Most people who spend time around animals recognize that there are some species with extraordinary abilities that defy conventional explanation. All over the world, there are anecdotes describing inexplicable journeys made by displaced dogs, who travel over vast territories unknown to them to arrive at their masters’ doors. In Japan, catfish are widely accepted to have the ability to predict earthquakes. While some of these baffling capabilities can undoubtedly be attributed to keen senses, others seem to be extrasensory in nature, driven by some natural or preternatural mechanism beyond modern comprehension.
Blackfoot Beliefs Regarding Dogs
All across Canada, disparate folkloric traditions contend that dogs have the ability to peer through the veil separating our mortal plane from the Great Beyond, allowing them to interact with the shadowy denizens of the invisible world. In his 1914 book On the Warpath, for example, American plainsman James Willard Schultz declared that the Blackfoot of southern Alberta and northern Montana regarded the dog as “a sacred animal, a friend of supernatural sight that could see the ghosts of the enemy in the night, and keep them out of the camp.” For this reason, Schultz claimed, the Blackfoot abhorred the idea of eating dog meat – a repudiation which distinguished them from their Plains Indian counterparts, the Gros Ventres, Crow, Assiniboine, and Plains Cree.
Dogs in Maritime Folklore
Maritime folklorist Mary L. Fraser made a similar pronouncement in her 1932 book Folklore of Nova Scotia, writing, “Dogs howling without reason was considered a sure sign of death, for these animals were believed to be endowed with the power of seeing phantom funerals and such like things. This belief was quite common.” The ‘phantom funerals’ to which Fraser referred were supposed to be invisible processions sometimes heard by travellers on Maritime roads, which were believed to be ‘forerunners’ or omens portending real funerary corteges for people then still living.
Fraser’s contemporary, folklorist Dr. Helen Creighton, included a short anecdote involving an interaction between a dog and a spirit in her 1957 classic Bluenose Ghosts. A man from the village of Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia, across the Chebucto Peninsula from Halifax, told her, “My father had to cross a brook to see my mother when he was courting, and it’s an old belief that a ghost can’t cross water. Everybody knows that, and another thing everybody knows is that animals can see a ghost that humans can’t see, and they see it sooner. This time, he had a little black dog with him. They were coming along the bank, and this little dog was fighting something all the way. It was behind my father, but he couldn’t see anything at all, and when they came back to the brook it stopped. Father always felt that he’d have got hurt that night if the dog hadn’t been there, because he was sure it was a ghost, and that it would have attacked him. That was the only time it ever happened to him.”
The Ghost of Mr. Le J.
In his 1909 book Life and Sport on the North Shore, government fishery inspector Napoleon Alexander Comeau included a personal experience which, despite its deflating denouement, demonstrates that the belief that dogs can see spirits was alive and well in the late 19th Century among the French-Canadian residents of the northern shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Comeau described how, in the spring of 1898, he was commissioned to blaze a telegraph line through the forest between the coastal village of Bersimis, Quebec, and the southeasterly settlement of Portneuf-sur-Mer. While hiring labourers for this operation, Comeau boarded in the family home of the local telegraph operator, Mr. A. Lausier, sleeping alone in a bedroom on the second floor which lay at the head of the staircase.
“Being somewhat tired after my long day’s walk,” he wrote of his first night in the home, “I retired early and was soon asleep. About eleven o’clock, I was awakened by a bark from Mr. Lausier’s dog, a large Newfoundland, which slept on a rug in the sitting room. I also heard someone walking downstairs, and, presuming it was some member of the family, I dozed off again and slept soundly till morning.
“When I came down for breakfast, I noticed that my host and his wife both looked as if they had passed a sleepless night. As there were a couple of young children, I concluded that the babies had been troublesome.”
That evening, Comeau again retired early, as was customary on the North Shore. “At about the same hour as on the previous night,” he wrote, “I was again awakened by the whining of the big dog downstairs, and the sound of someone moving about and dropping some heavy object on the floor. ‘What a careless servant,’ I thought to myself, and went asleep again.”
The following, Comeau accompanied Lausier by dogsled to a nearby Naskapi mission to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass. There, he met Father Arnaud, an elderly Catholic priest whom he had known since childhood, who invited him to lunch.
“Immediately after mass,” he continued, “my friend Lausier went to the vestry and had a long private conversation with the Rev. Father. We had an excellent dinner prepared by an Indian cook. French bean soup, boiled salmon, roast beaver and vegetables, stewed prunes and cheese, claret and coffee. On rising from the table, Father Arnaud said to me, ‘come over to my room, I wish to speak with you.’ He produced some cigars, and beckoning to me to sit down, said, ‘You have been staying in Mr. Lausier’s since your arrival, I hear!’
“‘Yes, Father.’
“‘Did you notice anything strange about the house, or hear any noises at night?’
“‘Well, yes, I did hear some noise,’ and related what I have previously described, adding that I believed it was the servant or some one of the family.
“‘Not at all,’ said the good father, ‘the inmates are all huddled together in one room and don’t dare to move.’ He then proceeded to repeat to me what Mr. Lausier had confided to him. ‘Some eight or ten days previous to my arrival, all the family had been awakened during the night by an unearthly yell, and then the tramp of footsteps in the house. The children and the servant girl who were sleeping upstairs ran down screaming. The dog had also heard the noise and was barking furiously. Lausier had jumped out of bed and lighted his lamp on hearing the screech, and had then heard the tramping and knocking had been repeated. Lausier and his family were so frightened and worried over the affair that they had decided to leave the house, unless some change took place. Of course, you know,’ added Father Arnaud, ‘that it was in that house that Mr. Le J. committed suicide two years ago; Lausier believes that it is Le J.’s spirit walking around, and asked me to celebrate a high mass for the repose of his soul, which is very kind and good of him, but I don’t believe that Le J. has got anything to do with this. Now, Alex, I know you are not very easily frightened, and I wish you would try and find out what is the cause of this.’”
That night, Comeau held a vigil, keeping a hefty hickory axe handle within arm’s reach in case of trouble. “Eleven o’clock came,” he wrote. “This was the usual hour. Not a sound! Was I to be disappointed? Half-past eleven, and still no ghost came. Evidently, he was not disposed to be sociable. I was getting sleepy, and had a long day’s travelling to do next day. Placing some matches close at hand, I put out the lamp and turned in. My head had hardly touched the pillow when I heard a light rap on the house, and then footsteps. I listened intently in the absolute silence that reigned for a time. Then I could hear distinctly, tramp! Tramp! Someone was coming up the stairs… I opened [the door] and entered the sitting room. The dog was lying near the stove, whining. Nothing visible; but hark! What was that? The footsteps sounded in my room. Things were getting interesting. I hurried to the stairs, closing the door quietly. On reaching my bedroom, I also closed it, went to the table quickly, and was striking a match when, as if to mock me, a tremendous knock was given, loud and strong enough to vibrate through the house; then a rush of footsteps on the stairs and everything was quiet again. The heavy blow had apparently come from under my bed…”
Comeau lit the lamp and examined the room, but nothing seemed to be out of place. Baffled, he returned to bed, and passed the rest of the night in peace.
The following morning, the amateur detective investigated the exterior of the house and made a discovery which he believed explained the mystery of the invisible visitor. The window to the cellar had been smashed in by a dog – probably a Husky owned by the local mailman – which left blood and fur on the jagged glass. The animal had evidently stolen some frozen joints of beef and pork that Lausier had hung up. Comeau deduced that the terrible screech that the family had heard was the yelp the Husky had made while cutting himself on the glass. On the nights subsequent to its initial entry, the animal had returned to the cellar to steal the meat. The thump that Comeau had heard was the sound of the meat crashing to the cellar floor, which shook the whole house, and the footsteps he had perceived were the paddings of the sled dog’s paws on the cellar stairs, which, through vibrational transfer, appeared to have issued from the staircase beyond his bedroom. The whining and barking of the family dog, which lent an uncanny air to the nocturnal mischief, were natural canine reactions to the encroachment of a strange animal on home territory.
Avian Superstitions
Dogs are not the only creatures said to have the ability to perceive ghosts. All across Canada, people contend that various birds have strong connections with the spirit world. In Bluenose Ghosts, Helen Creighton wrote that many Maritimers maintain that when birds beat their wings against windowpanes, or fly through open doorways into a house, bad news will soon follow.
The Comox Coast Salish of Canada’s West Coast believed that owls were the reincarnated spirits of the dead. Geologist Dr. Robert Brown elaborated on this notion in the August 19th, 1864 entry of his journal, which he wrote while leading the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition. While pitching their tents at a deserted Comox village on Denman Island, which lies off the east coast of Vancouver Island just south of present-day Courtenay, British Columbia, Brown and his crew were struck by the savage grandeur of the totem poles and panel carvings that ornamented the settlement, whose painted figures leered at them in the fading twilight. “The figure of the owl occurs frequently,” Brown wrote, “the bird of Athens among the Indians, as among the Greeks, being the bird of superstition. It is, they say, the spirit of the dead, and they will crowd closer round their campfire as they heard the solemn hoot in the gloomy pine forest and wonder if they have offended the dead by talking about anyone in the land of spirits. Among the Indians, it is a great breach of etiquette to mention the dead.”
In his mid-20th Century fieldnotes on Blackfoot belief, American ethnologist Claude Everett Schaeffer wrote that the Blackfoot regarded pelicans as evil omens, and believed in the existence of a mysterious raptor they called Ninase’e, which was supposed to be the transmogrified spirit of a warrior slain in battle. “People feared them,” he wrote of this avian terror. “If anyone saw this bird, which cried like an injured person, it was believed that he would soon die. If [its] cry [was] heard during the night, people covered their heads to avoid seeing them.”
The Story of Mitzi
One 20th Century anecdote from Vernon, British Columbia, suggests that some birds might be able to see ghosts. In the November 1959 issue of the magazine Fate, there is an article written by one W.G. Adler concerning the writer’s friends, Norman and Marie, and their budgie Mitzi.
“Norman and Marie were devoted friends,” the writer began, “with many joys, sorrows and interests in common, among them a love of birds, particularly budgies. In her apartment, Marie had five or six of these colorful, clever little birds. Norman at various times had owned several budgies. So it happened that when he came to visit Marie, often around 7:00 o’clock in the evening after he had dined downtown on his way home from work, the one who most eagerly welcomed him was the tiny, green jewel of a bird, Mitzi. At sighting him standing in the doorway, Mitzi would burst into a joyful twittering song, and at the same time do a funny fluttery dance. This she did for Norman only, for no one else, not even Marie.
“Well, came a day and Norman went away to join the armed forces, and was stationed many miles away from Marie and Mitzi. Some months later came word that he had collapsed and died suddenly. It was a terrific shock to Marie, and to his other friends.
“About 10 days after the news came, I met Marie on the street. She asked me to have a cup of tea with her, saying she had something to tell me.
“Her words were as follows: ‘Two evening ago, it was very warm, as you probably recall. I had supper down here, and then went home. The birds were all quiet and rather drowsy. I left the door down to the entry landing open, and sat down to rest. At the time, Norman was not in my thoughts, as I was thinking of something that had happened at the office. Suddenly, Mitzi, who had seemed to be asleep, began trilling her happy little song, fluttering her wings and commenced her funny dance. I was so startled that I glanced hastily at the open door, expecting to see Norman. For a moment, I forgot he was gone. Nobody was there. I looked at the clock. It was just 7:00, the time he so often came and stood in the doorway to whistle at Mitzi.
“‘I couldn’t believe my senses, as it was the first time she had gone into this routine since Norman went away. I am sure she was seeing him, even if I couldn’t. In a few minutes, she stopped, like she always did after he came in and sat down. She hasn’t done it again. Maybe she never will. But I am sure he came back to us for those few minutes, and Mitzi could see and hear him even if I couldn’t.
“‘It has made our loss a little easier to bear,’ she concluded.”
Have you ever seen an animal react strangely to something that you couldn’t see? Let me know in the comments below.
Sources
On the Warpath (1914), by James Willard Schultz
Folklore of Nova Scotia (1932), by Mary L. Fraser
Bluenose Ghosts (1957), by Dr. Helen Creighton
Life and Sport on the North Shore (1909), by Napoleon Alexander Comeau
Robert Brown and the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition (1989), edited by John Hayman
Glenbow Archive, Claude E. Schaeffer Fonds
“The Story of Mitzi,” by W.G. Adler in the November 1959 issue of Fate
Leave a Reply