Around Christmastime, from mid-December on, there may be another sound. The mummers out doing their rounds. Cries in the lane and a knock at the door. The knocking is part of it. No one knocks normally: they come straight in. “Hello hello and how’s the form?” Knocking is strange, a sign that something out of the normal run will follow. A good knock sets the stage.

In comes a costumed man with a face of straw. He asks permission first. That’s important, too. He must be invited in, like a vampire or a tax official. No harm will come to a householder who refuses entry. Nothing will be broken, no hard words said. The straw man will simply go away and take his lurking friends with him. They will be disappointed, of course. But to take rebuffs well is part of the performance. Such courtliness distinguishes the mummer from other masked men abroad in the dark.

And if he is welcomed in? Then you get a good look at him in the lamplight. This is the Captain or Jester. In England they might call him Marshall or Tom Fool or Arthur Abland or Father Christmas or even Mother Christmas, depending where you are and when you are. But we are in Ulster, and so we’ll call him the Captain. He comes right into the kitchen with his head veiled by a cone of straw. This is the crucial time. He must take control of his audience and do it quick, before the strange and true can wither into the ridiculous. “Room room brave gallant boys, come give us room to Rhime…”

Now it starts in earnest. In comes the troupe. There could be five of them, there could be 15. It varies from place to place. The Captain introduces some boastful wag. In Ireland, this is usually Prince George. After going on about his triumphs for a while, he is challenged by a third man. This could be Saint Patrick in West Tyrone, or a Turkish Champion in Belfast. They draw swords and lay about one another until the loser lies bleeding. The outcome is cut to local taste. Prince George might triumph in Belfast, but get pancaked in West Tyrone.

The cry goes up for a doctor. One appears, outfitted in a broad hat and a black coat, the very image of a medical man. “I can cure the plague within, the plague without, the palsy and the gout…” Yes, there’s a cure to be had, but it will come dear. Money changes hands. Ten pounds, a wonderful sum. The doctor gets to work and up springs the fallen man, restored to brawn and vigour.

The drama enters its third and final act. The doctor’s insistence on a fee is an ominous portent. Out comes Beelzebub to pass among the audience and press them for a few coins: “All silver and no brass.” The money won’t be much, and will go towards a mummers’ ball in the New Year, or perhaps to  charity. Still, it is awkward to ask. There is a subtle genius to the appearance of the Devil. The rest of the company need not risk embarrassment by asking for money. Who better than the King of Hell to send out begging? Don’t the people already hate him? And wouldn’t they expect such vulgarity from one of his ilk? “Money I want and money I crave, if you don’t give me money I’ll sweep ‘ee all to the grave.”

So might run an evening with the mummers. We know so little about the history of those nights. Christmas mumming probably came over from Britain, though there is much debate about when. We know that some form of the tradition had reached Ireland by the late-17th century — a mummers’ play was seen in Cork City in 1685 — and that it took a particular hold in County Wexford, County Dublin and the North. Mummers joined a broader culture of costumed visitors in Ireland, like strawboys at weddings and wren boys at New Year.

Even the word “mummer” is a mystery. Origins have been suggested in Middle English, German, Latin and Pontic Greek. Did it mean to “perform silently” or “to mask” or something else entirely? Scholars have been merrily disagreeing for years.

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The plays are all different too. In the early 1900s, the Oxford don R.J.E. Tiddy collected 32 examples from England, and one from Belfast, later published in his posthumous book The Mummers’ Play. While all follow a core structure — a fight, a miraculous cure, a request for money — the names and numbers of characters vary widely, as do their lines. These plays were printed on the mind and read with the tongue. They changed from village to village and generation to generation. Tiddy caught a few before two world wars and the television turned them into antiquarian curiosities. “I got a Mummer’s Play absolutely at first shot,” he wrote in 1915. “I overtook a dear old shepherd-like man just as I was walking into the village, and after one minute on the weather found he used to act in one, and remembered it.”

It is strange to read Tiddy’s book. The plays look wrong on the page. They were never meant to be transcribed. Loose and mercurial in life, they cramp in print. No doubt they were written down by some performers at one time or another, but only in the way we might write “milk, mince, apples” before we visit the shops. An aid to memory, nothing more. Not a text to keep on a shelf. However much the plays changed over time and place, after all, rhymed lines and closely fitted narratives were there to help the mummers. Each drama, rarely exceeding three or four printed pages, has a vivid pull that encourages recollection.

Tiddy died on the Western Front in 1916. But he had done much to preserve fragments of an English tradition that extended back, in fits and starts, to the Middle Ages. Scholars working in Ireland have had a slightly easier time of it. In 1972, the American anthropologist Henry Glassie spoke to people who had seen the plays or acted in them. He walked about a patch of County Fermanagh and listened to stories, about the welcomes and the rebuffs, about the ribboned costumes and the hard journeys between houses in the black countryside: “You’d be coming up that lane and you’d go up to your knees. It really was mud up to your waist. And you’d have to travel on.”

Glassie must have felt he’d gathered these recollections in the nick of time. When he published his book on mummers, in 1975, the tradition’s future looked bleak, especially in the North. The Troubles had put an end to carefree jaunts about the country after dark. But this was not the only factor. “It must be due to the standard of livin’ raisin’ in Ireland, and they haven’t been out,” said Peter Flanagan, once a mummer himself. Another of Glassie’s interviewees, Hugh Nolan, agreed. He blamed the car. It allowed young men to take jobs in town and spend their evenings gadding about. For good or ill, it let them escape the local and all it meant.

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While Glassie was travelling around Fermanagh with his tape recorder, in 1972, Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called “The Last Mummer”. A spectral mummer arrives at a house to find the occupants insensible: “The luminous screen in the corner / has them charmed in a ring / so he stands a long time behind them.” Not only has Heaney’s mummer lost his audience; he is alone. The boisterous company of masked rhymers has been reduced to a solitary ghost, doomed to tramp between houses that are curtained against him, made inhospitable by their cosiness. Heaney was not the only Northern poet to feel the loss. John Montague and John Hewitt both wrote their own elegies for a tradition that must have seemed on the brink of extinction.

But the “ould custom” proved resilient. In 1998, an anthropologist encountered a lively mumming scene in West Tyrone. Ray Cashman even joined them as Beelzebub, on the condition that he swap his Texan twang for a local one. His vivid account offers a glimpse into the practicalities of mumming: drumming up a company; the delicate process of assigning parts; the sheer exhaustion of delivering up to twenty performances night after night. Cashman found that the troupe tended to perform in pubs rather than private homes, but other aspects of the tradition had stuck, including the willingness to perform for whoever was to hand.

Historically, mumming was never the preserve of either Ulster community. There were Protestant troupes and Catholic troupes and mixed troupes. They would visit anyone who would have them. The performance, with its choreographed procession of events from knock to donation, allowed for the suspension of any usual tension. Glassie found that Protestants in his largely Catholic region of study took as keen an interest in mumming as anyone else. He interviewed one Ellen Cutler, who emphasised how much she had looked forward to seeing the mummers each year. Cashman met “a wealthy Protestant farmer” and former agent for the Duke of Abercorn who praised them as the best company he’d ever seen.

Are there mummers still about today? In a sense. The Belfast Wren Boys continue to promote the tradition of indigenous mumming, while the Armagh Rhymers have folded mumming into other Irish traditions of music and storytelling. Mumming endures, if not necessarily as it once was. Like the words of the plays themselves, the tradition adapts to the kitchen. But the core remains unchanged. As the year sputters out, the doctor delivers his cure, and kindles new life in the dark and cold. The Christmas nights may be quieter than before, but they aren’t silent yet.

I still remember her magnificent tail vanishing into a tangle of leaves. Or at least, I think I do. It’s all slightly hazy. But I don’t believe she was just a large badger, as one incredulous friend suggested. Though as a Londoner, my idea of a panther (or a badger, for that matter) is probably rather like Carpaccio’s idea of the lion of Saint Jerome. Neither of us had much experience to work with.

Perhaps I was willing it to be true, but no other explanation seemed to fit. And I wasn’t the only one to think so. Only yesterday, a construction worker claimed to have seen another legendary leopard, the Beast of Cumbria, while strolling across a field. The British Big Cats Society, meanwhile, receives reports of between 300 and 500 sightings per year, the vast majority regarding black panthers. But though I was in good company, it was still bewildering for me — a liberal “normie” in every respect — to face such a mystical assault on my Common Sense.

Believers squabble over how big cats ended up roaming the Cotswolds, but most trace the story back to the Sixties. Then, exotic pets were the height of fashion, with Harrods stocking a fine range of big cats, alligators, and even a baby elephant, which Ronald Reagan bought in 1967. But that all changed with the Dangerous Wild Animals Act of 1976, when, at least according to big cat enthusiasts, bohemians secretly released their pets into the wild to dodge the new ownership fees. Some later confessed. And in 1980, a puma was captured in the Scottish Highlands.

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This theory does, admittedly, have one slight flaw: there has never been any conclusive evidence of a big cat colony in Britain. And that’s not for lack of state cooperation. In 1983, 50 of our toughest Royal Marines, aided by a pack of beagles, went hunting for the Beast of Exmoor — but they found not a whisker. Later, in 1994, after a grisly sheep massacre was blamed on the Beast of Bodmin Moor, the then-junior agricultural minister, Nicholas Soames, commissioned a six-month inquiry into the matter. The report concluded that there was “no verifiable evidence for the presence of a ‘big cat’”. More recently, in 2012, a National Trust-commissioned DNA test into a suspicious roe deer carcass, which bore the marks of a ravenous feline, pointed to a lowly fox.

And while there is some talk among Big Cat trackers of state cover-ups and leopard corpses in government freezers, this is limited to an extreme fringe. What is fascinating, in fact, is how this theory has remained largely localised, unpoliticised, and untainted. Unlike UFO sightings, it has not yet cascaded into a sinister global conspiracy, nor has it set the internet aflame with coded talk of malign forces: the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset and the global capitalist elite.

This isn’t because Big Cat theory lacks the right components. If I were to conjure my own conspiracy, I dare say I wouldn’t find it too difficult. I would simply invent a cabal of rogue Rewilders, living in splendid stately homes in the Cotswolds, who had concocted a Plot to release panthers into the wild to wipe out local livestock — and, in the spirit of the Highland Clearances, drive honest farmers from the land. These wicked Rewilders — all Davos Men, of course — would then appropriate the empty farmland, fill it with enormous peat bogs, and live royally off the lavish government Net Zero subsidies that would soon roll in. Given the scarcity of land and livestock, the poor would be herded into packed cities and forced to eat mealworm porridge instead of meat, while the rich would feast on free-roaming venison and frolic in fields of wildflowers.

As with all the best conspiracies, mine would contain an acorn of truth. Many British farmers now fear for their livelihoods, as the Government rolls out a radical post-Brexit farming subsidy scheme that rewards green initiatives such as planting woodland or rewilding. In other words, it pays farmers to cease farming. Indeed, in order to meet the Government’s environmental targets, a quarter of UK farmland will need to be reassigned. All I’d need to do is pour this very real crisis into my potion of venomous half-truths. And there is no shortage of rage to ignite: farmers are already blockading European cities and hurling eggs at the European Parliament. How long until British farmers join the resistance?

My fantastical Plot would perfectly embody Richard Hofstadter’s definition of the “paranoid style”: “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life”. But as the real Big Cat theory has not yet spiralled in this manner, it seems more like a lost fragment of folklore than a conspiracy.

There is a certain romance in this idea. While British folklore largely died out after the Enlightenment, it still evokes a pre-industrial age before trains, television and 4G stripped the nation of its cultural diversity, belittled its local beliefs, customs and dialects, and forged a Great British Monoculture. Those were the days when Britain’s peripheries weren’t pining to resemble its centre; when people didn’t drink from the same fountain of knowledge, but from their own unwieldy springs. And if hobgoblins were said to wander the forests of one remote county, an outsider would hardly dare to suggest otherwise.

It was a time most tenderly depicted by George Eliot in Silas Marner. She writes that, “to the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery”. And her heart aches for those rare few who are forced to leave their native towns for a “new land where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished”. It was as if other realms were ruled by different gods.

This dappled land didn’t just vanish. It was crushed by middle-class Victorians in their quest to rid the nation of uncivilised superstition, and to forever replace the scourge of Magic with Enlightenment Science and Reason. The idea that “primitive” belief systems lingered not just in the colonies, but at home too, haunted the intellectuals of the age — and led to the creation of folklore as a field of study. It ultimately came down to class: the historian Thomas Waters argues that there was a “growing sense that supernatural credulity was a distinctly proletarian trait”. And that middle-class Victorians, having been enfranchised in the 1832 Great Reform Act, were seeking to define themselves through their devotion to reason.

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We can see Big Cat theory, then, as a vestige of this bygone world; a bottled cry against industrialisation. After all, as The Economist’s Jem Bartholomew argues, “the mythical beasts of the British imagination often appear at moments of modernisation”. Early sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, for instance, coincided with an upgrade to the Highlands road network. And after the Second World War, fearsome felines seem to have kept local tabloids in business, from the Beast of Bodmin Moor and the Cougar of Cupar to the Fen Tiger, the Nottingham Lion and the Sydenham Panther. Nowadays, when most British children will never know the song of a turtle dove or the scuffling of a hedgehog, the image of a panther padding over a neurotically well-tended lawn is a bewitching one.

Yet what if we have lost something more than folklore? By eroding local beliefs, ridiculing superstition, and insisting on uniformity of rational thought, we have perhaps made ourselves more, not less, vulnerable to conspiracy. Of course, the paranoid style is as old as time, its long cast of villains assuming many masks: Jesuits, Templars, Freemasons, global Capitalists, Communists. But I can’t help but wonder whether we have created a belief system so rigid and coherent that the slightest doubt can cause it all to crumble.

There once was a time when you could believe in witches, fairies, and hobgoblins, and still have absolute faith in God, Science, and your King. There were many contradictory authorities and infinite ways of seeing. But now, truth has become an all-or-nothing game: if you start to question the “Establishment” in one respect — whether over Covid vaccines, 5G or urban planning — the chances are it won’t be long until you’re drawn into an upside-down, Manichean world of conspiracy. And in this dark wonderland, as Hofstadter describes, there is “no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities”; everything is evidence of malicious intent. To the paranoid soul, the flick of a panther’s tail at twilight is enough to cast doubt over the entire system.