IS THERE ANYMOGGY THERE?

I was writing about a ghost dog in my new novel and got to wondering about animal spirits and pet hauntings. Are they genuine, or just harmless self delusion to comfort us after the death of a beloved member of the family?

Back in the late 1980s, I knew 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 her clients how their pets had spirits too, just like humans, and their dogs and cats would sometimes remain with them ‘for a while’ after their departure from this world. Linda had a colleague who operated as a Pet Psychic and she’d put her own clients in touch with this person if needed.

The pet spirit scenario was ‘proven’ beyond any doubt when Linda’s own cat Mitch died, but its spirit continued to ‘live’ in her house for several months. She sensed him constantly, of course, but also saw the ghost cat walking around the rooms and garden. She sometimes heard it mewing and purring, especially in the evenings. 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 passed away, incontinent, partially blind 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 never understood why this was. Why not one-year old, or three? Or four?

The strange thing was, Mitch didn’t die in Linda's 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 I suppose the spirit appeared where it had felt most comfortable in life. The cat's ghost returning home, however, posed a much 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 indoors. 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. Why not?

I mention the gruesome manner of their departure because many paranormal investigators are convinced that a sudden nasty death results in a lingering spirit haunting the site, more so than a contented soul passing away in a bed with the family around them. Murders and executions for example.

Whenever we hear about animal spirits, it always tends to be a ghost dog or a cat. Is there a paranormal scientific reason for this, or is it simply that ‘psychics’ don’t have the imagination to think beyond these two pets? 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.

I have to admit, it would make for a good ghost story - after flushing your child's dead hamster down the toilet, you hear the eerie squeaking sound of the spectral animal turning the exercise wheel in its empty cage.

If dogs and cats have spirits, then surely so must all the other creatures? Are abattoirs filled with ghostly pigs and cows?

Another friend of mine owns a small bakery in York. During the summer months, when his front 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 once 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 in the back, but these never get a mention either.

Why is this? Why are we only visited by phantom dogs and cats? Is there an official paranormal explanation?