I was running on an unused logging road and came up behind a wild cat. It didn't see me coming, so I got pretty close, maybe 20 feet away. It turned and stared at me for a second and then took off up a steep hill.
It was about 2.5 feet to the top of it's head, a little smaller than a Labrador. It wasn't a bobcat or lynx, because it had a long tail, but I don't think it was long enough to be a mountain lions tail(I don't remember seeing it curled). It had a brown coat and the tail had a stripey bit at the tip. 100% a cat from the body shape and movement.
But after looking it up, it seems like mountain lions basically don't exist in new england, or at least are extremely rare. Its limbs were not as thick as the mountain lion images I'm finding online.
I thought maybe it was one of those megasized housecats, but this trail is separated from town by a deep and wide river, any housecat would have had to walk 3 miles and across 2 bridges(one of which is a metal mesh footbridge) or 7 miles along the logging road to get to the nearest house. It's also below freezing out and there's 5+ inches of snow on the ground.
It's making me feel like I hallucinated this or something, because it doesn't seem possible. Hopefully I'll see it again now that I've looked at a ton of wild cat pictures. I was trying to remember as much detail as possible when I saw it, but I didn't know what to look for.
This is a good case for it being a formerly captive animal - it might just perceive humans as nbd. A mountain lion would probably be far more aware of humans in its vicinity than the inverse. But if it was a young one, who knows.
The problem is that this is NE. in NE we have a really high rural population density compared to the rest of the country. Our animals are very much attuned to living with humans. Our wildlife politics in the past years have had issues with this because city people moving to rural NE often have to contend with newer "friendlier" generations of black bears and that makes them go insane for whatever reason despite the fact that black bears are just big racoons.
There was a Mountain Lion that was smashed on the highway in Milford CT 13 years ago. Milford is not rural and stuck between two cities. The mountain lion likely got trapped because there's a way to get to the place that it was through open space and rural towns.
When the state researched they found that "it was from South Dakota", but that's some bullshit because they typically only travel 100 miles form their habitat and what they mean by "from South Dakota" was that it's DNA matches to a high percentage to DNA of a SD Mountain Lion population. It's the same way that Haredi Jews in the US are "from Eastern Europe" if you ran the DNA the same way.
There's just missing data and the NE states don't care to fund ecological research to put the question to bed because it's expensive.