Soliciting Real Animal Ghost Stories!

Title is weird and awkward but hopefully caught your attention so hey!

I have a lot of books about ghosts. I tend to hoard them and will compulsively purchase the damn things, so I might as well try and put them to USE. As such, I am considering doing a similar thing to my undergrad dissertation, and COLLATING SOME SOURCES ON A PARTICULAR TOPIC.

Specifically, animal ghosts. Or spectres, or apparitions, whatever you want to call them. I am defining these as animals that are either ghostly or otherwise not physically present.

But I don't just want to rely on stories from books and suchlike! I want stories that won't be there because nobody's got round to interviewing you yet. I want folklore from small towns nobody thinks has anything interesting to tell. So! I have made... a google document.

It's Here.

On it, I would like people to tell me about their stories. I have put a rough form on there to guide you, though feel free to suggest edits. To aid folks in this, I have made these lists of what I am and am not interested in:

I Want:

• Personal or friend/friend-of-a-friend/friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend/etc experiences where the ghost/apparition/whatever it is is an animal
  
• Local folklore/urban legends of ghostly/phantom/apparitional animals
• Stories about things like ghostly coaches and riders are fine provided there is an animal included- a ghost coach with ghost horses drawing it = fabulous, a ghost coach rattling along on its own = not so much. Though, thinking about it, if you have a story where a ghost animal should be present and isn't, like a horseless coach, that might be pretty useful for comparison purposes! Please tell me separately, though, so I can keep them sorted out.
• Personal experiences/folklore of talking animals = also good

I Do Not Want:

• Stories that are written and presented as fiction. Yes, I know that folklore is mostly made up/exaggerated like woah, but that's different. If the story was deliberately written to be fiction and marketed as such, I'm not interested. If it was written and presented as fiction but got absorbed into folklore, that's fine! Though please make a note of this. I just don't want people giving me stories they got out of novels or Goosebumps books, yannow?
• Stories where flesh-and-blood animals sense ghosts. While interesting, they are not quite the same and not (yet, at least) relevant. If the flesh-and-blood animal is sensing a ghost animal, though, fine.
  
• Stories with no animals. Kind of defeats the point, ya?

The ultimate aim of this is to write some kind of weird-ass essay on the topic where I wave a stick around and point at things and go 'LOOK THEY ARE SIMILAR/DISSIMILAR ISN'T THAT INTERESTING', but due to various things like the sheer amount of research and the sheer lack of spoons I don't know when that will happen. But rest assured, I hoard ghost stories like a slightly crazed dragon so they will be appreciated!

So! Give me your stories! Feel free to wave this around at anyone not on Kintsugi who might have something to add, too! That's why it's on the general forum, haha. I want ghost stories! Come at me, bro!

If you have questions, plz don't be afraid to ask, I entirely understand the desire to clarify believe me. Suggestions also welcome! And don't worry I won't believe you or will think you are mad. I do not judge, and not planning to put a lot of weight on how 'possible' the stories are.

 

@jacktrash
THANK YOU. =D

 

It's not exactly a story but I like, actively have a ghost cat. My first cat has just decided that she's going to keep harassing me occasionally even though she's dead.

It's usually in the form of jumping on the end of my bed in the middle of the night and kneading her paws there. There's the distinct physical sensation (anyone with a cat knows the "cat jumps on the bed" feeling - it's like a lighter version of that). Not a sleep delusion - it's consistently A) when I am having pretty insomnia nights, B) ONLY when my boycat (who didn't get along with her) isn't in the room. Ghost cat grudgingly respects living cat, I guess?

Also my mom's experienced it too, though she usually gets headbutt-on-ankle rather than "i'm gonna sit on your feet," so. There's no visual component, just the tactile sensation, but it's pretty distinctive, so.

also @jacktrash my ipod started playing the music from the x3 standoff flash when I got to the part in your story about punching the horse in the face, it was weirdly fitting.

 

@Starcrossedsky
To be honest that's precisely the sort of story I'm interested in even if you think it's not dramatic enough or whatever! Would you mind sticking it on the document, or can I copypaste what you put here?

 

Not really a ghost story, but I do think it sort of fits.

I've had a couple bettas over the past three years, and three of them passed away over the course of about a year. This happened with the other two, but I remember it best with my first. It was clear there was something wrong with him, and I'd tried everything I could get my hands on to help him, but it wasn't noticeably working. But he sort of limped along for about a week or two after he became noticeably sick, and the night that he died, I dreamt of him. He was in this big aquarium place in sort of a window looking tank in the wall. I looked at him for awhile, and talked briefly to someone (idk who) but I just said something like 'I think he looks happy here.' And that was it. In the morning I woke up and found that he'd passed away during the night.

 

@Alska
Oooh, that totally fits! In that it's an extension of the phenomenon of seeing or dreaming about a person at the moment they die, but with an animal, which I've not heard of before. Could you drop it on the document for me, or should I copypaste it there?

 

Feel free to copypaste it!

 

@Alska
Is 'alska' ok to refer to you as?

 

@TwoBrokenMirrors yeah, that's fine ^^

 

Copypasta away, I wouldn't have shared if I wasn't comfortable.

 

@Starcrossedsky
Thanks! Would you like to be known as Nai or something else?

And I'm still soliciting, everyone else! I will always be soliciting.

 

Nai's fine.

 

Hey guys! Sorry for the random quote, but as you can see from the OP these stories I dredged out of That's Unusual are pretty much stuff I'm interested in at the moment, and I was wondering if you guys would mind if I added them to my collection? You can put them on the document yourself if you want to elaborate, or I can copypaste what I already have here if you let me know what name you want to go under on the doc. =) or you can say no, don't take them, that's fine too!

 

you can use mine, but i can't elaborate any more than that because i don't really remember it, and my mom wouldn't be willing to talk about it.

 

@Deresto
That's fine, it's still relevant!

 

Bumping this so everyone knows i'm STILL COLLECTING

 

Did I send you one or did I forget?

 

@Morven
I don't recall one from you! Aaand don't see one on the doc. So I guess you forgot!