I wonder if anyone can help with animal spirits and pet hauntings?
In the 1980s, I used to know a girl named Linda who worked as a ‘psychic’, enabling people to speak with their dead loved ones for money – at the time, she charged £30 for thirty minutes. She’d explain to clients how their beloved pets had spirits too, just like humans, and their dogs and cats would sometimes remain with them ‘for a while’ after their departure. Linda had a colleague who operated as a Pet Psychic and she’d put her own clients in touch with this person if need be.
The pet spirit scenario was ‘proven’ beyond doubt when Linda’s own cat Mitch died, but its spirit continued to ‘live’ in her house for several months. She often saw the ghost cat walking around the rooms and garden, she sometimes heard it mewing and purring. Most comforting of all, she'd feel it in the bedroom at night as it jumped onto the bottom of the duvet and settled itself down, much as it had done most evenings during its life.
Fortunately, Mitch wasn't the mess he'd been just before he died, incontinent and virtually unable to walk, but youthful and healthy again (apart from being dead). Linda explained that cats return just as they were when they were happy two-year old animals. I've never understood why this is. Why not one-year old, or three? Or four?
The strange thing was, Mitch didn’t die in the house, but in a veterinary surgery several miles away where he was sadly ‘put to sleep’ for the medical reasons mentioned above. I wondered at the time why his spirit wasn’t haunting this building instead of Linda’s home, but there was a weirder and, I thought, far more obvious question.
Linda had spent the previous decade cleaning up the corpses of all the local wildlife that Mitch had helpfully brought in. During the nesting season, when garden birds need to take more risks to find food for their chicks, her cat would snatch countless robins and tits, bringing them in to torture to death on her carpet. Hundreds of birds, mice, voles, and even young rabbits had been systematically torn to pieces in her house over ten years, yet she never once saw or heard any of their spirits.
I mention the gruesome manner of their departure because many paranormal investigators believe a sudden nasty death results in a lingering spirit, more so than a contented soul passing away in a bed with the family around them.
Is there a scientific reason for this, or is it simply that ‘psychics’ don’t have the imagination to think beyond dogs and cats? We never seem to hear of spectral hamsters, pythons, or ghostly goldfish still swimming in pathetic circles in the air above the table where their bowl used to stand. If dogs and cats have spirits, then surely so must all the other creatures?
Another friend of mine owns a small baker’s shop in York. During the summer months, when his door is open to the public, the wall-mounted electric fly zapper constantly sizzles flying insects to death. One of his regular customers is a lady psychic who often talks about all the spirits she sees, but she’s never pointed out the eerie cloud of ghost flies that, by now, must annoyingly fill his shop. Transparent dead mice must constantly race past her feet too, courtesy of his rodent poisoning boxes, but these never get a mention either.
Why is this? Is there an official paranormal explanation?