This question is, of course, not for those who insist that ghosts don’t exist.
My cat died over two years ago and I’ll say that I still miss him. I’m not devastated by the loss, I just miss him sometimes. I say this because I’ll admit that it might effect my opinion. But he’s not the only animal ghost I’ve ever been aware of. Not by a long shot.
Anyway, I bring this up now because occasionally hear and see, out of the corner of my eye, my cat do things he used to do when he was alive. Tonight I heard him meow and jump down from the window sill. Sometimes I “see” him walk by.
So I believe that animals (and people) do have ghosts.
Again, this isn’t a debate, so if you don’t accept the possibility of ghosts your opinion is obvious and needn’t be stated. The question isn’t “are there ghosts?”.
For those who accept at least the possibility of the existence of ghosts, what about animals? Could animals who live closely with people “grow” a ghost by osmosis? Do they have one on their own?
Yeah, I guess this a deeper version of “Do Dogs Go To Heaven”. 
(Of course they do, whatever heaven is.)
Peace,
mangeorge
If they have souls, the have ghosts, and I believe that animals have souls.
I, in my timidity, avoided the use of the term “soul”. But yes, soul = ghost.
Well, I remember hearing of a few instances (in popular fiction, at least) of human ghosts appearing as covered with worms/insects/etc.
So, if that’s the case, it appears that some invertebrates have ghosts.
On the other hand…by that rationale, rusty chains and burial clothing have “ghosts,” too, seeing as how ghosts are sighted with those.
Has anyone else seen this? The reason why I ask is because, after losing a friend and losing a pet, I did “see” them on occasion. I’d double take and then they wouldn’t be there. I think it was wishful thinking. After I left the apartment where I had my cat, or the town where I knew my friend, these things stopped happening, because my brain stopped interpreting “that person who looks like my friend” as “my friend”, and “vague black blur in the corner of my eye” as “cat”.
First time I’ve heard that a rusty chain would have a soul, but hey! Thanks for the input. 
My Aunty and her family insist that there is a ghost of a dog in their house. Just thought I’d share…
Well, in my experience, most things that are living are capable of having ghosts. Personally, there are few humans that remain in the liminal status of “being a ghost,” but it is more common in animals, and, erm, plants. (I most commonly see what I’d describe as “the ghosts of trees” when I go wandering about at night. Of course, this is mixed in with other things that I see.) I’d go with your instinct on this one and think it’s possibly a ghost cat.
You can think of me as crazy or otherwise, but I’m of a more animist/spiritualist bent when it comes to these things.
People who visit such battlefields as Gettysburg often report perceiving the ghosts of horses as well as spectral humans. According to this page:
There are loads of ghost animals in stories and legends. Ghost dogs, ghost cats, ghost horses. (The headless horseman road a what?)
So the idea of a ghost of a dead pet is just as sound as the ghost of a dead person.
YMMV
I did know a woman who insisted that all the dogs she had in her life were the reincarnation of the first dog she ever had.
While I remain rather skeptical on the whole subject of ghosts (I’m as agnostic on that issue as religion - seems that there is the same amount of proof of both), the one thing that made me doubt my sanity was what seemed to be an animal’s ghost.
I used to housesit for a number of people when I was a teenager. I was staying at a lady’s house taking care of her Rhodesian Ridgeback and houseplants. The first night I was there, the cat jumped up on my bed. I felt the footsteps on my legs and reached back in my sleep to pet it. It wasn’t until the next morning that I remembered that I wasn’t feeding a cat. I mentioned it to her when she came back, and she told me that she’d had a big old Persian tom until just before her vacation, when he had died.
That was eerie enough to make me not want to work for her again. He was a pleasant enough ghost though, if that’s what it was. But alone in a house with strange ghosts and a biting dog was more than I wanted to deal with at 17.
Only tangentially on-topic, but always worth repeating: “Those who say that dogs don’t have souls either never had a dog, or never had a soul.”
2 of my cats have died since I’ve been living in my current house. Coonie is buried in the backyard, and both me and my husband have seen him. Not directly after he died, while we were still greiving, but months later. We didn’t bring Alley home after we had her put down. And although we had her much longer than Coonie, we haven’t seen her.
My parakeet McNugget, is also buried in the backyard. I still hear him imitating the computer sound from when we had dial-up, and scratching around in his cage which we no longer have.
As far as I know, I’ve never seen anything ghostly until moving to this house, and considred myself a skeptic. Living here has really opened my mind. The previous owner still “visits” occassionaly.
The night after my cat Fluffy died (at age 16, and I had had since I was six years old), I swear, I saw her jumping down off of the dryer where she always used to lay.
Then, later on after I went to bed, I felt something jump up on my legs, and brush against me. I looked to see if Noel or Misty was there-nope.
It could have been my overworked, exhausted and grieved imagination…but I still like to think it was my baby telling me goodbye. (Okay, now I’m getting a little teary-eyed.)
:o
Ghosts of animals exist for people and only where there is an emotional attachment to that animal.
Ghosts of people exist for people and only where there is an emotional attachment to that person.
Ghosts do not exist for non-sentient animals, only in the eye (mind) of a sentient beholder.
I think so. My parents’ old hound dog died a few years ago and since then, every member of my family, at one time or another, has heard that dog come up onto the front porch, grunt and then lay down heavily against the screendoor, exactly as she did while she was alive. It got to be such a commonplace happening that we’d hear it and shrug, saying “There’s Susie again.”
Strangely enough, the sounds all but disappeared after my parents had a new front door installed.
(And yes, someone would actually get up to look out on the porch to make sure there was no other animal out there that could be responsible for the sounds. )
A friend of mine had a young cat that died and a couple of months after the cat’s death, she felt something brush up against her leg under the computer desk. It happened more than once and the next time she was ready for it. She snapped a photo under the desk and caught an orb on film right next to her foot. :eek:
My cat used to sleep on my belly sometimes (genital area, actually. My belly’s like a hill :)) . Every once in a while I “dream” he’s sleeping there. When I wake up there’s no cat, but where he used to lie feels warm. To the touch. Sometimes I sleep on my back and the same thing happens in the small of my back, where he also used to sleep.
My mom had a Russian Blue Persian named Muffin who had to be put down a few years back.
Over the past several months, both of us have several times felt a cat jump up on the bed, gone to pet the cat and… no cat anywhere in the room.
The past few weeks, Conan has been confined to my room for, um, retraining. Our other cat, Schrodinger, decided that he didn’t want to use the litterbox for peeing in anymore (we’re pretty sure this was behavioral, and not a UTI, for a list of reasons to long for this post) and this resulted in Conan doing some territorial marking. Thus far, Conan has been a very good boy and hasn’t peed on the carpet once, and I hope that within the next week or so I can let him become part of the household again, but in the meantime…
At least three times a week (and sometimes a few times during a night) since Conan has been imprisoned, I’ve felt a cat jump on the bed, and looked to see that he is either clear in the hell on the other side of the room, or is curled up at my feet motionless in deep sleep. Mom and I think that Muffin has come back to hang with Conan and keep him company since we had to give away his bestest buddy and now spends most of his day couped up alone with nobody but my parakeet O’Brien for companionship.
I guess I don’t really believe in ghosts, human or otherwise, but do wonder from time to time about souls and all that.
I’ll just copy a post I made in another thread if that’s not too gauche:
I am intrigued by your reply. But, what’s an orb? Also, is there any chance you can get that photo posted on line somewhere, somehow? - Jinx