Members Editorial
Can Animals Sense Ghosts?
Members editorials are the expressed personal opinions of the members who wrote them and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of the Haunt Masters Club as a whole.
We’ve all heard that animals are more sensitive to paranormal phenomena that humans, but where did this idea come from and has it ever been tested?

Dogs have always been associated with guarding people, and appear in mythology all across the world in connection with the supernatural. They seem to frequently accompany liminal deities, or protectors of thresholds, whose images were placed at doorways to prevent supernatural intruders from entering a home.

  • In ancient Greek mythology, the three-headed dog Cerberus guarded the entrance to the Underworld. In her later role as Queen of Ghosts, the Greek goddess Hecate, is often depicted as accompanied by an entourage of hounds, and it was believed when dogs howled at night, she was roaming.
  • In the Yoruba region of Africa, Ellegua was a barrier-god whose image, a stone head with cowrie shell eyes, nose, mouth and ears, was placed at the threshold. In Vodou, the folk religion of Haiti and known in America as Voodoo, this god is affectionately known as Papa Legba and is associated with Saint Lazarus, who is shown accompanied with dogs.

Robert Morris of the University of Kentucky was one of the first to experiment with the alleged second-sight of animals. In 1960, he was able to investigate a house that had been reported to be haunted. He took along with him a dog, a cat, a rat and a rattlesnake. He wanted to see if this theory held any truth, and if so, if all animals had this ability.

In Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time: The Unexplained, Volume 10, the H. S. Stuttman Co. explains that both the dog and the cat would only go two or three feet into one of the rooms, and would go no further. The dog lowered its tail and whimpered when it saw a vacant chair; it couldn’t be moved any closer to the chair. It quickly fled the room and would not return.

The cat had to be carried in, content in the investigators arms. As soon as it reached the mark the dog had stopped at, the cat saw the vacant chair and hissed. It clawed the investigator, jumped to the floor and backed into the corner furthest from the chair where it laid it’s ears back, bristled its hair and hissed, eyes fixed on the chair.

The rattlesnake was handled with a lot of care. When it was released from its cage, all investigators fell back and crowded in the doorway to watch and see what the deadly creature would do. The snake seemed to explore the room where it was at for a few minutes, then noticed the chair. Instantly, it coiled and its rattle began to shake. It immediately had taken a defensive, threatening posture. Its eyes would not be torn away from the vacant chair until the wrangler put it back in its cage.

The rat was the only animal that seemed oblivious to any spiritual presence that could possibly be sitting in that chair.

The investigators tested all of the animals again in other rooms of the house and under laboratory conditions away from the house, but none of the animals acted as they did in the room.

For skeptics, this proves nothing, but it reinforces what many people already know, animals are indeed sensitive to many things we are unaware of.
Paranormal Research & Investigation
Northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia & Western North Carolina
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