With the pandemic, America is in crisis. We have been ordered to self-quarantine. One kind of writer rises to the challenge. You can expect heartwarming tales of families reconnecting over hot chocolate and monopoly boards. It’s really not that bad, they will say.
I am not that kind of writer.
Instead, I’m going to scare the pants off you. But first, the feel-good part. For our pets, self-quarantine is a dream come true. No one ever leaves. No more waiting at the window through long, boring afternoons. Every day is Saturday.
We own a black Lab. Riley is so happy with America’s pandemic she can hardly sleep.
But another dog also lives with us. A Ghost Dog.
That’s right. We have a ghost dog. Our house is 110 years old. We thought it would be fun to buy and repair an old fixer upper. The PBS show made it look easy. My wife could hang curtains and re-caulk windows. I would paint walls and sand the floors. I’m not very handy, and unlucky with tools, but the hills surrounding the town are filled with trout streams, and I’m a fly angler, so I talked myself into it. We got the place cheap. An American Foursquare, with high windows and gabled roof, it looked a little spooky from the outside. It looks even spookier from the inside. Smarter people might have guessed the place had a ghost or two.
My wife saw our ghost dog a month after we moved in. She went outside for the mail. On her way across the porch she saw Riley waiting at the door. When she came in the dog was nowhere to be seen. That was weird. In the living room Riley lay curled on the sofa, sound asleep.
“I saw a ghost today,” she told me when I got home.
“So did I.” I slung down my computer bag, falling into a chair. “This morning. While shaving.”
She’s used to my talk, and ignored it. “I’m not kidding. I saw a ghost in the house. It was a dog.”
She described the event. I listened, thinking about the house. The basement leaked. The roof needed replacement. It turned out the kitchen walls were un-insulated, and peanut butter has to be pried from the jar. Almost nothing had gone right. Of course we had a ghost.
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“It was creepy.”
The two of us forgot about it. Or I did. Then my brother came for a weekend of fly fishing. He slept downstairs, and in the morning thanked us for letting Riley sleep on his bed.
The dog didn’t sleep on your bed, I told him. The dog sleeps with us.
Well, she must have come down in the middle of the night, he told me. She was on my bed.
I put my coffee down. “Then she figured how to open our door. Let herself out. Go downstairs. Then come back up and close the door again, because that dog slept with us.”
“She is pretty smart.”
“It’s the ghost dog!” my wife gasped. “I saw him, too. Oh, what does he want?”
What every dog wants. To be let outside, and allowed to sleep on a warm bed. I didn’t give it a second thought. My wife is an avid reader of the latest novels, books with the most implausible scenarios. I always knew my brother was nuts.
Then I saw the ghost dog, too.
It was at night. I went for a bottle of wine in the cellar. In the shadows, a dog ran under stacked chairs. Swiftly. Silently.
“Riley?” I said. “Is that you?” I heard a scratch and whine. “Riley?”
I should mention the light’s not so good down there. In the past this seemed unimportant. Even charming. Then I saw her, Riley’s head sticking out of the cellar door. I looked closer. The door was partially closed, and only her head protruded, as though stuck. She must have followed me downstairs, and been in the wine cellar when I closed the door. “What happened, honey?” I said, reaching down. As I did so the dog’s head vanished before my hands.
I made the first landing without actually touching stairs. Tearing through the house, I shouted for Riley. She had been dozing by the fire. She leapt to action. We ran downstairs.
“Get it Get it Get it Get it!” I yelled. When you yell “Get it!” to a black Lab, they’re gonna get it. Tools clattered from shelves. Chairs overturned. Stacks of books and magazines came crashing to the floor. I checked everywhere with a flashlight, Riley sniffing corners, tail going a mile a minute.
We never did find that ghost dog.
We didn’t find it because there’s no such thing as ghosts. Imagination-fueled shadows don’t count, and any old house has enough creaks and groans for a whole family of poltergeists. Mom, Dad, and Grandma in a hoop skirt, if that’s the direction you’re headed.
We’ve learned to live with our phantom dog. I even drop a little extra food in Riley’s bowl now and then, just in case the ghost dog is hungry. It’s always gone. That’s proof enough, isn’t it?
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com