The Eyes of the Panther

In Ambrose Bierce’s The Eyes of the Panther, a beautiful young woman rejects her suitor’s marriage proposal. Explaining that she is insane, she describes the strange circumstances of her birth, involving the mysterious appearance of a panther at her mother’s window, an event which terrorized her mother and led to the death of her older sister. Haunted by this spectre of a panther, the woman cannot marry. An early example of werewolf fiction, this story was first published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1897.