Really hard to tell by the photo, I would suspect housecat. That's not to say that there aren't cougars/panthers/catamounts/mountainlions/pumas (golly how can one cat have so many names?) in the area. Biologists and wildlife officials have been saying for *ages* that other than the Florida Panther and escaped exotic pets, there are no cougars in the east. Everyone who lives in rural areas in the east knows that is completely false. Perhaps that myth is perpetuated because officials are afraid folks will panic at the thought of living around large cats. Hard to say.
I can tell youu that growing up in WV, cougars were a commonplace fact of life. I've seen tracks, seen cubs, seen adults and heard the screams. Generations of my family have, neighbors have, etc. I've seen enough bobcats to be able to tell the difference between bobcats and cougars. I've never personally seen a black cougar, but know of plenty of folks who have. Don't know if that's due to melanisim or not. It would seem wierd to have a completely melanistic phase of the cougar be fairly common, and yet the books don't mention it. Equally unusual to have a completely undocumented subspecies out there in this day and age. If you read the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, you'll find a story of her father seeing a "black panther, as black as Susan over there" (indicating thier black housecat) in the "Big Woods" of Wisconsin.
