Mid Canterbury's mysterious big black cat is back.

Ange Montgomery reckons she spotted it prowling down an Eiffelton hedge line 150 metres away from where she was sitting having a coffee early one frosty August morning.

She knows some people might think she is crazy, but she knows she's not. She knows what she saw, and that other people have seen it too.

Erin Tasker/FairfaxNZ Angela Montgomery, with two-year-old daughter Isabel Purton, believes she saw Mid Canterbury's mysterious black panther walking along the hedge in the background.

It's been about three years since the last reported sighting of the cat, which some people believe is a black panther or puma.

Its story dates to 2001 when it was first spotted near Alford Forest. In 2003, Ashburton truck driver Chad Stewart saw a large black animal sitting at the foot of a hill near stockyards on the Mayfield farm of Blair and Sarah Gallagher.

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Erin Tasker/FairfaxNZ Angela Montgomery, with two-year-old daughter Isabel Purton, believes she saw Mid Canterbury's mysterious black panther walking along the hedge in the background.

Extensive searching from air and on land found no trace of the mysterious animal. In the years that followed numerous people reported seeing a similar creature lurking on Mid Canterbury farm land.

Montgomery admits that before she saw it for herself she would have been skeptical.

Montgomery – who moved from Christchurch to an Eiffelton dairy farm with her partner and two-year-old daughter Isabel only a couple of months ago – knows what she saw was a big cat. It walked along the hedge and then disappeared into it. It was the way it walked that convinced her it was a big cat. She has been keeping her eyes peeled since, but has not seen it again.

"It was exciting for me, I know what I saw and it wasn't anything explainable," she said.

"It wasn't a cow, or a dog, or anything like that."

She called out to her partner, but he was not quick enough to see it. When he told her it might have been a black panther, she thought he was kidding, until she remembered seeing something on the news a few years ago about a panther sighting in the area.

Now, she is a believer, but she held off going public until she had researched the other sightings and the habits of big cats.

"I've told a few people about it and they kind of think I'm nuts and it was probably something else, but I know what I saw," Montgomery said.

It was bigger than a labrador dog and smaller than a cow, but was not a feral cat, she said.

"I know my animals and I know what they look like, and it wasn't that far away."

There have been rumours in the past that it is a black panther that escaped from a private zoo, or possibly from a boat, but no physical trace has been found.

In 2005, Timaru man Mark Brosnahan reported seeing a large black feline in the Mid Canterbury high country. He got two pictures of it from a distance.

If it was the same big black cat first seen in 2001, it was getting on in years now. Black panthers have an average life expectancy of 12 to 17 years.

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