Animal Ghosts
by Dave Juliano
I have an affinity for stories of animals ghosts
like the faithful dog returning to visit his master. I personally
have experienced this with my dog Sparkee (who is featured on The Shadowlands
main page) who came back 3 times to visit me and also appeared in a lucid
dream. I have heard many stories about other animals returning from
the grave. The most common seem to be dogs, cats, horses and birds.
The experience can be auditory like hearing the jiggling of a collar and
tags or hearing the animal bark, meow, etc. Others may see the animal
like I did in my case. I have also heard of people feeling the animal
curling up next to them in bed and not seeing anything there at the time.
This brings us to the question of how is this possible? If we believe that
ghosts are the spirits or souls of a deceased human being then wouldn't
that mean that the animal spirits are the same thing? Many religions
do not believe that animals live on after death. I believe that certain
animals, maybe even all, have a spirit that lives on. I have no doubt
that what I had experienced with Sparkee was real and I'm sure all the
others that have had a similar experience share this view. In fairness
and keeping an open mind, I must also admit there is another popular theory
concerning animal ghosts. This theory is that we give the pet, through
our love and devotion, a "spirit" which is created from the energy of all
out emotions concerning that pet and out wish to see it again. I
have always leaned toward the first theory of animals having souls and
there are many cases of psychics contacting the deceased animals which
would not be as likely if the second theory was true. I'll leave
it up to you to decide for yourself.
I do want to mention one other type of animal
ghost that we see in many stories and that is one that represents some
evil presence in the home. For the most part the ghosts of pets normally
just show themselves to their former family. There are other cases
of a somewhat more active haunting also having an animal spirit being observed.
Most investigators that deal with the darker hauntings look for this as
a sign that there may be an evil presence at play somewhere in the situation.
The most common animals to be seen in this type of haunting are black dogs,
black cats, rabbits, goats and other small black rodent-like animals.
Now they are usually seen in hauntings that do have other symptoms of a
diabolical haunting so don't assume if you see a dog ghost that you don't
know, that you have a evil spirit there, that's jumping the gun a bit.