Last week I told you about the real haunted house my family lived in for a few years and the small second floor bedroom that my siblings and I kept our horde of toys in. We called that room the junk room, because that’s what it usually looked like. I also mentioned the larger bedroom on the same floor, where my next younger brother and I slept. My bed was at the end of the bedroom away from the door. My brother’s was, obviously, next to the door. The junk room was down a short hallway to the right, maybe fifteen feet away from our bedroom door. The stairs down to the first floor were immediately to the left of our door. The stairs to the basement were under that staircase. The basement door had a hook and loop lock that we always used at night because the basement door to the outside was a classic, old farmhouse, slanted cellar door, that could be easily broken into. Our dad worked nights and my mom feared burglars.

One night, around two in the morning, I was woken by the sound of the junk room door opening, which, as I said last week, we kids kept locked from the outside. I heard the sound of a large dog, German Shepard size or larger, walk from the junk room in the bedroom, its toes tapping heavily as it walked. We had no such pet dog. We had a Toy Manchester Terrier which is a Chihuahua sized little black dog.

This big dog, toes a-tapping, went straight to my brother’s bed and sniffed at him loudly. He did not wake up. I then heard it circling tightly for a few seconds and then lie down. I was petrified, not the least because there was a large, oval rug right where it somehow tapped its toes before laying down.

It lay there for about twenty minutes, then got up and went down the stairs, toes still tapping away. It then went down the basement stairs. The stairs to the second floor were fully carpeted, yet those toes tapped. It went down the basement stairs though the basement door was locked.

A few minutes later I got cautiously out of bed and looked at the junk room door. It was closed and locked. I carefully went down the stairs, woke my mother to see if she’d heard anything like a big dog walking around. She had heard nothing and our little dog was sleeping at her feet, under the blankets. I went to the basement door, unlocked it, turned the lights on, looked down the stairs, saw no dog, turned the lights off, closed the door and locked it. No way in hell was I going down those stairs and check for stray ghostly doggies.

Re-shared on 6/7/2017 in the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast:

For the reading impaired, an audio version of this quasi theory may be found here: