So a week or two ago, everyone in my paranormal research group received an email from one of our member, who received an email from a friend asking if she had any opinions about something that happened to her earlier in her life. I thought it was relatively interesting, so I copied a transcript of the email (it already had the names edited out, but even if it hadn't I would've, and I also removed a couple of specific geographical landmarks as well) with the intent of showing you the sorts of things we get asked to look into. Next entry on the blog will be my analysis of the story...
---
It happened when we were 11 or 12 years old and afterwards we didn't mention it to each other again until we were over 40. At that point I wanted to confirm that it really had happened as I remembered it, so I finally asked XXXXX if she remembered "the dog." She said yes and confirmed that she remembered what I remembered, but the discussion made her very uncomfortable. Out of respect for her feelings, I can't make the story public, but I would like to tell you about it and see if you have any ideas about what it might mean.
XXXXX and I have been best friends since second grade and we grew up on the same street. She lived in a beautiful house that was built by a wealthy bachelor in the 1930s. He supposedly hid a stash of money somewhere in the house, but nobody ever found it. I loved her house. It was much fancier than mine and was surrounded by gardens and a filbert orchard. XXXXX loved the house too, but always said that there was sometimes something scary in it. She was afraid to be home alone and said that when she was alone she heard heavy footsteps on the basement stairs. Her parents laughed off her fears and told her she was imagining it. (Her elderly mother still lives in the house and for decades insisted that nothing was wrong with the house. A few months ago, XXXXX's mom reported that she had locked herself in the bathroom because she heard banging in the basement and the sound of footsteps on the basement stairs. She assumed somebody had broken in, but later found no evidence of that.) That's the background to my story. XXXXX grew up in a house that frightened her, a house where she heard noises and occasionally saw things.
XXXXX was a believer. I wasn't. I tend to prefer rational, scientific explanations for things. I would entertain the notion of ghosts the way I entertain notions of vampires and werewolves. I love to get a chill up my spine from contemplating other-worldly beings and hearing stories, but I didn't really believe they existed. XXXXX and I brought very different mindsets to our shared experience.
When we were 11 or 12, XXXXX told me that she had started seeing what she called a ghost dog. The first time she saw him was in the middle of the night. She woke up and in a shaft of moonlight, she saw a dog materialize next to her bed. It was a large dog with wavy black fur. He was sitting on his haunches, leaning forward, looking at her intently. It drew back its lips and exposed its teeth, as if it were snarling, but it was absolutely silent. As she stared at the dog, he disappeared. He frightened her. She said that she saw him many nights and was having trouble sleeping.
Her house was surrounded by filbert orchards and we spent a lot of time playing among the trees. XXXXX said that the ghost dog had started appearing to her in the orchard. It always happened close to sunset. She insisted that she didn't walk around a corner and see him and he didn't jump out from behind a tree, the way a real dog might. He appeared and disappeared while she was watching. He always was in the same position and he always snarled silently before disappearing.
XXXXX's parents thought she was making it up and didn't want to hear any stories about ghosts. I was the only person she could tell. I listened sympathetically and said it sounded scary, but the truth was that I was just as skeptical about ghosts as her parents were. I didn't think she was making it up. I knew she was really frightened, but I figured she had psyched herself into it. I thought she had a recurring nightmare about the dog showing up in her bedroom at night and that she was so jittery that she was imagining she saw the dog in the orchard. That she jumped and ran at the sight of a stump, or something. I was in no way predisposed to see it myself.
Our mothers had convinced us that if we walked home alone after dark we were likely to be murdered, so whenever XXXXX and I visited each other and had to walk home after dark, we'd split the risk. The host would walk halfway home with the guest, then we'd split up and head home separately. Share the risk. Confuse any homicidal pervert with two targets. One evening I was leaving XXXXX's house and, as per our agreement, she was going to walk halfway home with me. She had a long driveway that was edged by a laurel hedge so dense that nothing could have jumped out of it. (We had tried to build forts in it and couldn't penetrate it.) Exterior lights from the house and the garage illuminated the driveway. We walked out of her back door, came around the corner of the house and started up the driveway. All of a sudden a dog materialized in front of us. It was the dog XXXXX had described: large, with black wavy fur, sitting on his haunches. I remember that it carried a real aura of menace. XXXXX and I grabbed each other. I was too frightened to scream. The dog exposed its teeth in a silent snarl that resembled a grin. As we were looking at it, it disappeared. It didn't leap away. It faded away.
This is as much as I remember and over time, I started to question the memory. It defies sense. XXXXX and I didn't tell anybody. I didn't validate her story to her parents. Why not? Somehow I still walked home, but it's hard to believe I wasn't too scared to do so. I can't remember what happened next and XXXXX and I seemed to have an unspoken agreement never to mention the event to each other. It's funny. It still feels like a moral imperative. I am hard-wired not to talk to XXXXX about it, as if it would betray our friendship to do so. For 30 years I mulled over the memory and over time it bothered me more and more. I finally had to ask XXXXX if it really happened. She told me that it did, but she doesn't want to discuss it further and I'm left wondering about my post event amnesia. Maybe amnesia isn't right, but I can't recall any aftermath to the event. It's like it happened in a void and had no logical consequences.
Have you heard of an animal being a ghost? A ghost who deliberately appears before someone and seems to aim his malevolence toward the person seeing him? And have you ever heard of the kind of amnesia I experienced after the event?
---
END TRANSMISSION.
No comments:
Post a Comment