Can Dogs See Ghosts?

Here's a story I've told here before. My background is in science and I'm not a particularly superstitious person.

Years ago, I would take our big black lab to the dog park first thing every morning before I went to work. I didn't want him running on a full stomach, so his breakfast was always waiting for him in the basement family room when I brought him home, and he would charge it eagerly.

One morning, we came home and he started down the stairs to his breakfast, but stopped about halfway down. His fur went up and he actually backed up the stairs (which I would have guessed was impossible.) He made a low growl, unlike anything I've heard before or since. This was not, BTW, a nervous or fearful dog.

I was afraid there might be someone downstairs that shouldn't be, but that wasn't the reaction I would expect from that dog when encountering a human threat. I explored the basement, a little nervously, and there was nothing there - unless you count my mother-in-law's ashes in an urn on a shelf, awaiting burial. They had recently arrived from Denver, but that's another story.

My two children had each experienced odd things in that basement since my MIL had arrived in that urn, but I was inclined to dismiss them as young, overactive imaginations. I don't believe dogs have imaginations, so that wasn't so easy to dismiss.

He actually skipped breakfast altogether until I returned that evening and went downstairs with him.

mrvoodoo said:

The greatest scientific minds on Earth once thought the Earth to be flat, then they thought that the Earth was at the center of our solar system. If you really believe that all of the wonders of our universe can be explained by a man in a white coat with a bunsen burner, then I feel sorry for you.

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This is rapidly veering off-topic, but the burden of proof is not on the skeptics to disprove the existance of ghosts, but on the believers to prove it.

Second, the 'flat earth' theory was not as widespread as believed - at least, not amongst sailors. Erasthothenes actually managed to calculate the circumference of the earth to within 1%, over a millenia before Leif Ericson. All of the mathematics of navigation is predicated on a curved surface; even superstitious 15th century sailors instinctively understood that the world wasn't flat. The fear among Columbus' crew was not that they would fall off the edge of the world, but that they would be stranded in the ocean, dying of thirst in the middle of nowhere.

I don't believe that humans have discovered all of what the universe is. Heck Scientists can't even properly explain "dark matter" yet.

I am not closed to the possibility of ghosts, because I believe that as a species we still have a long way to go in the knowledge department.

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Dark matter is something different - it was first theorized based on available data, then its existence was confirmed decades later based on continuous observation and experimentation.

Ghosts, ESP, astrology, etc - these are all typically offered as an explanation based on the lack of data. I don't necessarily preclude their existence, but I'm going to need some very compelling evidence to even begin considering the possibility ahead of more mundane explanations.

Anyway, back to the OP: my dog is afraid of her own food bowl - I had to lay a towel down under the feeder in order to get her to eat. We've all had experiences where our dog freaks out when encountering a person wearing a backpack, or a hat, or with an arm in a cast, for the first time. Given all this, is it more likely that a dogs can detect a ghosts, or that they are reacting to a particular object, scent, or sound that we don't even notice ourselves?

And yes, I'm a contributor to the James Randi Foundation.