My brother, when we were very little, just about two years old (me) and five (him), was having repeating nightmares. He had this night terror that he called the Black Dog. The Black Dog was a dog that would charge down a hill at him, every night; no matter what dream he was in. There might be a different hill, but the dog would attack him and eat him alive. He started seeing it in real life, utterly terrified whenever he did. He saw it under our sofa and in the pantry constantly, and started throwing scraps of sandwich meat and other food behind the couch to somehow appease it. I’ve only heard this story from my other family members, but they all agree on the details, and my brother still insists it was there. The Dog would follow him to our bedroom (which we shared) every night, and would stand in the doorway and watch us. My brother said that I had a black cat with me, in my crib. They were like shadows, he said, with glowing eyes. The Dog had yellow eyes and my cat had blue. I don’t remember this at all, seeing as I was two, but he said I snuggled with the cat and sometimes the cat would stand inside the doorway and watch the dog from their opposite sides, sometimes hissing and scratching if it tried to come in. My brother tried to suck The Dog up with the vacuum several times, claiming it was trying to “get us”.
My brother got deadly sick when he was six. He was exhausted, and on the way to the hospital my parents thought he was dying. He wouldn’t stay awake, his eyes kept rolling back in his head, he was burning up, and talking about the Dog, but since he was drifting in and out of consciousness they thought he was just having his dream again. The official illness was “acute dehydration”, but that didn’t make sense because he was eating and drinking normally. Immediately after, The Dog disappeared. My brother says there was a white cat with him in the hospital, but I still had my black cat.
He doesn’t talk about them anymore, but he remembers them. He stopped talking about them when we moved, I think- he would have just turned seven. I’ve heard that black and white animals can be “omens”, but I didn’t know how credible “omens” are. I believe in ghosts, I believe in a great deal of other phenomena, but I haven’t heard a story similar to this. It could be just the mind of a little kid, sure, but then again maybe not.
