A Yorkshire family were left in shock this weekend after spotting was they think was a 4ft long ‘crocodile’ in their neighbour’s back garden.
It’s not the first sighting of the reptile in the area, either.
The family spoke of their disbelief at seeing the terrifying scaly predator slithering through the grass of their next-door neighbour’s garden.
Sarah Jayne Ellis captured the mysterious creature on camera and told Yorkshire Live the thought the animal was roughly 3 or 4 feet long and that it “looked real.’
The nurse, who had just finished a long shift at the hospital, was shutting the blinds to go to bed when she spied the creature in the long grass outside and took an image of it.
“I thought ‘that’s a crocodile,” she confirmed to YorkshireLive, stating that whilst it didn’t move when she initially saw it when she went back hours later it was no longer there.
The picture has now left other locals wondering if there is a croc on the loose in Castleford.
Sarah says that she feels the incident needs to b investigated, especially given the fact that other people have also reported similar sightings around the area.
A very similar event was reported in May last year by wildlife photographer Lee Collings, who was rambling at Castleford’s nearby nature reserve when he was also shocked to come across a crocodile ‘or caiman’.
Although he didn’t have time to snap the creature before it slithered away, being out on a family walk without his proper photography equipment, but felt sure that he had not imagined the sighting – later being told that had dumped a caiman around that area.
However, he was still ridiculed by some at the time who dubbed it the “Cass-ness monster”. Now, it appears that this new sighting supports his finding, with both being described as between 3 and 4 foot in length.
A caiman is a small alligatorid belonging to the subfamily Caimaninae, similar to a small crocodile. Whilst some people do keep caimans as pets in the UK, to do so requires a licence under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act 1976.
