Reader Story :: Spectral Dog

I received an interesting email from a reader that I thought I would share:

I came across your blog while looking for something completely unrelated, and it made me remember something that happened to me about 12 years ago. I was living in Balsam and working in Sylva (a town about 10 miles from Balsam - Wes). It had snowed Saturday night, maybe 4 or 5 inches, and it had been cold all day Sunday. The state snow plows hadn't made it to Balsam yet, so the roads were still fairly covered. I woke up early Monday morning, an hour so so before sunrise, to see if the roads were passable. I walked down to the road, maybe thirty yards from my front door, and stood in the middle of the road, testing to see how slick it was. Because a few cars had driven the road over the weekend, it was frozen into solid ice. There was no traffic, and it was dead quiet. The moon was out and the snow and ice practically glowed.

From down the road I heard the unmistakable sound of a dog running. I could hear heavy panting, the jingling of a collar and the thumping of paws on the frozen pavement. I stared towards the source of the sound, but I couldn't see anything. My first thoughts we simply wondering if I was about to be attacked by a dog. As it got closer though, I started to get weirded out. The sound was definitely coming from the road, and it was definitely coming towards me. After maybe 20 seconds, the sound of this invisible dog passed right in front of me and I could hear it continue down the road for a another few seconds until it faded back to silence. I swear that I could have reached out my hand and touched the source of the sound as it passed me, but I never saw anything. No dog, no ghostly footprints in the snow, nothing. Just this disembodied dog sound.

Anyway, probably not the weirdest story in the world, but your blog brought it to mind so I thought I would share. Nothing else ever happened while I lived there, and that was probably the closest I've ever come to a paranormal experience. Thanks for the blog, cool stuff.

Chris 

Thanks for sharing that. Definitely interesting, and probably really unnerving in the moment.