THEY have taken our oil riches, they drink our whisky and they beat our football team, but now the English have gone too far – they are claiming a monster to rival Nessie.

The Werewolf of Cannock Chase gets taken seriously only by a few people, as should this story, but those believers in the unnatural seem determined to outdo our own beloved Loch Ness Monster, first recorded in August 565 when St Columba told the beastie to “go away” after it came out of the loch.

This lycanthropic English monster is not like other werewolves, a breed that dates back to ancient mythology. The Cannock Chase beastie doesn’t need a full moon to start howling and he or she has been ‘spotted’ in daylight. Paranormal investigator and newspaper columnist Damon Simms has written plenty words about the werewolf that prowls the dense woods of Cannock Chase, allegedly, and now he has been approached by a film company that is set to make a documentary-drama about the half-man, half-wolf that bounds around Staffordshire.

Simms, 42, an operations manager for a security firm when he’s not researching the paranormal, says the werewolf can be another Nessie. He said: “I see the Werewolf of Cannock Chase as rather like a fantastic cash cow. I think it is Staffordshire’s Nessie – and if you think how many people go to Loch Ness in Scotland because of the monster, it is incredible.”

Already the company Eleven Films, makers of the Bafta Award-nominated The Enfield Haunting, have appealed through the Stoke Sentinel for more information on the werewolf, especially sightings.

The English would-be Nessie only dates from around 1975, but Simms has unearthed plenty of evidence about the creature, as he told the Sentinel.

“There have been many creditable people who have claimed to see the werewolf, including rangers, an ex-police officer, a good friend of mine who is a civil surveyor,” said Simms.

“What I find interesting is there always seems to be a spate of UFO sightings at Cannock Chase as well as the werewolf sightings.

“I found a story of a boy in Eccleshall who promised his soul to the Devil in exchange for being able to transform into a werewolf, while using a ouija board. Shortly after he rang up a friend making strange guttural noises and panicking about transforming. He committed suicide, he stabbed himself with a silver knife. It was around about the time that the first sightings of the werewolf were made, in 1975.”

According to the local newspaper most of the sightings seem to have been centred around the German War Cemetery in the area.

The Sentinel added: “It is claimed that of all the official werewolf sightings in the UK – that is, reported to the police – the overwhelming majority of them are at Cannock Chase.”

The reports included three teenagers spotting an “upright wolf” searching through a rubbish bin and a dog walker who fled after hearing a creature howl and being frightened by monstrous yellow eyes. There is no doubt that paranormal investigators can have a field day at Cannock Chase, which is reportedly haunted by black-eyed Satanic children and a “Lady of the Chase”.

West Midlands Ghost Club – it is a respected organisation in the paranormal world – first looked into a story about the werewolf in 2009, as it states on their website.

The club reported: “The account involved two motorcyclists who were crossing the Chase one evening and saw, what they initially took to be, an enormous dog at the side of the road. As they approached the creature, it allegedly began to run away from them at speed….. bizarrely leaping up onto its ‘two hind legs’ as it made its swift getaway.”

Sadly, and unlike our Nessie, no one has yet come forward with any film or photographic evidence of a werewolf in Cannock Chase or anywhere else in Britain for that matter.

For the moment, Nessie rules the roost and is willing to take on all-comers, as his official spokesperson didn’t quite tell The National.