A mysterious “big cat” was spotted yesterday afternoon as it prowled through a hospital car park.

Cleveland Brandy was walking to the supermarket at 4.30pm when he spotted the mysterious beast near to the Cardiff Road exit from Watford General Hospital.

Mr Brandy, who was with his sister at the time, said he had never seen such an animal before and believes it may have been a puma.

He said: “It was very strange. It had a very long tail and was all black and eyes bright, almost luminous yellow.

“I would say it was the same size as a fairly big dog. The car park was closed at the time so there were no cars about, but I could compare it to the height of the fence and it was definitely too big to be a normal cat. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

“It prowled around for a bit and then slipped under a fence back into the wilderness.

“We’d both heard about similar sightings before so we went back later to try and get a photograph of it. But by that time there was no sign of it. I wasn’t scared but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted it to attack us.”

Numerous sightings of big cats have been recorded in South West Hertfordshire in recent years. Large black cats have been spotted near Sarratt, Kings Langley and Bricket Wood. The much-discussed “Beast of Bedmond” has even been accused of killing sheep and birds.

Big cat expert Danny Nineham, who stressed that the Bedmond incidents were most likely the work of a large dog, has stressed that wild “big cats” are by no means uncommon in the UK.

Many big cats, he said, were released into the wild in the 1970s when the keeping of “exotic pets” was outlawed on safety grounds and have been breeding ever since.

Speaking in 2009 he told the Watford Observer: “These cats are potentially dangerous. Anyone who says they are not should visit a zoo and look through the fence at a leopard or lion and ask whether they’d like to go inside.

“It’s almost unheard of that they would attack a person because they have such a lot of food available to them in this country.

“The problem comes when you disturb them in their natural habitat and they see you as a threat – then they can be dangerous and unpredictable.”

West Hertfordshire Hospitlas NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, said it had received no recent sightings of a big cat but said its staff would “continue to be vigilant to ensure the safety of patients and staff,”