Ghostly Animals and Things

      One of the oldest and strangest legends oft he sea tells of the Flying Dutchman, a special condemned to an eternal voyage, with a single skeleton for a crew, because the captain attempted to round the Cape of Good Hope in defiance of a divine warning to turn back. The Dutchman, however, is but one of a number of phantom ships to have been sighted, for the perception of ghosts of inanimate things on both sea and land os not uncommon. Though less numerous than their human counterparts, ghosts of things-ships, buildings, castles, lakes, violins, horse-drawn carriages and cars abound. So do ghosts of animals, a relatively popular species of phantom.

      Such irregular ghosts can be every bit as unsettling as an unexpected human apparition, and now and then perhaps even more so. After all, there is an appropriateness about human ghosts-man may hope to exist beyond his mortal years; but extending the privilege to cats and dogs and horses? An mortar and bricks? Unthinkable perhaps, and yet such stories do appear and persist.

      In 1892 a woman reported that after deciding to put a sick cat out of its misery by drowning it, she was horrified to see the gray-and-black-striped creature reappear "thinner and dripping with water" at her door. She ordered a servant to remove it, but the servant replied that she saw no cat and told her mistress of having already witnessed the animal's burial.

      In another case a man was walking through an unfamiliar part of the Australian countryside when he happened on "a collection of grey buildings and pipes" and heard "the sound of water gushing forth." He mentioned what he had seen to his father, who returned to see for himself and found only "a dry, rocky gully." The man was bewildered by his vision for several years, until, as he told it, " a local resident informed my mother that there had been just such an installation as I had described back in the old mining days."

      Writer Barbara Cartland and her brother came upon "a story-book castle complete with spires and turrets" while walking in the countryside of Carinthia in southern Austria. After the walk they mentioned their discovery in a local village and were they told that the castle had long ago been destroyed.

      In 1910 several members of the Tweedale family in Yorkshire, England, shared a vision of an aunt who had died years earlier. Later, Mrs. Tweedale reported that the specter had as a companion a nervous, short-haired white dog. The aunt had indeed owned such a dog, although none of the family had ever seen it.

      Is it possible? Are the ghosts of buildings, nervous dogs and drowned cats suitable phantoms to ponder? As with ghostly humans, the apparitions of things and animals may exist only in the human mind; or the universe may be infinitely more cluttered than we can perceive or date imagine.