“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

–From Hamlet (I, v, 166-167)

As the daylight fades, signaling the onset of twilight and beckoning the stars and moon to begin their nightly dance, I find myself wondering if Shakespeare’s words were ever influenced by the strange and sometimes magickal events of life that some call “fate,” others “coincidence” and few others might call “supernatural.”

Our minds are wonderful things.  Possessed of conscious and subconscious components, the occassional conscience and endless possibilities for the interaction of hopes and fears, the mind frames our perceptions and provides our primary sensory processing for all that occurs around us.  Superstitions and science, myth and legend, art and the life it imitates all find their origin within the mind.  And the mind, itself, finds origin deep within the evolved brain of our species.  We inherit, from our ancestors, increasing levels of complexity built upon a “reptilian” core.  This common ancestry is part of what led Carl Jung to surmise that there is a “group mind” somewhere lurking in the deeper consciousness, where common hopes and fears, patterns and imagery are shared across our kith and kin.

From this pool of common ancestry, we often draw the trappings of our base myths and legends, including perhaps our common preoccupation with matters spiritual.  For tonight, when an unusually large number of individuals crouch in fear of the symbology of the date, I thought it appropriate to share another shared commonality of our species — a ghost story.

::  ::

It began on the evening when Missy, our Alaskan Malamute, died.  Shortly before the normal doggie dinner hour, the wind howled mournfully through the front yard.  It sent a chill down everyone’s spine: it sounded just as Missy did, when she would begin to howl mournfully in an effort to get dinner a little early.

The howling was intermittent, but continued through the night, occurring with eerie precision at the particular times that Missy would usually engage us in conversation.  I didn’t get much sleep.  The rain which had brought the winds began just as I was bringing Missy to the vet.  It didn’t stop until a week later.  It was almost as though the whole area mourned the passing of the Woo.  

The day after Missy died, I kept finding myself assaulted by mysterious tufts of her fur; I awoke with one on my head.  While having breakfast, another one alighted on my head.  I removed it, and placed it on the table, only to see it ~whoosh~ right back, this time alighting upon my chest.  My wife stifled a tear: to her mind, it was Missy, still hugging me the way she did in life, unable to leave us.

A few days after we received Missy’s ashes, Wifey and I accompanied the little one out to the back porch. Ember went downstairs, and trotted right up to the little igloo dog house that Missy often occupied. With her face right up to the entrance, she just stood and stared into it for a long moment. After whatever thoughts she was having had passed, she trotted back up onto the porch and over to the corner that gave her the best view of the neighborhood, searching off into the distance with both eyes and ears.

Wifey and I looked at each other. We both suspected what the little one was doing — looking for any sign of the big dog — and we made soft “woooo” sounds to each other to confirm it. Ember mistook our sad commiseration as a call to Missy, and she excitedly began to listen and look more intently, trying to catch any sign of the big girl’s response.

Nothing.

We went back inside together, a quiet trio lost in thoughts for our missing compadre.

The next morning, with Wifey off to work and Mumsie safely deposited at her adult day care, Ember and I pulled back into the driveway and prepared to go back into the house. As I closed the door of the Jeep, I noticed our back gate was open. We entered the house, and I went to the back of the house to go outside to address the latch.  That’s when I noticed that the gate had been opened just the way Missy always did it — pushed open and forced past where the latch could catch, so the latch was still in the closed position.

I closed the gate and reset the latch.

As I made my way back up the stairs to the porch, I caught sight of another oddity: Missy’s favorite tug-rope, resting atop her doghouse.  It had been inside the day before; I remembered seeing it.  I made note of it, intending to show Wifey later. When Wifey returned home from work I brought her outside to see…nothing. The tug rope was gone. (We later found it in a far corner of the yard, in the direction Ember had been looking for Missy.)

That night, Ember insisted on climbing onto our bed, and nestled right up against me. She even demanded a portion of my pillow, in her puppy-dog-eye sort of way. She needed comfort.

We gave her lots of hugs and scritches. She eventually got down, but has spent every night since curled up by my side of the bed.  She still looks at the Woo House outside, but has not gone into it.  She doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

My wife and I have also been catching fleeting glimpses of something moving just beyond our line of vision, and receiving soft nudges/nuzzles, when least expected.  We feel Missy’s presence all the time, although we never really paid much attention to ghost stories.

There’s a comfort in the words of Shakespeare at times like this.  Instead of an ominous intonation or portent, the words now hold for us a singular comfort: we miss our friend, yet still she’s here with us.

…and that’s the ghost story.  See?  06/06/06 doesn’t have to be scary at all…