Basking on a high ridge, clearly visible from their kitchen window, was a mysterious cat-like figure, as black as night, which they estimated was “as big as a good sized sheep.”

The pair had been eating lunch in their kitchen when Jeff spotted it approximately 100 metres away.

They immediately took to their balcony with a pair of binoculars. Ruth made a bee-line for a camera and took three photos.

“I could see it but I really couldn’t believe it,” Ruth exclaimed.

“We’d heard stories of a mysterious cat in the area maybe 10 or 12 years ago, but we had never seen anything.”

“At first we thought it could have been a big black dog that’s been tied to that tree.

But next thing it gets up and it starts to walk. I said: ‘Jeff that’s no dog! That’s a cat walk. It just had that feline silkiness to it!”

The couple say the animal lingered on the ridge for about 15 minutes before it disappeared into the bush as silently as it had appeared.

They were left dumbfounded by what had just happened. Jeff even alerted his neighbours of what he had just seen.

The Gulsons wouldn’t be the first to lay claim to such a mysterious animal.

Stories of mysterious Australian panthers are a common place in Australian folklore.

The Goulburn Evening Penny Post was even gripped by sightings of the “Marulan Tiger” in the early 1900s.

One report from the Evening Penny Post on Feb 26, 1903 stated: “People living in the Marulan district are stated to be very careful in their journeyings for fear of molestation by the tiger reported to have been seen.”

A spate of sightings also gripped Windellama and Bungonia in the late 1990s.

But for one to be roaming the outskirts of Goulburn?

“Unlikely” says biologist and environmentalist Rodney Falconer.

“It’s got all the hallmarks of something bogus in my opinion. There’s just no hard evidence. It’s just a blurry photo.”

He says from inspecting the photos taken by Ruth Gulson, he believed the animal to likely be an ordinary cat.

“I’m quite convinced of this, either domestic or feral. It’s hard to be certain about the exact scale of the thing as it was far away, but I’d put the animal at somewhere between a medium and large cat. At the largest it could conceivably be the size of a medium sized fox, something not unusual for some feral cats.”

Falconer, a keen observer of the region’s flora and fauna, has been fascinated with the story of Australia’s mysterious cats. He says sighting of a panther or puma like figure have been a notorious urban myth all over Australia from as early as the 1860s.

But without there ever being hard evidence, he believes the possibility of one roaming Goulburn and its surrounds are highly unlikely due to human growth.

Tell that to Ollie Barnes. The 87-year-old is adamant the panther is real. She’s seen it with her own eyes, and she knows how it came to be in Goulburn, if you believe her.

“Years ago, they had a Worth Brothers circus come to town and they camped up there under the bridge,” she explained.

“One day this fella came down here. He wanted to know if I had seen any strange animals around, he wouldn’t tell us what exactly. Well, we said we didn’t.

“But it was just after that, we saw him (the panther) lying on the big rocks at a quarry.”

“It was him, I saw him, and when this thing in Bungonia kept being sighted (in the 1990s) we just thought it was the same one.”

As to how it’s survived all these years, without detections, Ollie says: “He’s never ever tried to hurt or eat anything. He never touched my fowls, never touched the cows or calves.

“So we just put it down that he kills rabbits and possums to feed himself.”

And as for her story, “It doesn’t add up,” Falconer claims.

“This is potentially a really interesting story, but there is one relatively consistent in this whole urban myth and that is the one about it escaping from a circus.”

So what do you believe?

Have you ever seen the mysterious Goulburn Panther?

The Goulburn Post wants to know. Tell us your story.