Phantom Felines And Other Ghostly Animals - Gerina Dunwich 2006

Goldie
Hounds and Hauntings

by Christopher Kypta

During the summer, my mornings have a certain ritual order to them. I walk down my driveway in the pre-dawn and sit at the mailbox waiting for the sun. It’s the most peaceful part of my day. The skies are still a dark blue and the dew is settling on the grass as I sit and watch and listen. The sound of first birdsong comes and the sky lightens in the east.

The sun, still under the horizon, lights the bottom of clouds as they wisp through the sky in an array of scarlet, purple, and gold. Watching the clouds float across the sky, I find it easy to imagine that I am alone atop some mountain in the Far East rather than sitting by my mailbox in the suburbs of Atlanta. Occasionally, however, the lights of a car remind me all too well that Atlanta is not far away and the city is already beckoning its early workers.

It is never too hard to return to the contemplative state I find in watching the dawn come once a car has passed and its taillights fade into the distance, but sometimes there are other visitors as well. My neighbor’s golden retriever, Goldie, is always out early in the morning taking her stroll around the block. I can hear her coming down the hill, tags dangling and nails clicking against the asphalt. I’ll turn to look up the hill and her tail will wag as she sees me, and sometimes she will come and sit beside me as if she, too, is watching the sunrise.

But one quiet summer morning, no different from the others, something unusual happened. The clouds lolled through the July morning sky as always and the early bird workers headed down the road. Goldie came down the road, too, but that day she surprised me. When I looked up the hill and saw her trotting down the road, I realized I couldn’t hear her tags jingling or her nails clicking. I waited for her to come and sit beside me, but she trotted across her yard as if my neighbor were calling her.

Oh well, I thought, and looked away. It was several moments before I remembered that Goldie had died the day before. She had been lying in her driveway when my neighbor backed over her in his car. He took her to the vet, but there was nothing that could be done.

It was then that I realized I had seen a ghost, that I was in the middle of a paranormal experience. I always thought that if I were to see a ghost I would panic, but at that moment I felt calm and the morning seemed very still. I looked across my neighbor’s yard.

Goldie was still there, making her way deliberately across the yard to where the driveway snaked around toward the back of the house. As she walked, there was no jingling sound from her dog tags. Goldie walked in silence.

Watching Goldie walk across her yard was almost like looking at a silent movie of a dog. There was no sound, but there was also something odd about how she looked that was so subtle anyone unaware that she was a ghost would have missed. Goldie seemed to be two-dimensional, almost an outline of a dog filled in with golden color. She had reached the driveway now and walked across the asphalt without a single click of her nails and then was gone around the corner of the house.

I got up from the mailbox and went inside. I did not wish to see the sun rise that day, nor for many days to come. But eventually I did return to my perch beside the mailbox. The first time I was very nervous and each bird chirp made me jump as I sat and waited, wondering what I would do if I were to hear the jingling of Goldie’s collar coming down the hill or catch a blur of golden color out of the corner of my eye. But nothing happened. The sun rose as it always had and the clouds turned purple, gold, and crimson in the morning sky. No apparition of a dog ever came down the hill again nor took a morning walk around the block. It happened only once. Goldie was run over, taken to the vet’s, and put to sleep. Then she came home.