What can my dog see that I can't?
Last week on Facebook I commented on how Monty, my dog, had suddenly taken to spooking me on our evening walks. We have two routes we travel and on the evenings that we walk 
through the village we wander slowly along, Monty checking out each post and stone for interesting scents and me looking at the stars or, more often, huddling inside my waterproof coat. My village is tiny; the road meanders past a number of ancient cottages, dips into a little hollow beside the old mill ( the one in the picture on the right) and then starts to climb again, bridging the mill stream as it heads out towards the main road. There are no street lights out here in our corner of Oxfordshire and at night it's not uncommon for the only sounds to be the rushing of the water and the call of the owls. What light there is comes from the moon, stars and the cottage windows and outside lights.
Until last autumn our evening walks had proceeded without any strange occurences at all. Then, as the nights drew in as we approached Halloween, Monty and I started to see what we both thought was a cat. It was small, dark, shadowy and oddly insubstantial and it would dash across the road in front of us and disappear under a parked car. Monty would try to rush after it but it was never actually there; we'd both peer around and look under the car and try to see where it had gone, but it had vanished. There's nothing odd in a disappearing cat, though, especially when it sees a dog approaching. What baffled us was that we never actually saw where it went, but of course it was dark… We continue to see the cat quite often.
Then one evening at exactly the same point in the road, where it dips down to pass the old mill, we saw the vanishing man. That was more disturbing. We saw him walking towards us as we approached. He wasn't anyone I recognised (in a place as small as this you know all the neighbours) and at that time of the evening on a cold night it was odd seeing a stranger wandering about without a coat. He was tall, dark and thin, and he crossed the road in front of us. Monty, a very mild-mannered dog normally, barked at the stranger. His hackles came up and he refused to move. And then the figure disappeared – literally faded out as it was walking away - and we both stood still, in my case because I was so surprised.
The oddest thing that has happened down there by the mill, though, was an enormous shadow that reared up behind us as we were walking and looked like a breaking wave about to tumble over us. That was the only time I felt scared, and then only because there was an odd atmosphere that night with definitely a hint or more of malevolence in the air.
Last week we reached the mill on our nightly walk and Monty stopped dead and could only be coaxed on after a minute or two with a hefty bribe of biscuits. He very carefully walked around something in the road that I couldn't see. But last night he dug his paws in and we had a flat-out refusal and for the first time we had to turn around and come home. I'm wondering what tonight will bring. Perhaps we need to find a new route for our nightly walk. And I wish I could see what Monty can see!
There are many, many places in the world that can lay claim to some sort of haunting and this village, which is recorded even before the Domesday Book of 1086 certainly has enough history behind it to have left an imprint on the place. That's how I like to think of it, as memories of the people – and cats! – and emotions and experiences that, over the hundreds of years, have left their mark on a place. Sometimes you can feel it in the air. Sometimes you can see traces. I can't explain it but most of the time I don't mind living alongside it and have done here, and in our haunted cottage in Somerset, and in various other places. Shakespeare got it right, I think: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. What do you think?
©2011 Nicola Cornick. All Rights Reserved.
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