Episode 20 Ghost Pets Part 1

[00:00:00] - [Speaker 0]
Hello, everyone. My name is Graeme Milne.

[00:00:02] - [Speaker 1]
My name is Karen Swanston.

[00:00:04] - [Speaker 0]
Welcome to Lights On, Still Scared. Now today folks, our episode is about ghostly pets, haunted animals. Aw. I know. Some of them are not cute though, just have to say.

[00:01:03] - [Speaker 0]
There are a few cute ones. Now, how are you, Karn, anyway?

[00:01:06] - [Speaker 1]
I'm very well. How are you?

[00:01:08] - [Speaker 0]
I am fine. I'm looking forward to this one actually because I do like a good haunted animal story. Indeed. I like animals anyway and I like to believe I like to believe that when we shuffle off the old mortal coil, our four legged friends are there with us. Indeed.

[00:01:22] - [Speaker 0]
I like to believe that.

[00:01:23] - [Speaker 1]
Mhmm.

[00:01:24] - [Speaker 0]
Would you like to start and what do you have for

[00:01:27] - [Speaker 1]
us Well, I have a doggy.

[00:01:30] - [Speaker 0]
Okay.

[00:01:31] - [Speaker 1]
Sadie was her name. I'm saying it's a Sadie. It's her. Yes, it is. Sadie is a she.

[00:01:37] - [Speaker 1]
Sadie was a much loved cocker spaniel belonging to a Kimberly Pierce, North Carolina.

[00:01:43] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, okay.

[00:01:45] - [Speaker 1]
She was 12 years old and only three days away from her thirteenth birthday when she died.

[00:01:51] - [Speaker 0]
That's a bit unlucky.

[00:01:53] - [Speaker 1]
But she'd been seriously ill and Kimberly had eventually faced what decision every pet owner dreads and she authorized the vet to put her to sleep. Yeah. Although the decision was made because Sadie was ill, Kimberly was overwhelmed with guilt. She felt that she had personally signed the papers that ended her companion's life.

[00:02:14] - [Speaker 0]
Mhmm.

[00:02:14] - [Speaker 1]
Worried that Sadie might somehow blame her, which is what you do, isn't it really? Sometimes when you have to

[00:02:20] - [Speaker 0]
It is.

[00:02:20] - [Speaker 1]
Make that decision. Decision. So a few days after her death, Kimberly reportedly sat down on her porch and spoke to her for around an hour and a half. She apologized and asked Sadie to forgive her and begged Sadie or God to send her a sign showing that her dog was alright. So Kimberly's husband Chad brought home a small Morkie puppy called Bella.

[00:02:45] - [Speaker 1]
I have no idea what a Morkie is.

[00:02:47] - [Speaker 0]
I have no idea. There's a chocolate bar. So a morkey could

[00:02:51] - [Speaker 2]
be a Yorkie in a could be a Yorkie in a Malamute. No. That's impossible. Surely.

[00:02:56] - [Speaker 1]
If anyone knows, please let

[00:02:57] - [Speaker 0]
us know.

[00:02:57] - [Speaker 1]
Anyway, so he's brought Bella home in a hope helping her through her grief. Mhmm. Approximately one week after Sadie died, Kimberly used her phone to film Bella playing inside the house. She did not notice anything unusual at the time. Several days later, after sharing the recording to her friend, Kimberly noticed a pale, fast moving shape crossing the room.

[00:03:20] - [Speaker 1]
The instinctive form appeared briefly before Bella came running into view. Right. To Kimberly, the shape resembled a dog. More importantly, she believed she recognized a white and camel covering Mercedes. Kimberly said that the recording was made around lunchtime.

[00:03:37] - [Speaker 1]
She rejected the possibility of passing car lights or the shadows of a bird, explaining the family lived in the countryside well away from passing traffic. She became convinced that her request from the porch had been answered and that Sadie had returned to reassure her. As Mhmm. Sir Kimberly did not interpret the appearance as frightening, she felt that Sadie was telling her that everything was alright. She was not angry and that she would be waiting for her and that Kimberly should allow herself to love and play with Bella.

[00:04:09] - [Speaker 1]
Experience reportedly transformed Kimberley's reaction to Sadie's death. Her initial shock and tears gave way to relief, and she no longer felt consumed with the guilt. She believed it was a single, personal visit rather than the beginning of an ongoing haunting. But she didn't expect Sadie to appear again because in her view, the message had already been delivered. Oh, that's actually quite a nice little story.

[00:04:33] - [Speaker 0]
That is quite a nice positive story. I know. It's really odd because I... Last year... So we lost our dog, Tertia, two years ago, like literally three days ago, you know, two years before that.

[00:04:46] - [Speaker 0]
And of course, we miss her terribly. And in March this year we were staying in a cottage, we often go to this place in Dunkeld and of course we always had the dog there. So this time, you know, we're staying in the downstairs room and it was the strangest thing because we heard something running around the bed like an animal, it was really odd, really odd and then a great big clump from upstairs that you could hear people walking about upstairs quite easily and get a really like clump and when we went up in the morning, my wife's boots had been knocked off the boot rack but the boot rack, the way they were positioned, there's no way they would have fallen off unless something knocked them. Right. And we were convinced that something was running about at night Mhmm.

[00:05:29] - [Speaker 0]
And potentially our dog. It was very strange.

[00:05:32] - [Speaker 2]
There

[00:05:33] - [Speaker 0]
was also a woman in the room, that's a completely different story. So, yeah, we had a strange experience that time. Mhmm. But that's what we thought anyway. So, I'll let you think I'm still around Yeah.

[00:05:43] - [Speaker 0]
Somewhere doing their thing. This one's not quite so cuddly.

[00:05:48] - [Speaker 1]
Oh, okay. Oh.

[00:05:49] - [Speaker 0]
And I'm sorry.

[00:05:50] - [Speaker 1]
I need to brace myself.

[00:05:51] - [Speaker 0]
A little bit, baby. So we're back up in Peterhead in the North Of Scotland at the village of Bodham. Bodham famous for its lighthouse, I suppose. Built by Stevenson. Mhmm.

[00:06:05] - [Speaker 0]
Actually story came from my mother-in-law and father-in-law, would you believe or not? Valerine Terry. Right. So they both stationed the area of Bodham and moved into nearby street called Earls Court. It's a very small street.

[00:06:21] - [Speaker 0]
It's still the other house but it's been done up. Mean this is the 1960s 1960s in Bordham. A lot of the houses by there were not derelict but they needed a bit of TLC and according to this, to what they told me, in 1964, for example, in the kitchen there was a hole in the floor which you could actually look through and see, like literally a cave beneath and you're water rushing, know, it's kind of very alarming. It was a kind of odd house, for example, you know, the upper floor consists of a bedroom on each side of a central staircase which led to an unused attic. It was described as having an atmosphere and I was told that strange things would occasionally occur, jangling coming from a clock for example, like really loud jangling, just odd stuff like that, which they found unexplainable rather than frightening.

[00:07:14] - [Speaker 0]
But that was it. That was really it. In the attic, the room was near derelict. There was a latch outside, no attic lights and one tiny wee skylight, thick thick coat of dust and it laid empty for years. Two old chests corner, that was it.

[00:07:32] - [Speaker 0]
That was all of us in the room and that was it. So they got on with our lives basically, you know, they went the RAF. Carol's mom was looking after her daughter Karen who's a baby and it was then the weird stuff began to kick off.

[00:07:44] - [Speaker 2]
Mhmm.

[00:07:44] - [Speaker 0]
It was noises to begin with, you know, they'd gone to bed, was weird, heavy thuds in the attic above them thumping away and of course Terry went up to investigate and as he approached the door the noise ceased abruptly and the door was still locked so he thought, wait till the morning, have a wee look, you know, was pitch black so came back in the morning and had a look. Nothing in the attic but the enamel bath they've had in their bathroom was covered by large dusty animal prints

[00:08:13] - [Speaker 2]
Mhmm.

[00:08:14] - [Speaker 0]
Which on inspection belonged to a cat, much bigger than a domestic cat by the way. I remember our dad, Terry, telling me that it was the circumference of a coffee cup.

[00:08:25] - [Speaker 1]
That's a big cat. That is a big And

[00:08:27] - [Speaker 0]
it was like, boom, boom, boom, all across the path. So that was really odd. At the end of the attic, saw nothing, locked up. What was it? This was a bit sort of, you know, alarming.

[00:08:39] - [Speaker 0]
So they went to bed that evening and listened and the same sounds were repeated again, but again no evidence of thump, thump, thump across the attic. Some days later, with mounting concern, approached a friend at the RAF camp and confided him, persuading him to help resolve the matter. So what they decided to do was basically to go around and build a trap. So they checked the house, nook and crannies, nothing. They could think anything could come from and an animal of that size, how the hell could it have gotten anyway?

[00:09:08] - [Speaker 0]
Anyway, the skylight was shot and the chests were looked in and all it was was some grubby, tatty old clothes. So that was it. So they set a trap. Now I remember he told me about this, it was quite a weird contraption, I'm gonna try and get this right. So essentially they had six inch nails hammered in a piece of wood, Right.

[00:09:28] - [Speaker 0]
Balanced. Okay. Where the single staircase was that would come from the attic, so wherever it was would come down, there was a tray of food, remember they put food down and wherever it was was supposed to hit the food causing this thing to drop. He's an engineer so they kind of... And I was thinking that's a bit cruel because what if it's an old cat, it's going get flattened.

[00:09:48] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. Anyway, they did it and it was meticulously planned. So they went to bed that night and he kept, you know, half eye, half eye open and that was it and then suddenly all hell breaks loose. So he had this horrific screaming and commotion and her mum said it was the most horrible sound like a proper screech of a wild animal in great pain. Terry ran from the room, he grabbed a bayonet which they had in the wall which was like a world war one bayonet and he ran to the trap, it was upended, food spilled everywhere, no cat, no nothing, just the noise and everything collapsed around it.

[00:10:28] - [Speaker 0]
So in the morning they cleared everything away to see and then wait to see if anything would reappear, nothing ever again, Nothing happened. So it was over forty years since when I was first told that story and it remains unexplained. Was it an animal flesh and blood? If it was, it certainly didn't leave any evidence of it being in blood or anything. So they returned back to the village twenty five years after and almost lived next door, which has had nothing like that at all connected to it.

[00:10:53] - [Speaker 0]
Apparently the house belonged to sea captain, which kind of makes you think, did he bring something exotic back with him? Who knows? It's a very weird story. Now I spoke to him, you know, I've known him for twenty seven years and the story has never deviated at all and they're not the kind of people who make an ethnop, I don't think so. It's a strange one.

[00:11:15] - [Speaker 0]
That's a strange one. Creepy sort of. Yes. But the footprints, yeah, that was odd. That would that would have alarmed me slightly, have to say.

[00:11:22] - [Speaker 0]
Yes. I think so. There you go.

[00:11:25] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. Think. So I have a strange one. Now I'm I'm not saying it's it's anything spooky or ghosty pet, but it's something that happened that I can't explain even to this day.

[00:11:40] - [Speaker 0]
Oh. So

[00:11:41] - [Speaker 1]
it involved my first pet. What was your first pet, Graham?

[00:11:45] - [Speaker 0]
My first pet was a... What a gerbil.

[00:11:50] - [Speaker 1]
A gerbil?

[00:11:50] - [Speaker 0]
What the hell was his name? I can't honestly say Kapoor Sod. I'm talking about me by the way. No, this was a long time ago honestly. It was about 1975 or something.

[00:12:01] - [Speaker 0]
I can't really remember it. It was a wee it was a wee gerbil. I remember it bit my brother's nose. I do remember Well,

[00:12:08] - [Speaker 1]
my first pet was Jimmy and he was a blue budgie.

[00:12:11] - [Speaker 0]
Oh, that's nice.

[00:12:12] - [Speaker 1]
Yes. So as I previously mentioned in our episodes, my mom was a home help, and she used to go off and she used to, like, look after, like, little old ladies, do their shopping, cleaning, so forth. And one of her little old ladies was an old lady called Jane.

[00:12:28] - [Speaker 2]
Mhmm.

[00:12:29] - [Speaker 1]
She was a lovely lady. I still remember Jane. She was quite elderly. And sometimes she said she was quite lonely as well.

[00:12:38] - [Speaker 0]
So

[00:12:39] - [Speaker 1]
someone got her a budgie.

[00:12:40] - [Speaker 0]
Okay.

[00:12:41] - [Speaker 1]
And he called it Jimmy. And now, Jane was blind.

[00:12:46] - [Speaker 0]
Oh.

[00:12:46] - [Speaker 1]
So my mom used to say to me, come with me, clean the out. So every day, used to go out, clean the budgie, feed it, tune with water. And, yeah, this went on for about a year or so. As I said, I was six at the time. Mhmm.

[00:13:05] - [Speaker 1]
And then Jane unfortunately passed away.

[00:13:08] - [Speaker 0]
Right.

[00:13:08] - [Speaker 1]
I was quite upset because I was quite fond of her. But apparently, in her will, she bequeathed me Jimmy. So my dad... I mean, my dad said, well, we'd rather have she given us a million pounds instead of a budgie.

[00:13:21] - [Speaker 0]
Well, I was actually thinking that, but...

[00:13:25] - [Speaker 1]
So, yeah. So so Jimmy, he he lasted a while. I think I was about 11. Mhmm.

[00:13:31] - [Speaker 0]
That's not bad.

[00:13:32] - [Speaker 1]
But that's not bad. He must have been a couple of years old when I got him anyway. Budgies, he's quite an old budgie. Another part of the story is that my dad had a cuckoo clock. Now he he thought this was the bee's knees, this cuckoo clock, and it used to come out on the hour.

[00:13:52] - [Speaker 0]
Right. Yeah.

[00:13:53] - [Speaker 1]
The only time it used to go cuckoo was on the hour.

[00:13:55] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah.

[00:13:55] - [Speaker 1]
And I remember it now, there's these great big long chains and had these great big metal heavy weights at the end of it. Mhmm. And we were all giving turns to wind this cuckoo clock up.

[00:14:06] - [Speaker 0]
Mhmm.

[00:14:07] - [Speaker 1]
Wobitize you if you turn it up wrong anyway. So this particular day, and I remember it was it was... Must have been tea time because my mom was in the kitchen cooking. We were all sitting around the table. So my dad, my sister, me, and my brother, he was, like, tiny at that point.

[00:14:23] - [Speaker 1]
And Jimmy was in the corner, and all of sudden, he let out this squawk, and he started falling. I remember now it's like slow motion. He... It was like... He start...

[00:14:35] - [Speaker 1]
As he started to fall off his perch, this cuckoo out the cuckoo clock come out of its, like, window.

[00:14:42] - [Speaker 0]
Okay.

[00:14:43] - [Speaker 1]
Gave a a kind of like strangled... The the chains, like like, spun around around the pendulum Yeah. Into, like, a huge knot.

[00:14:54] - [Speaker 0]
Right.

[00:14:56] - [Speaker 1]
And we thought, well, what's going on? There's a cuckoo clock. My mom comes in, what's going on? And I was going, well, Jimmy, cuckoo clock. It it was bizarre that...

[00:15:05] - [Speaker 1]
And it wasn't even on the hour. And the only time that this clock would come out was the hour. Okay. So the fact that this cuckoo clock come out exactly the same time as he fell off his perch...

[00:15:16] - [Speaker 0]
What? Was he dead?

[00:15:17] - [Speaker 1]
He was dead. Yeah. We just... He just like fell off his perch.

[00:15:20] - [Speaker 0]
Just died there and then.

[00:15:21] - [Speaker 1]
He probably had a heart attack, bless him. Oh, cravings. But this cuckoo club, it was bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. And I can't explain it even to this day how that happened or why it happened.

[00:15:33] - [Speaker 0]
That a great story.

[00:15:36] - [Speaker 1]
Am I?

[00:15:37] - [Speaker 0]
Yeah. That's interesting.

[00:15:39] - [Speaker 1]
My dad blamed my sister because she wound up at 06:00 that day, so...

[00:15:44] - [Speaker 0]
Did you get another budgie?

[00:15:46] - [Speaker 1]
I think we did. I think we got another budgie.

[00:15:48] - [Speaker 0]
Was it cheap?

[00:15:51] - [Speaker 1]
I think it was called Chippy. I think with Chippy... With Jimmy was that he he he... The only words he used to say was to my dad, and you say, you're a twit, which you see, drives Yeah. My dad up the I'm sure my mom taught him that because my mom used to chuckle away.

[00:16:09] - [Speaker 0]
There's a few there's a few stories about vicar coming in for tea and the, you know, the parrot blaspheming or whatever which I think is hilarious. My my my auntie, great aunt Isabelle had a budgie bliss and it was... She'd she'd a string of budgies and they all met unfortunate ends and her brother was staying one time, this was years ago and the budgie sat on his shoulder and he never saw it there and he went wandering out into the street to get his newspaper and of course the budgies got freed him and flew off into the... Flew yonder and never be seen again. It's a bit unfortunate but I've got a few budgie stories but they're not very haunted I have to say.

[00:16:48] - [Speaker 0]
More clumsy clumsy related I guess. So I've got one for you here. This is a this is a one about a phantom dog, a phantom collie.

[00:16:58] - [Speaker 1]
Uh-huh.

[00:16:59] - [Speaker 0]
It was actually in a in a place, it was kind of two stories, they're both collie related Dumfriesshire Dumfries Shire. And it was, it was, it was put forward, the story, by a witness called Mary Craig and she stayed in a cottage looking out, stayed in a cottage in the countryside that said Dumfriesshire, it's very rural and her husband worked on the estate. So he would literally, you know, do his job, disappear for the day, come back and that was it and she'd have tea ready and so forth and so forth. But out of the window that day she saw a man who she didn't recognise and a dog, a collie dog wandering by and she was strange, didn't know who he was. So she kind of looked at her and thought, that's odd because when he was walking she couldn't hear any noise on the gravel.

[00:17:45] - [Speaker 0]
Mhmm. This is broad daylight, so it's not nine, so there's no crunching, so it's really odd. And she witnessed this, you know, this pair walking up towards her husband, her husband's now coming over the brow of the hill, so they're gonna meet and she's like, well, obviously, let's know each other whatever and they just passed and completely ignored each other and her husband then appeared and she was all peely wally and white and a bit shaky. I said, what's up? She goes, well, I just had a really weird experience.

[00:18:12] - [Speaker 0]
Did you see the guy and the dog just passed you? Who was he? I never saw anyone, he says. I never saw anyone. Literally rubbing shoulders.

[00:18:19] - [Speaker 0]
Her father was a postman and he delivered mail near Castle Douglas. It was a remote hamlet. And early one morning, this is like a one off story if you like, he is delivering mail. Now, you had to take shortcuts over fields and such like, there was a kind of route they did, you know, it was a fair old war. One morning, he noticed a very friendly collie behind him.

[00:18:44] - [Speaker 0]
Very friendly collie. Tongue hanging out, happy to see him and he was speaking to it and it was running up, but you know what collies are like, they don't...

[00:18:52] - [Speaker 1]
They can

[00:18:52] - [Speaker 0]
be a bit aloof but friendly. So he was saying, it's okay. Got me a bit company for the morning and he did his round and then he looked down, he's about to go over this field and the collie is now sitting at his feet and it's still looking all jolly and happy and he bent down and he said, oh good boy and he's gonna pat it, his hand went right through the dog's head. No. So he did it again, you know, very quickly and the same thing and he he was just so aghast by this and the dog got up and just jumped over the dike but vanished as it jumped into thin air and that was it gone.

[00:19:27] - [Speaker 0]
Very strange

[00:19:28] - [Speaker 1]
story. Very strange.

[00:19:29] - [Speaker 0]
But he tried to pat it right through to the shoals of rock Yeah. Except it

[00:19:32] - [Speaker 1]
wasn't Mhmm.

[00:19:33] - [Speaker 0]
Till the point of time. Just a random story. Two different collies, I'm assuming, two different incidents, two different areas, but, you know, interesting stuff.

[00:19:42] - [Speaker 1]
Interesting. Oh, I you like to think that they're they're they're about though, don't I?

[00:19:46] - [Speaker 0]
I do. I do. Yeah. I do like that.

[00:19:49] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. So my next story is a little squirrel. Oh. Yeah. Squirrel.

[00:19:54] - [Speaker 1]
Squirrel. Squirrel. Squirrel. You know, you wouldn't expect a squirrel to come back from the dead, but there you go. Sorry.

[00:20:02] - [Speaker 1]
Sorry.

[00:20:04] - [Speaker 0]
Didn't mean to laugh there at an inappropriate moment.

[00:20:06] - [Speaker 1]
Oh, no. No. Thank you. Wow. So this was told by a Donna Bradley who is a Florida squirrel rescuer.

[00:20:12] - [Speaker 0]
Uh-huh.

[00:20:14] - [Speaker 1]
Apparently, she rescued squirrels, as I said, in for flopter. Mhmm. Squiggy arrived with a severe head injury and without any upper teeth. Mhmm. His lower teeth had penetrated cavity, leaving him with a persistent difficulty breathing.

[00:20:32] - [Speaker 1]
And he could not simply return to the wild, so she cared for him for a very long period. Looking after Squiggy meant far more than putting food in a cage. Donna described feeding, cleaning, and exercising injured squirrels, listening to their every sneeze and change of breathing Mhmm.

[00:20:48] - [Speaker 2]
And

[00:20:48] - [Speaker 1]
learning the smallest details about their personality. And Squiggy became one of the animals of whom she formed a very close bond with.

[00:20:55] - [Speaker 0]
Very nice.

[00:20:56] - [Speaker 1]
So during an unusual cold, dry winter, Squiggy's breathing problems became worse. Poor Squiggy. Tonya knew he was approaching the end, she held him against her chest, soothed him and felt what she believed to be his final breath. A few seconds later, appeared to breathe and move once more before finally letting go. Devastated, cried herself to sleep.

[00:21:23] - [Speaker 1]
During the night, she dreamed that Squiggy was with her again and she was holding him. And in the dream, Squiggy was no longer struggling, his breathing was normal, and he appeared as if he was younger before the lasting effect of his injury had taken its toll. Donna remembered him as a healthy, content, and free from pain. So her interpretation of the dream was that she did not regard it as an ordinary dream created by grief. She felt she had briefly met Squiggy at the Rainbow Bridge Mhmm.

[00:21:53] - [Speaker 1]
And they had returned to show her that he was safe and well. And after Squiggy's death, Donna asked an artist friend to make a memorial figurine of him. And according to Donna, the Finnish squirrel had the same weight resting in her hand, the same weight that Squiggy had. And she found this striking because to her knowledge, the artist had never held a squirrel. Donna wondered whether Squiggy had somehow guided the artist while she worked.

[00:22:22] - [Speaker 1]
Maybe. Possibility.

[00:22:24] - [Speaker 0]
It's interesting though that the the squirrel appeared to her in a in a in a a more healthy condition. Because what... See, they see about what spirits appear back in front of their loved ones minus ailments and such like, which I think is very fascinating and how you can perhaps in the afterlife if you believe in that, present yourself in a certain way. A guy I used to work with years ago who's a chef, an older guy. Jeff was his name, nice guy.

[00:22:56] - [Speaker 0]
He used to live down in Oxfordshire when he was a young lad and used to go to choir practice and I always remember he told me this story. He says I've got a ghost story for you. He says we used to go there at choir practice, think it Reverend Mark B, I think his name is Mark B, and he would always do the, you know, the the choir practice. He wore glasses all the time, literally and he said one time they'd gone into to choir practice and there was the Reverend Mark B sitting at the back listening, not wearing glasses and he says that it really struck me as being odd because he kinda, you know, when people wear glasses all the time, take him off. Yeah.

[00:23:33] - [Speaker 0]
So he's looking at this guy. So they did the bit, the practice and he went home and subsequently found out that Reverend Markby passed away at the exact same time as the court practice was going and he must have appeared without his old glasses which to him were some kind of, know, physical ailments Yeah. Passed with it. I thought that was quite interesting.

[00:23:55] - [Speaker 2]
It's

[00:23:55] - [Speaker 0]
interesting that animals should do that. That's really interesting.

[00:23:58] - [Speaker 1]
Yeah. I like that. And they do say that, you know, if you dream of them in death then that is a visitation.

[00:24:05] - [Speaker 0]
That is true. There are dreams as well that can be so potent and real. You know, sometimes seem to be just collections of stuff, but that stuff you wake up, you go, oh, you got a feeling of cricket. Does that really happen? Mhmm.

[00:24:16] - [Speaker 0]
I find that interesting. It's a weird world out there, people.

[00:24:21] - [Speaker 1]
Pretty strange.

[00:24:23] - [Speaker 0]
It is. I've got a story for you now which is a bit of an odd one I have say. Not so much a phantom pet as a phantom thing. Phantom thing? Well, creature.

[00:24:34] - [Speaker 1]
Okay.

[00:24:35] - [Speaker 0]
But an invisible one.

[00:24:36] - [Speaker 1]
Oh. Now do you know it's there?

[00:24:39] - [Speaker 0]
Well, I don't know. I never saw it. It chased somebody, they heard it. Her little leggies galloping. It was quite an interesting story.

[00:24:49] - [Speaker 0]
It comes from a book by a guy called Affleck Gray.

[00:24:52] - [Speaker 1]
That's a good name.

[00:24:53] - [Speaker 0]
That's a great name. So if you're a fan of cryptozoology, mountain climbing, any of that kind of stuff, Affleck Gray will be a name you'll recognise. He wrote a very famous book called The Big Gray Man of Ben MacDewey which is he gathered numerous accounts of climbers and walkers in one of Scotland's largest and wildest mountains and they've all connected to this alleged spirit of the Big Green Man which people argue is either a thing, a real ghost or is some kind of, you know, strange formation caused by the weather, I mean depending on your point of view, but anyway he collected stories and this one came from a lady called Joan Grant who encountered a very strange apparition in nearby Rothe Murches Forest. Now I've been to Rothe Murches Forest many years ago and it's very beautiful. You can get it lost in a wee bit, it's quite windy, it's got big trees there, it's rather nice and so this is it.

[00:25:59] - [Speaker 0]
So she wrote this incident out later as well in a book called Time Out of Mind. In 1928, Joan, her husband, had spent the part of the day, at least the best part of the day, towards the Cairngorms with the intention of returning to Avie Mor by evening. While walking, a sudden and illogical fear descended on her, which she described thus: I was seized with such terror that I turned and in panic fled back along the path. Leslie, her husband, ran after me imploring me to tell him what was wrong. I could only spare enough breath to tell him to run faster, faster, something utterly malign, four legged and yet obscenely human, invisible and yet solid enough to allow me to hear the pounding of who's was trying to reach me.

[00:26:48] - [Speaker 0]
Around half a mile later, she burst through what she described as an invisible barrier, only then feeling safe. She was by her own admission a psychic but the question remains what was it? Was it genius loci, the spirit or guardian of an area or some hideous incident in the past leave an indelible stain on the ether. What is certain that is in the aftermath of the encounter, several reports described similar incidents which came out. These are stories of these things across Britain, similarly when people have these incidents, but this is the only ones that I personally am aware of in the Cairngorms apart from the big grey man and it's Rothy Murch's Forest.

[00:27:28] - [Speaker 0]
Interesting story. No idea what it was. Still didn't know what it was. But didn't fancy it very much, have to say. No.

[00:27:37] - [Speaker 0]
Rather scary. But I do... It's it's an odd one, you know. It's an odd one. Yeah.

[00:27:43] - [Speaker 0]
What could it be?

[00:27:44] - [Speaker 2]
What could it be?

[00:27:45] - [Speaker 1]
Very strange. Well, fact that it's hooves, that's something that's got hooves, obviously. Yeah.

[00:27:50] - [Speaker 0]
Hooves. Hoof. Hooves. Goat. Goat.

[00:27:54] - [Speaker 0]
Donkey. Donkey? I don't know. A mule? A mule.

[00:27:59] - [Speaker 0]
Who knows?

[00:28:00] - [Speaker 1]
Very strange indeed.

[00:28:02] - [Speaker 0]
It is strange.

[00:28:05] - [Speaker 1]
So I hope you enjoyed that episode. Join us next week for more ghost pets. In the meantime, keep the lights on, still scared.

[00:31:35] - [Speaker 2]
But every night I swear I feel a presence drawing near. You can say there's nothing there, but tell me if that's true. Why does something in the quiet feel like it's looking through me too?