Note: But wait... there's more!
Mom and I share a bit of an open secret: at home, we have what we affectionately call a “ghost dog”, and it’s been around for as long as we’ve lived in this house (so it’s not Hunter, sadly).
We call it a "ghost dog" because, the first time it made its presence known, it took a ring that belonged to my great grandma, hid it for two weeks, then put it right in the center of Hunter’s dog bed (which he never used). Since then, random things have often gone missing, but have always been found in weird places: inside Penny’s kennel (which we no longer use), the top shelf of the towel closet upstairs, my bathroom sink, hung up on a low tree branch outside, on top of the box freezer in the garage, in a drawer in the fridge, etc.
Whatever this “ghost dog” is, it isn’t malicious. It’s just… weird… and I don’t have any explanations for it. Nor does my mom. And yes, we’ve checked for basically every problem we could possibly think of, from possible Carbon Monoxide poisoning, to some weird form of Psychosis or Sleep Walking, to someone playing pranks on us, to Penny being a naughty little jerk, etc, etc. But, we’ve come up with no natural explanations, even though we experience this weird phenomenon (among others) in our house pretty regularly. And we’ve experienced it for years.
For some reason, when this “ghost dog” messes with me, it goes after my keys. The first time my keys went missing, it was only the ignition key to my Xterra (the key somehow got removed from the metal keyring). I looked everywhere for that key: in the house, in the car, in my bags, in the washer and dryer, on the driveway, on the sidewalk, on every shelf in the house. I even knocked on my neighbors’ doors and asked if they’d seen a Nissan key anywhere. Finally, after two hours of tearing up the house in search of it, I decided the best thing to do was use the spare key to go to Ace Hardware to spend $200 on a new key.
However, because my Xterra had an aftermarket remote start installed, the workers at Ace suggested I go to the Nissan dealer to get a new key, because they weren’t confident that they could properly program the new key to the Xterra. But, for reasons I can’t recall, I decided to go home instead and planned to get a new key the next day. At home, Mom suggested that I check every nook and cranny one last time before going to bed. So I did, and guess what I found right smack dab in the middle of the driver’s seat in my Xterra?
The missing ignition key.
Yeah… I can’t even begin to explain that shit.
Since then, my keys have gone missing several times, each time ending up in places I wouldn’t have ever put them. Most notably, I once found my entire lanyard of keys strung up on the Ponderosa tree in my backyard, just swaying in the wind. And this was in the morning when I was home alone, as Mom and Jack had gone to Seattle a few days before. I didn’t tell anyone, because I knew nobody had been in my house to take the keys and put them on a low-hanging bough (I checked the cameras), and I didn’t want to freak my mom out.
However, a few months later (or about a month ago), Mom found the window in the guest bedroom was open and the screen had been removed. Just a few hours before, she’d been in that room putting clean covers on the bed, and the window was closed. Plus, it was cold outside, so there was no reason to leave a window open. Understandably freaked out, she bolted downstairs and made me investigate the situation with her. She was worried that someone had broke in through the window and was hiding in our attic (the attic entrance is also in that same guest room). But, there were no signs that anyone had clambered into the attic (there would’ve been insulation and bits of popcorn ceiling on the floor had someone crawled up there), and I was way too chickenshit to check out the attic for myself.
Instead of shoving me into the attic with a tactical flashlight against my will, Mom checked our outdoor security cameras, as they would’ve activated and recorded any unwanted intruders. They had activated several times that day, but only because either one of us or the dogs had triggered them. There was, however, a recording from the night before at exactly 5:00 AM. Nervously, Mom watched the footage on her phone. Thankfully, instead of a masked intruder, we captured a very cute video of two foxes playing with my brother’s whiffle balls on the back porch.
Needless to say, we had no explanation for how the window opened and the screen popped out of it, when nobody had been in that room or had climbed up onto the roof to do it. So, we pinned the blame on the “ghost dog” and left it at that. I mean… who or what else could it have been (especially since Jack had been at a friend’s house all that day)?
These events, as weird as they are, don’t usually freak me out anymore. I’ve just come to accept that there are things in this world that are inexplicable, and there’s an apparent “ghost dog” in my house that likes to play hide-and-seek with our stuff.
The only time I ever get freaked out by this stuff, is when Penny randomly growls and barks at empty spots in the house. She’s a rather loud and sensitive creature. A squirrel can’t bound across the lawn without her noticing it, so I usually ignore Penny’s barks and growls during the day. But, it’s much harder to brush her off when she’s standing stiffly at the bottom of the stair or staring into a random empty corner of a room, her tail between her legs as she barks at literally nothing.
I’ve tried to come up with a logical explanation for her eerie behavior many, many times. I’ve listened for mice in the walls, checked outside for people, animals, and/or noisy vehicles, moved things such as pillows and chairs from those empty spaces thinking Penny was just scared of them (she has a lot of weird phobias). But I’ve never been able to figure out what she gets so freaked out about. And rarely does she simply stop barking and growling in these instances. She’ll just stand there, her tail low, her lips and hackles raised, barking and growling at something I can’t see or hear until I physically pick her up and carry her away.
Maybe Penny just has doggy Schizophrenia, or thinks an outside noise is coming from a random empty corner due to the weird ways sound can travel. Or maybe my house is actually haunted, as ludicrous as that felt (and feels) to admit. It would be much easier for me to blame doggy Schizophrenia for Penny’s weird behavior if Hunter didn’t do similar things while he was around.
Of course, Hunter was a lot less anxious and attentive than Penny, so he didn’t care as much when something seemed off. I guess that made things much scarier when gentle, old Hunter would suddenly perk up and growl and bark at empty places with a vicious look in his eyes, just like Penny now does (only with a lot less viciousness and a lot more fear in her eyes).
What makes things weirder is the fact that neither of my dogs acted like this at any of the Airbnbs we stayed at during the pandemic. And the only time they ever acted weirdly at our Gig Harbor house was when there actually was an animal rummaging around in our trashcans outside. But never once did I catch either of them barking at empty spaces in the house for no apparent reason. That, and my keys never went missing, either.
Needless to say, I have no idea what the hell’s going on. To be honest, I don’t really want to know. If you couldn’t tell, “paranormal” shit like this makes me very uncomfortable. I’m only writing about it now because I’ve been a little more open to talking about it since Hunter passed away, as death and dying, in my eyes, are spiritual matters. And, just like how I now believe that humans are immortal beings (our souls go on to live for eternity after our bodies die), I also believe that animals are immortal beings.
But that also begs questions such as “Where does the soul go when the body dies?”, and “What else, besides God and previously-living souls, exist?”, and “What the fuck is my ‘ghost dog’ really?”
