Spirits and Basset Hounds

I often get the question, “do you believe that animals are more in tune to the supernatural than humans?”

Well, I hate making generalized statements, but as an overall rule, I actually do believe that animals and children are much more pre-disposed to brushes with the paranormal than adults. Their minds are pure and innocent, free from a lifetime of conditioning to suppress anything out of the realm of the “normal”.

Just think about it – if a child were to say, “Mommy, I see a man standing there,” most mothers would glance over at an empty hallway and reply, “There’s no one there, honey, it’s just your imagination.” No matter how the child insisted, the mother would continue to rein the child back into the “real” world. God forbid that the kid grows up seeing things that “aren’t there”.

In my experience, it’s the same with animals – especially dogs and cats, which become such close companions to their human caretakers. You learn to read their every bark or meow, and can immediately tell the difference between a request for a treat and an alarm that something is going on outside. When a warning bark is given that something abnormal is happening – someone is in the house, for example – the human investigates, and if all is well, goes on about his business. This could leave the little family pet staring at the ghostly figure of a man that everyone else seems to be ignoring... how confusing would that be to their canine or feline mind?
Something like that has happened in our house on several occasions. Our basset hound Murphy would let us know immediately if someone was at the door. At the first sound of a knock, he would jump up, even from a sound sleep, and go running to the front door where he would stand and bark until we answered the door. We often joked that we never needed a doorbell – Murphy did a much better job.

Since we live in a house that is haunted by several spirits, we’ve seen Murphy jump up and run barking on several occasions when there was no one there that we could see. Sometimes at the front door, other times up in the parlor, and at a few other places in the house. Each time, he was alerting us of a visitor with the same fervor that he did when there was physically someone at the door. We are sure that he saw someone in the house that he didn’t think was supposed to be there, but we just couldn’t detect our ghostly visitor.

Sadly, Murphy passed away last year. Now we're keeping our eyes open for him to come back and pay us a visit.