Pooches: Can Your Dogs See Ghosts? (Stick with me on this one)

Last Halloween, I decided to try writing short scary-stories with my students. We spent a lot of time analyzing what really makes a story scary, and of all the things we discovered the ones the class found most chilling were: solemn children and pets reacting to things that humans couldn't see.

I was surprised that a lot of my students were able to share stories about living with ghosts in their homes, complete with reactions from their dogs.
Dogs awakening at 4am and barking at things their people couldn't see.
Dogs who would routinely stare in corners with raised hackles.
Multi-dog households where dogs would unexpectedly converge to bark and growl at a certain location where nothing was there.

I had never thought about it with our own pups.
Until I did need to think about it.
Since we made the decision to move to a new home, we've spent a lot of time walking the pups and  'stalking homes' in our potential new neighborhood. The other day we took our pups walking by our frontrunner home when Mr. B stopped short, and stared unblinkingly into the yard, almost
as if he saw something. Since there wasn't a cat, I thought maybe it was a sign that it was meant to be our home.
Or not.

The neighborhood we're looking at has a combination of older, traditional homes and developers swooping in to find foreclosures and tear downs and build on empty lots. The home we're looking at is new construction being built on an empty lot, but given Mr. B's reaction I was curious to find out what had been there before.
I was able to find out that the previous home on that lot had been abandoned and taken over by squatters. It eventually burned down and they found a man had died in the fire.
Which made me wonder if Mr. B really did see a ghost.

I spent a sleepless night Googling about the ghost world, trying to figure out if it still counts if it's a different house in the same area. Seeing if there are ways to ask the ghost to leave. And looking up ghost hunters I could consult with.
Though I also realized Chicago has so much history, nearly every home is bound to have some kind of death in it. And would this also mean that when someone is killed on the street our streets and sidewalks are haunted too?
But I guess the most consoling thing was when we took the pups back to the house to see if Mr. B would react again, we found out he did have another reaction.
Because the windows are mirrored and he was checking out his own reflection.
He must have liked what he saw.

Though I'm still curious...has anyone had any ghost-like experiences in your home? Or pups that can detect ghosts?

Also:
This Buzzfeed article made me feel a lot better.
Mr. B is bewildered.

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