I run a store in nearby Casco, Maine and heard accounts of sightings of an animal fitting the same desciption by some customers who probably never heard of”MonsterQuest” They don’t say they “saw a mutant”, just an animal they basically hadn’t seen before in the area. I think some may be sightings of
fisher cats living around and when my wife saw one across the street at the millpond she could not identify it, but upon talking to neighbors (and a visit to Gray Animal Park) we’re pretty certain that’s what it was. They have killed plenty of small domestic animals (mostly house cats) in our neighborhood as well. The existence of these animals (and that many people have never heard of them) probably fuels a “mystery killer of small pets” rumor in this area. Our employee saw something he could not identify just last week, he described it in nearly identical terms to “sightings” made in the past. When I jokingly asked him if it was the “Mystery Beast of Androscoggin County” he said he’d never heard of ANY of the legends (”Maine Mutant”, “Turner Beast”, etc.) He said it wasn’t a fisher cat. His description is “golden retriever size, but with a lot of weight to it, color blackish brown, arched back, 6 inch bushy tail. It didn’t look like a bear or dog, but somewhere in between.”

I found this article. It’s an op-ed piece published before the report referenced above confirming one particular “beast” as “fido”.

http://www.sunjournal.com/opinion/20060827155.php

This one particular excerpt below is interesting in that the descriptions are really similar to the account describing the mysterious animal sighted just down the road from us.

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“June Stevens of Greene reported such an encounter in 2004. Driving onto her property in the middle of the afternoon, she saw a strange animal behind an outbuilding. “It appeared larger than a dog, had a bristly looking coat, sort of a mottle gray and black. It was not a bit timid, started right at us.” It frightened her dog so much, she quickly drove into the garage and shut the door.

Also in 2004, Leo Doyon described his uneasy encounter with an unidentifiable animal in Auburn. He saw the animal while on his deck and, despite years of hunting in the Maine woods, had never seen such a creature. “It was no wolf. It sure as hell wasn’t a fisher and it wasn’t a coy dog,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what it was.”

Sightings of similar animals have been reported in Wales, Litchfield, Sabattus, Turner, Lewiston and Auburn, with many of the reports describing a hyena-like animal.

In Wales, such an animal killed Leo Michaud’s 16-year-old Doberman pinscher. At the time, Michaud described the attack as savage. The dog’s head was ripped open and her neck appeared to have been chewed.

After his dog was killed, Michaud found a den near the doghouse, which was just 40 yards from the entrance to the Oak Hill High School campus. And, nights later, he saw the creature in the yard. It was, he said, a large animal, black, gray and brown with wild eyes and a bushy tail.

Like Doyon, Michaud has hunted in Maine for decades. “I’ve spent a lot of time in the woods,” he said, and “I’ve never seen anything that looks like this.”

While there was some speculation the animal was a wolverine, Maj. Thomas Santaguida of the Maine Warden Service guessed it was a fisher, an animal similar in size and shape to a wolverine, but much more aggressive and mean. These animals can, Santaguida said, “live very nearby without people even knowing it,” suggesting that people might be surprised to know how prevalent they are in the wild.

Other experts believe these sightings are probably variously colored coyotes with mange. Trapper Cindy Johnson told the Sun Journal, if a coyote starts losing its hair from mange, “they may drag their rear end when they walk. It will look odd,” she said, and may explain the hyena-like appearance”