Haunted Curiousities

BLUE TIGER

Around 1910, Harry Caldwell, an American missionary and big game hunter, spotted and hunted a blue tiger outside Fuzhou.

Caldwell gives his historical account in his book Blue Tiger (1924), and by his hunting companion Roy Chapman Andrews in his Camps & Trails in China (1925). Chapman cites Caldwell thus:

As quoted by Caldwell in Chapman (1925)

"The markings of the beast are strikingly beautiful. The ground color is of a delicate shade of Maltese, changing into light gray-blue on the under parts. The stripes are well defined and like those of the ordinary yellow tiger."

While in southeastern China American missionary, Harry R. Caldwell described a clear sighting of a tiger colored deep shades of blue and Maltese (bluish-gray).

Caldwell was knowledgeable of different types of tigers and during his time in China, he shot literally dozens of the big cats.

In the Fujian Province in September of 1910 saw Caldwell and watching a goat. A tiger was pointed out to him, but at first glance, Caldwell thought it was a crouching man dressed in blue.

A second look told him otherwise, "I saw the huge head of the tiger above the blue which had appeared to me to be the clothes of a man. What I had been looking at was the chest and belly of the beast."

He raised his gun to fire, and then realized several children were in the way. During the time, it took him to change position the tiger vanished.

Caldwell described the tiger as having a Maltese base color, which changed to deep blue on the undersides of the cat. The stripes appeared to be similar to those on an orange tiger. He called the tiger "Bluebeard.â??

Though he never caught the cat, villagers confirmed the presence of 'black devils' roaming the area. 

Caldwell offers the description of a fascinating creature, a blue-morph tiger, that he attempted to capture for science. Only a few blue tigers have been reported in the archives of cryptozoology.

Other occasional sightings have been claimed of bluish-toned tigers, particularly in the Fujian Province. One report from the son of a US Army soldier who served in Korea during the Korean War. His father is certain he sighted a blue tiger in the mountains there, near what is now the Demilitarized Zone.

It has long been believed that it is honorable to be killed by a Maltese Tiger. Local tribes would sacrifice themselves to these tigers because they believe they would be reincarnated as one.

Richard Perry, in his book "The World Of  The Tiger" reiterated that China's blue tigers were called blue devils because they were so often man eaters.

Most of the Maltese tigers reported have been of the South Chinese subspecies. The South Chinese tiger today is critically endangered, and the "blue" alleles may be wholly extinct. However, "blue" tigers have also been reported from Korea, home of Amur tigers.

"Cryptozoology," of course, was coined by Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans in his personal correspondence among colleagues in the 1950s, after the 1955 French publication of his book On the Track of Unknown Animals. The first published use of the word "cryptozoology" was in 1959 when a book by Lucien Blancou was dedicated to "Bernard Heuvelmans, master of cryptozoology."

I only have one of these and it is the real spirit of the blue tiger who's personality is that of a human. All the strength and power that they posess is here.