Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters

Wendy Yaddock and I have been friends since we were five years old. Over the years we sometimes drift apart and too much time might go by between talks. But we always send each other birthday cards and no matter what is happening in our lives, we always have one thing in common. Cats. We love them.

Wendy knew that she could share something with me that I would understand. When Goofer, her beloved cat, passed away, she was devastated. He was one of those special, once-in-a-lifetime cats. When he looked at Wendy and she looked at him, they had a connection that did not need words. He was always there to comfort her when she was feeling sad. With Goofer gone, she felt a painful void. “I tried to work through my grief in the next few weeks and thought of him often,” said Wendy. “One day I was on my couch when I saw him. He was walking through the room, holding his tail up high.”

She stared in amazement at the slightly transparent cat before he vanished. Since then, Wendy has seen him three times and her son has spotted him once. “I miss my cat,” she told me. “But I feel comforted in knowing that we are really still together.”

While Wendy’s story is heartwarming, it is not unique. Our animals love us and they often stick around after death takes their physical bodies.

The following stories tell of animals whose spirits have lived beyond their bodies:

When Kathleen Lee is asked about the scariest incident of her life, she casts her memory back to the 1960s when she was a cute twelve-year-old girl with fire-red hair that fell to her waist.

The Ontario mother of six remembers how her own mother struggled to raise five kids alone. The year she started junior high school, Kathleen, her sister, and her three brothers moved with their mother to a drafty farmhouse in the middle of six acres of land in Whonnock, British Columbia. “It was a rental house,” said Kathleen. “It once belonged to a Japanese family and they lost it when they were sent to an internment camp during the war.”

The kids found old faded Japanese newspapers in the attic. Kathleen felt sad for the family she knew had once loved the home. The long driveway that led to the secluded two-story house was lined with Japanese cherry and plum trees and the overgrown land still harbored beautiful oriental shrubbery, long ago planted by loving hands.

Sometimes Kathleen and her siblings were a little spooked on the isolated property, especially when the kids at school whispered about the nearby institute for the criminally insane. “It scared us,” she admitted. “We worried someone would escape.”

One dreary February afternoon the family was surprised to find a visitor at their door. “It was a beautiful white dog,” said Kathleen. “He was so beautiful that even my mother was impressed and she is not a dog person.”

The husky-like dog had a thick fluffy coat. Her fur was pure white. Oddly so. Most white dogs, Kathleen points out, have a little yellow or beige tones mixed into their fur. But the Carnegies’ visitor had startling, snow white fur.

The dog watched the children with inquisitive, friendly eyes. “My brother tried to touch her, but she backed away,” said Kathleen. The curious canine seemed to want to join the family, yet she shied away when anyone came near.

The Carnegie kids put food and water out for the dog, hoping their mother would let them keep her. She had a collar with a tag hanging from it, but they could never get close enough to her to read it. Meanwhile, their dog, Scampy, a medium-sized mixed breed, stayed in the backyard. This was a little peculiar, as Scampy normally raced around the house, his tail wagging, eager to greet visitors—dogs and people alike.

That night Kathleen watched television until she fell asleep on the living room sofa. It was 2 A.M. when she woke with a start to an odd mixture of noises. The static of the TV was drowned out by the keening howl of Scampy. Kathleen sat up quickly. “I thought something was wrong with Scampy,” she said. Then she realized that the white dog, still on the front porch, was also making noise—a low, throaty growl.

Puzzled, Kathleen got up. The moon was full and filled the room with a cold white light. Kathleen glanced at the front door and froze. There, silhouetted against the door’s window, was a tall figure.

The bright moonlight behind him blotted out his features. For a second, she wondered if she were looking at her own shadow. “I moved my head, but he didn’t move,” she said. Cold terror filled her belly and her feet seemed stuck to the floor. “I could see the outline of his shoulders, neck, and jaw, but he was so big that he was taller than the door. I could not see the top of his head.

“I knew he could see me. I was so frightened it seemed like my heart stopped. I could not even scream. I just couldn’t believe that this was happening to me. We were locked there, with him watching me. He was menacing. I knew whatever was on his mind couldn’t be good.”

Suddenly the white dog’s growl turned into a ferocious roar. Kathleen could not see the dog, yet she knew the animal lunged at the intruder. “I saw the man’s head move from the window.”

Kathleen ran to her mother’s room and watched from the window as the white dog chased the stranger up the long driveway. “It was too dark to see the man.” Only the dog was visible, glowing white in the moonlight as she raced away.

“I went looking for the dog the next morning,” said Kathleen. But the animal had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. She stood on the porch, wondering what had become of the mysterious creature. Then her eyes fell on the dishes they had set out for the dog. “They were still filled to the brim,” said Kathleen. “The food and water had not been touched.”

“I showed my mother,” Kathleen remembered. “When she saw the food hadn’t been touched, she said, ‘That dog was sent by God to protect us.’”

The dog, they decided, had to be either an angel or a ghost. They checked with all the neighbors and no one else had seen or heard of the pure white dog.

“Scampy refused to come around to the front of the house for several days,” said Kathleen. “My brother Gary tried to drag him, but he wouldn’t budge.”

Was the white dog an ethereal being? The fact that she did not touch food or water for the twelve hours she had sat on the porch was strange. And why did no one in the community know anything about such an unusual-looking dog? Wouldn’t someone else have noticed the animal?

Scampy’s behavior, too, pointed to the possibility that the white dog may have been from another plane. Why wouldn’t the friendly Scampy interact with the dog?

The menacing intruder was another puzzling element. Was it possible, that he, too, was a ghost? Or was he a patient, escaped or discharged from the nearby criminally insane institution?

If his presence was ghostly, could it have anything to do with the Japanese family who was removed from their home? Was the white dog a ghost of a pet of the Japanese family who suffered the injustice of internment?

Perhaps she had come back to make sure another family would not lose anything precious.

Jessie Johnson was a sophomore in high school on the winter morning she trudged through the snow to the barn to prepare breakfast for her four horses. It was 1994 and a heavy snow had fallen on the Ohio Valley, where the Johnson family lived on fifteen wooded acres.

As Jessie, her parents, and her eleven-year-old brother, Adam, filled pails with oats, the horses played in the snow in the pasture. It was a peaceful scene. The little farmhouse, the trees, and the long driveway that led to their home were all swaddled in white. Joey, their dark brown mare, pranced in the snow. She tossed her head, playful as a colt, as she danced about in the bright white world.

The family was devastated to find Joey dying from a hunter’s bullet. “I held her head,” remembered Jessie. “It had snowed so much that the roads were too bad for the vet to get there in time to save her. It was horrible.”

The careless hunter had thought he was shooting at a deer and discovered the distraught family when he arrived to collect his bounty.

It was the worst day of fifteen-year-old Jessie’s life. The sweet-natured quarter horse with the white star on her forehead was a year older than she and had been born on the farm. Jessie had shown her in the 4-H Club. The gentle mare had always been part of her childhood.

“The horses were in our yard, right next to our house,” Jessie stressed. “He shouldn’t have been hunting there. It turned out he was a substitute teacher and he showed up at my school a few weeks later.”

Jessie marched up to the teacher after class and spat, “You murdered my horse.”

“I don’t care,” she retorted, and stomped off. Though the Johnsons were awarded a cash settlement for Joey in a civil suit, and they purchased another horse, it did little to ease their grief. Joey had been part of their family. No amount of money—no other horse—could replace her.

The ground was frozen on that awful day Joey died. A kind neighbor showed up with his tractor and dug her grave beneath the tree where the mare had loved to graze. “It is at the end of our driveway. It was her favorite place. She was always standing there,” remembered Jessie.

The seasons changed and the snow melted. Tiny wildflowers poked their heads up around the roots of Joey’s tree. The Johnson family noticed something odd. When the horses were in the fenced-off area on the other side of the driveway, they would stand beside the fence and stick their heads over it, staring at the tree where Joey was buried.

There were four horses again. Joker, the newcomer, joined the others. Penny, Joey’s mother, was such a bright red that she resembled a new penny shining in the sun. Nugget, Joey’s son, was also bright red. Image, the pony, rounded out the foursome. The herd clustered together, staring over the fence at something beneath the tree—something no one else could see.

“My brother saw her first,” said Jessie. Adam Johnson was sauntering up the hill to the end of the driveway on a summer morning when he passed the tree. “Hello, Joey,” said the eleven-year-old as he saw the brown mare. He glanced away and then stopped in his tracks as realization flooded over him. Joey was dead.

A year later, it was summertime once again and Jessie was driving home after a night out with friends. “It was around 11 P.M., my curfew, as I pulled into the driveway,” she confided. As she headed down the driveway, her headlights lit up the tree and there, grazing beneath it, was her beloved horse. “The other horses were all in the barn for the night,” said Jessie. “I knew it was Joey.”

She gazed at her for a full thirty seconds. The brown quarter horse appeared as solid and real as any living being. Then the animal dissolved before her eyes.

Tears burned Jessie’s eyes as she sat in her car. “It brought back so many memories,” she said.

Before long, every member of the Johnson family caught glimpses of the horse. “My father saw her too,” said Jessie. “He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he saw her. He would tell us about it and then quickly change the subject.”

Joey’s spirit was spotted regularly. Jessie sometimes saw her when she looked out her bedroom window. “She was always under the tree,” she said.

A few years after the tragic death of Joey, Penny died of natural causes. Her spirit, too, has been seen on the Johnson acreage. “Penny was my horse,” said Jessie’s mother, Cheryl Johnson. “I’d gotten her when I was sixteen. She was thirty-one when she died.”

Penny, a registered quarter horse, was four years old when she came into Cheryl’s life. Cheryl immediately fell in love with her. “She had a diamond star on her face, a white snip on her nose, and two white ‘socks’ halfway up her legs,” said Cheryl. “When she died in 1997, we buried her where she liked to stand, under an ash tree.”

A couple of months later it was dusk as Cheryl and her husband, Steve, were bringing the horses to the barn for the night. Cheryl was beside the barn with the horses gathered around her and Steve was on the road on the hill above. He called down to his wife, saying that one of the horses was grazing beneath the ash tree.”

“It’s not one of ours,” Cheryl yelled to him. “I’ve got them all around me.”

She looked up at the tree, and there in the dimming light, she saw the distinctive outline of a horse beneath it. “The image was there for a long time,” she said. As she watched, it eventually dissolved into the shadows.

Jessie now lives in Anaheim, California, where she is a counselor who works with children. “The horses are still seen,” she said. “It makes my mom happy. She’s glad their spirits are still around.”

Ghosts come in all sizes. While the animal spirits in the previous story might seem larger than life, others are just itsy-bitsy ghosts. Carlie Parrish was eleven years old when she fell in love with a tiny fluff of a creature she could cradle in her hand. Bubbles, the hamster, was just a baby when the Milton Keynes, England, girl began to nurture him. “He was a Christmas gift,” she said.

She was devoted to her new friend. She couldn’t help but smile when he looked up at her with his shiny dark eyes and wiggled his little nose. He lived in her room, in a little cage complete with an exercise wheel. “He was very active at night,” said Carlie as she remembered one of her favorite childhood pets. Each night she fell asleep to the reassuring squeak of the exercise wheel as Bubbles scampered around. And around. And around. “At night he was constantly on that wheel,” she said.

Bubbles died when he was two years old, and Carlie was inconsolable. “I screamed for hours,” she confided.

“After he died, I didn’t want the cage in my room, so my mum put it in the garage,” Carlie said. But the fact that his cage was no longer in her room did not seem to deter the feisty little spirit of Bubbles. In the dark of her room, Carlie snuggled beneath the covers and was about to drift off to sleep when a sound startled her. It was the distinctive squeak of Bubbles’s hamster wheel.

Then thirteen years old, Carlie was frightened by the sound. Bubbles was gone and so was his cage. How could it be?

Night after night, hour after hour, she lay in the dark and listened to the squeak of the exercise wheel. Spooked by the occurrence, she began to wear ear plugs to bed. “I also used to leave the hall light on at night. I never looked toward where the noise came from, because once I was in bed, I wouldn’t move again until it was light. It really scared me.”

After about six months, Carlie welcomed two new friends into her life. A pair of gerbils took up residence in her room and the phantom sounds of Bubbles abruptly stopped.

An adult now, Carlie is no longer frightened by the idea of a spirit pet sticking around. She still remembers Bubbles fondly. “I loved him to bits,” she said.

Judging by the fact he stayed so long, it seems that Bubbles was attached to her too.

Move Over, Scooby-Doo!

WHILE MANY PEOPLE HAVE REPORTED sightings of ghostly animals, animals have also demonstrated that they can see ghosts. The Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer reported on a rottweiler named Abe who “sees dead people.” The October 30, 2003, article said that the psychic pooch accompanied the folks with Seven Paranormal Research to haunted sites, where he sensed spirits. According to the report, when the investigators searched Fort Fisher, a Confederate fort by the mouth of the Cape Fear River, Abe nudged a researcher’s hand and went into pointing mode. All eyes looked to see what he was pointing at and witnessed a fully developed apparition standing atop a mound.

It seemed to be life imitating art with Abe accompanying a paranormal research team just as his cartoon counterpart does in Scooby-Doo!

Seven Paranormal Research, stationed in Carthage, North Carolina, appeared on a Learning Channel television special that showed off Abe’s skills.

Lighthouse Cat

OHIO’S HISTORIC FAIRPORT HARBOR LIGHTHOUSE, a fixture on the shores of Lake Erie, has long been the source of ghost stories. It was said to be home to the spirit of a gray cat but local skeptics laughed at the stories of the lighthouse volunteers. The lighthouse folks had the last laugh when their claims gained legitimacy because of a recent gruesome discovery.

A vintage photograph of the Fairport Harbor Lighthouse, where a ghostly cat makes its home. (Courtesy of the Fairport Harbor Historical Society)

On May 26, 2001, Cleveland’s newspaper, the Plain Dealer, reported that “workers installing air conditioning vents discovered the mummified remains of a gray cat in a crawl space.”

Curator Pamela Brent insisted that she’d seen “the wispy gray spirit of a cat” several times. The report quoted her as saying, “It would skitter across the floor near the kitchen, like it was playing. I would catch glimpses of it from time to time. Then one evening I felt its presence when it jumped on the bed. I felt its weight pressing on me.”

Vindicated by the discovery of the kitty, the folks at the lighthouse further investigated and discovered that a former lighthouse keeper’s wife did indeed have pet cats. Bedridden because of illness, Mary Babcock occupied the second floor, where her cats kept her company and brought her comfort. Mary died of arteriosclerosis (a thickening of the arterial walls) when she was close to seventy, but no one knows how the cat met its demise.

The Fairport Harbor Marine Museum and Lighthouse draws many tourists who say the sixty-nine-step trip up to the top is worth it for the sweeping view of Lake Erie. Located approximately twenty-five miles northeast of Cleveland, Ohio, the museum displays many fascinating artifacts. In addition to showcasing its maritime exhibits, the lighthouse tour includes a peek at the cat’s mummy—something that particularly fascinates schoolchildren on field trips, who also have their eyes peeled for a friendly kitty ghost!

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FAIRPORT HARBOR MARINE MUSEUM AND LIGHTHOUSE

129 SECOND STREET

FAIRPORT HARBOR, OH 44077

(440) 354-4825