feet in front of them “in high gear. I have never seen an animal run so fast. My dog just froze and stared, he weighs 60 pounds. This cat was twice his size.”

Lucas went on to compliment me for “supporting the sightings down there. We need someone like you up here. Our sportswriter is Dennis April. I think he gets his information from the Internet and should be on the comic pages.”

To be fair, I must admit I’ve received credible reports from trained professionals who doubt the existence of mountain lions in New England. That discussion is for another day. First, we must get through the other side of the story, the one wildlife officials seem determined to sweep under the carpet. It gets interesting.

Very interesting.