ABSTRACT
In nineteenth-century folklore accounts of hauntings and spectral presences, the ghosts of animals seldom make a showing. Animals appear more often as the living guardians of the house who warn – with barks, hisses, or howls – of the approach of a human spectre. There is evidence to suggest that the animal ghost is now more routinely seen, felt, and heard. Stories of revenant pets can be found on a range of social media sites, blogs, and discussion lists, as well as in mass market texts that collect stories of the phenomenon, or provide advice to bereaved pet owners about how to increase their chances of making contact with the departed animal. In the burgeoning academic scholarship about attitudes toward death and belief in the afterlife, however, the animal ghost remains unseen and unheard. While the complicated grieving of people for their companion animals has received due scholarly attention, accounts of the ghostly ‘persistent continuation’ (Day 2016: 156) of pets in the home has not. This paper examines the significance of accounts of revenant pets through an analysis of discussion threads on paranormal-r, the popular sub-site of Reddit that is devoted to true accounts of supernatural encounters. Borrowing from the theoretical and methodological approaches of folklore studies – an area notable for a long and lively attention to the cultural work of ghost stories in everyday life – this chapter examines the cultural processes of sharing that turn private experience into mutual consolation, that celebrate the animal in the home, and that highlight the particular challenges of pet death.
