The Old Dog

This incident took place shortly after the elderly dog of my late grandmother had to be put down due to painful and disabilitating

illness. I was perhaps seven or eight at the time and had always feared being alone upstairs in my grandmother's house due to a certain eeriness about the place.

One night my mother and I were staying at my grandmother's house and my (then living) great aunt had come over also. The time was perhaps 10:00 and I was sat alone in an upstairs bedroom playing with some toy soldiers I had stumbled upon that had originally belonged to my uncle when he was a child. The bedroom in which I played was next door to my late grandmother's room. I had never been in there but I had known that my grandmother's dog, Jem (fake name) would consistantly sleep beneath the bed that my grandmother retired to. As I played, keeping my mind off my fear of being alone in the house, I could hear my mother and great aunt chatting quietly in the living room below, and due to the house being quite secluded, no other noise was audible besides the fabricated gunshots of the miniature soldiers.

Suddenly I stopped playing and froze, not daring to continue making any other noise. For another, more ominous noise had invaded the silence around me. Besides the gentle murmurs of my family members downstairs, there was an eerie sound of what sounded like breathing coming from my late grandmother's bedroom. Both bedroom doors were open at the time and so it was quite audible. The breathing then revealed itself to sound more like panting. I strained my ears to listen harder and decipher what the noise was and where it was coming from. I eventually decided that it was the sound of a dog panting heavily. Something that Jem would do most of the time in her old age. The noise became louder and louder to the point that I felt that whatever was making the noise was in fact, sitting in the room with me. I was too frightened to move for a few seconds. But eventually I screamed, ran downstairs and refused to be alone upstairs for the rest of the night.

Though with age I have become far more sceptical of supernatural occurences, that experienced has never left my memory. Even today at the age of twenty I am completely unable to explain it. A similar pet incident did occur after our cat (Phylis) was buried in the garden just before a heavy snowfall. One morning as I stood in the garden I saw a set of pawprints in the snow starting in the centre of the garden and leading directly to the spot where she was buried.