Sassy Sprague sat on the railing of her front porch on a sunny Friday morning, just a short distance away from a utility pole with a lost cat sign.
Pat Sprague, Sassy’s owner, is continuing to let the longhaired tabby cat outside despite the fact that many cats in the neighborhood haven’t come home in recent weeks.
“What are you going to do?” Sprague said. “She’ll keep you up at night scratching at things if you try to keep her inside.”
Sprague is one resident remaining consistent with his habits in the wake of the disappearance of 17 cats in two months in Bangor’s Fairmount neighborhood, while others are considering new ways to protect their pets.
Jennifer Delano, who has lived in the Fairmount neighborhood for 15 years, said she’s considering putting a GPS tracker on one of her seven cats who likes to roam outdoors. For the others, Delano is tying them up so they can’t leave her yard. Regardless of how far her cats want to explore, Delano said she makes sure they are all inside long before sundown.
While residents seemed split on what’s behind the spike in missing cats, they have banded together in the 2,200-member Fairmount Facebook page, which has become the headquarters for a neighborhood searching for answers to a puzzling mystery and seeking closure on where their beloved pets have gone. The page is now filled with posts about lost cats alongside photos of ones that people report seeing in the hope of matching it with a missing feline.
Delano created a map of where the missing felines live after noticing a series of lost cat posts in the Facebook page dedicated to the Fairmount neighborhood and added to it with each new disappearance.
None of the missing cats have come home as of Friday and no one in the neighborhood has reported finding evidence of a cat encountering one of the wild animals that live near the area, according to Delano.
Adam Edward said he has kept his three cats indoors since he adopted them and doesn’t plan to change that knowing cats in the area are disappearing. In fact, Edward enclosed his front porch when he moved to the Fairmount area to protect his cats, as they’d have to get through two doors to get outside.
Though the details surrounding the mystery are “weird,” Edward said he assumed wild animals, such as foxes, fishers or coyotes, are the cause, as it wouldn’t be the first time domestic animals have run-ins with predators.
“We live in Maine, so it could be anything,” Edward said.
Trisha Bruen, Bangor’s animal control officer, previously told the Bangor Daily News she suspects wild animals are behind the disappearances, but agrees the high number in just two months is unusual. But a state wildlife expert isn’t so sure.
Shevenell Webb, a wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, said it’s unlikely that a “natural predator” like a coyote, fisher or even owl that has been in the area for years is suddenly killing so many cats.
“This is an unusual spike that you wouldn’t see with a natural predator,” Webb said previously. “You’d also see some evidence because predation isn’t always clean.”
Celeste Curtis, who owns one of the cats that went missing earlier this month, said she’s conflicted and confused by the different opinions on what’s causing the cats to go missing.
“We have a lot of different opinions on what specialists feel has happened and they don’t match,” Curtis said on Friday as she stapled lost signs for her cat, Pascal, to a telephone pole. “It makes you wonder what we’re all supposed to think. We need closure.”
Curtis hasn’t seen any sign of Pascal since Aug. 14, though she has searched the nearby golf course for him.
“What’s most bothersome to me is the fact that nobody has witnessed any of these cats being taken by anything or anyone,” Curtis said. “I’m always going to be suspicious about whether people are involved rather than wildlife, but I’d hate to think that. This has just been a nightmare.”
Pascal is the only one of her five cats who goes outside, as he came to her many years ago as a stray. If Pascal comes home, Curtis said she’d find a way to keep him inside.
Claire Donovan and Andy Jones, who have lived in the Fairmount neighborhood for 21 years, said they usually see multiple cats on their daily walks with their two dogs, Nilla and Darcy. On Friday, however, they didn’t see a single cat.
When the pair first heard about the missing cats, they assumed coyotes in the area were to blame. But, after hearing what Webb said, they’re uncertain. However, they don’t want to consider the possibility of human involvement.
“I don’t want to think the worst of people,” Donovan said.
Though they don’t have cats themselves, both Donovan and Jones said they’re invested in the mystery and hope all the cats return to their owners.
Sprague, however, is “100 percent certain” a coyote is the cause of the disappearances, as he has seen one roaming the neighborhood when he wakes up for around 4:30 a.m. To put the mystery to an end, Sprague said he wants a game warden to come kill the coyote.
“I don’t think it’s much of a mystery,” he said.
