A Residual Haunting From A Tragic Death?

Years ago my mom and I rented a house. It was a three bedroom house and there were only the two of us. My mom suggested I take the master bedroom. Now, I wasn't really thrilled about the master bedroom because it had two architectural/design features I hate--mirrored closet doors and a toilet I can see from my bed. But I thought, OK, it will be nice to have a bigger room.

So I set up my bed--at this point most of our stuff hadn't even been moved in. I got settled in bed, or tried to... My dog wouldn't set foot in the room, and normally we had this game where we would race each other to the bed. He would always get there first, and then spread out, and I would try to push him to one side but I'd be laughing so hard I couldn't. I digress. My point is, this was one of my dog's favorite things in life, and he wasn't coming to bed! After about five minutes I couldn't blame him. I just had a major sense of the creeps.

That very night I told my mom she could have the room if she wanted it, I was moving into the empty one. She didn't want the master bedroom either, go figure. We both agreed that it didn't seem like a malevolent entity or anything like that, but more like really, really bad negative residual energy, including a lot of sadness. (As I mentioned in another one of my stories, everyone in my family is "sensitive" and I especially pick up on emotions.)

I continued to use the master bathroom, and for the life of me I cannot understand why, because I would literally run to and from it, so as to spend the least amount of time possible in that bedroom. My dog never did go in there.

Time passed, and one day we had a repairman over working on our air ducts or something. He and my mom got to chatting about the neighborhood and the town--he was an volunteer fireman and, like us, an animal lover, and he had a lot of interesting stories--and he told her that the house we lived in had a really high turnover rate. He said that it had been occupied at one point by a couple with a little baby, and one day the family dog, a Rottweiler, had mysteriously attacked and killed the baby. My memory's a little foggy after all these years, but I think we asked some neighbor kids about it (my mom was tutoring them) and they confirmed that something like that had happened.

More time passed, and we had moved away from that depressing house. I'm not usually a big newspaper reader, but one day my eye chanced to fall on an article about a dog mauling that had happened in this county (we still lived in the same county). I probably only noticed it because I love dogs, and usually when an attack happens it's a case where the dog was behaving like a normal dog and the humans did something really awful or stupid, yet the dog always gets put to sleep. I'm sure I read the article to see what sort of human stupidity was at work this time... I don't remember the rest of the article, but at the end it briefly recapped all the other dog attacks that had happened in the county, and one of the stories--and only one--was about a Rottweiler that had killed a toddler, in the same city we'd been living in.

Now, I can't say for certain that this house was the same one where the attack mentioned in the paper happened. But according to the paper, there was only one Rottweiler that killed a toddler in the county, and there is no question that it was the most depressing house I've ever been in. So I can't say the evidence is conclusive, but I do think it is suggestive.