Nothing Will Stop Bolton’s Monster Hunters

England is full of monsters: boggarts, skrikers, and other creatures with names that make the back of your tongue do the worm.

Mick Mclaren believes in them all, for the most part. Him and I are walking up the very earliest incline of what could be considered Winter Hill in Horwich, Greater Manchester. Ambling up this gentle slope, the path is black and tarmacked for the cars of unseen utility workers. The destination is the century-old Montcliffe Quarry, a huge site that crushes and screens for gritstone. Mick tells me how two quarry security guards saw a giant cat monster.

“The Beast of Bolton” Mick says, as we stand outside a wire fence and an unfavourable sun blares down, “is a panther-like creature.” It’s just as large as the big cat – noticeably so, as Mick demonstrates with his hand a metre off the floor – and according to legends, there could be a whole hidden population of big cats thriving in the English countryside, right under our noses. Most of the evidence is based on carcasses of sheep and deer, but sightings and stories go back decades.

England is full of monsters. We may have too many, even. And it’s high time we caught one of them. Pulling up a map of cryptids across the British Isles reveals that practically every area, every county, town, or borough, has a big cat of its own. And so I found myself more interested in the people dedicated to finding one.

Mick is a shorter man whose shaved head, glasses, and goatee make him look a little like Walter White in the blaring sun. Appropriate, since he’s the natural leader of Winter Hill Investigation Team – shortened to WHIT (Walter WHIT?). More importantly, Mick is a cryptid investigator, a cryptozoologist – a person who searches for creatures whose existence is not backed by science. Depending on your definition this could include anything from supernatural canines to corporeal cats.

Shortly after we meet, I read all sorts of odd sounding names from a crumpled list I whip out my pocket. British Bigfoot. The Lancashire Raptor. Rivington Dogman. Mick says he believes in, or has heard reports of, each one. He doesn’t, however, know of any reports of frogmen, which is good because I made that one up.

Glimpsing the hazy Manchester skyline from the top of the hill, Mick tells me he’s “not a fan” of crowds.  He does venture into town for gigs, however, and he saw Tenacious D just days earlier. He hadn’t made the connection to their song “Sasquatch” until I pointed it out.

He may be timid in the city, but Mick has a posse of four extra hands with him. Monster hunting has led him to catch a padre of pals. It’s clear to anyone that these people are incredibly hospitable.

Cryptozoology has had a contradictory uptick online. To a sceptic, a phone in every pocket means a large creature bumbling around this island would’ve been snapped by now. But to the believer, abundant tech means just more tools in their arsenal, more ways to get organised. If you’re a serious monster hunter, the internet is both a clubhouse and an armoury.

The kit is key. Footage is important. “There’s plenty of times we’ve been out and you see a deer on the road,” Mick explains, “if you’re going at a certain speed you might see somert you’ve already been thinking about.” 

I ask him what his ideal bit of evidence would be. “I’d love to get somert on camera,” he replies. “Though, I still think we’d have sceptics who would say it’s made up. We’ve got things on camera that aren’t the solid evidence that we can say: ‘that’s a bigfoot; that’s a dogman.’”

But validity costs money, which can be a squeeze on a group of amateur cryptozoologists. The Sionyx Aurora, which Mick dutifully models for me, can cost upwards of a grand for the fancier models. “It’s like a computer game,” Lee, Mick’s righthand man explains.

Lee has yet to come into this story, but he’s crucial to WHIT’s operation. He’s a cool and confident bloke, the sort of guy you’d imagine never had an anxious thought in his life. The top of his hair is an ashy black, and the sides are covered in shocks of grey. Popping on his all-black wrap sunglasses, his cool-guy affect is complete. This is a monster hunter. But like all WHIT members, he’s strangely modest about his monster hunting. It’s only when I casually ask how you’d go about tracking a cat as big as the Beast that his trap comes up in conversation. You see, Lee is the sort of guy who won’t just build you a monster trap, but he’ll find you an isolated ravine to put it in.

I’m eager to see the trap in person, so we speed over in cars to an undisclosed location where Bolton bleeds back into its old Lancashire borders. The police are there when we arrive; kids have gathered at the local deathtrap reservoir to escape the heat. It’s hot. Last night, England was blasted with sights of the northern lights, and today there’s a strange vibration in the air. Preoccupied, the police don’t ask us why we’re there in matching WHIT polos. Uniformed and unarrested, we head towards our own death trap. An upwards march to a thicket of wood, and an illegal hop of a farmer’s fence, we find ourselves staring down the slopes of a small ravine. There, I can see it: a genuine monster trap.

Lee calls his work “simple, common sense”: a wooden frame, soft mud, and a bird feeder full of fish. Food in his “budgie cage” will attract an animal across the mud-filled framework to leave paw prints. He calls it the “matt trap.” The spot is by a small trickle of water, one Lee reckons would help to pass the scent downstream. “A domestic cat at home can smell between two to three miles,” he tells me, “So what’s a big cat? It’s just common sense. If there’s anything about I’m sure it’ll pick it up.”

As we watch our step down the sheer drop to his contraption, Lee tells me it’s been over two months since they set it up. He’s filming a video for his own YouTube channel as he does this. There’s audible excitement when, as we’re metres away, he says “there actually IS some paw prints.” But the promise of cat prints quickly vanishes into the ether.

“Deer,” he says, clearly disappointed.

“What about that one, there?” I say, pointing to a paw print more comparable to a cat’s.

“Yeah, it’s just deer, that.”

Lee’s happy that the trap works, but he’s more pragmatic about the results. “Big cats are stealth. It sounds daft but if I’ve put this here and left a scent, it might try and get it through the other way.”

Lee chose this spot specifically because of nearby bones, which he says look like they may have belonged to a deer. Something killed that animal – why not the Beast? He shows the bones to me, pulling away fronds of overgrown grass, and after hours in the sun I find myself awestruck at the sight of a porcelain white spine lying there, bleached and undeniably real.

A few metres away there’s a camouflage trail camera tied to a tree. Lee set it up to catch anything that might’ve been pulled in by the smell of piscine delight. But the camera seems to have been dead for a while. Lee kicks himself for using cheap batteries and not Duracells.

“I’ll take it back and analyse it. Maybe put it back up here again towards winter. At least the trap actually works. Something’s been around.” Lee’s faith is unwavering. Any set back is simply another opportunity to have another go. “It’s one of them. You just have to keep trialling. People try for years. People try for the first week and get results. You have to keep trying at it but not think too much into it.”

How does he stay motivated?

“It’s just a passion you love. You just can’t put it down, really.”

Tumbling back down Winter Hill, Mick tells me that the paranormal has been around him since childhood.

“I was in a house which we had strange things happening,” he says. “After me dad passed on we had a lot of strange things happening. I’ve seen a few things as I’ve grown up like apparitions that seem solid but aren’t.”

“What sort of things were happening?” I ask.

“At the time, because I was only five [when he died] – I don’t know what it is, it’s a bit of trauma – and I can’t remember much about it,” he says. “I got to the age of eight and things sort of started clicking into place. This happened then and that happened then. We were having the smell of tobacco – he used to smoke a pipe – and we used to get the smell in the house. Just out of the blue. We’d be sat there watching telly and the next minute the smell would be overpowering. Things being moved around. Playing tricks, in a way. Going to the cupboard knowing we’d bought some biscuits. We’d go to the cupboards, they’re not there. Then half hour later they’d be there right in front of our faces in the cupboard.”

Mick has an appreciation for the unexplained. He has what I can only describe as a sensitivity. A sensitivity for crowds. For nature. For folklore. A sensitivity for the type of inescapable loss when two parents become one. But that sensitivity extends to how he approaches the world. His soft lilt and low-decibel speech are his gentle hunting tools, a dowsing rod for things between. Even though he seeks creatures said to exist in physics far beyond comprehension, he never says he’s scared. Rather, he comes from a place of a scientist. When the paranormal is tantalisingly close, hidden in familiar scents and biscuit cupboards, Mick has “never felt any fear with that.”

England is full of monsters, and hunters like Lee and Mick won’t stop until at least some of them, any of them, are caught.

This feature was based on the experience producing our short documentary The cryptid hunters of northern England, which you can watch here.