Moving Objects & Ghost Dogs

This took place at my parent's house in Fayetteville, Arkansas back when I was a senior in high school. We had just moved into this house in Arkansas to be a little closer to family after we had lived in North Carolina for a few years. The home is fairly average, in an average neighbourhood and was only about five years old when we moved in.

There didn't seem to be anything odd with the house at all. It was open and sunny all of the time, and had a pleasant feel to it. The living room, however, was completely different at night, and since it lay in the centre of the house between the kitchen and the master and guest bedroom, it tended to amplify sounds. Since I was less than a year from going off to college, my parents let me have the larger guest bedroom that lay right next to theirs. It had a nice large window that looked out to the front lawn and had a very high ceiling.

The first odd thing that I remember happening was in broad daylight. I was spending a lazy Sunday morning reading a book, in which I kept my place with a small brass bookmark that my grandmother had given me. The top of it had also been engraved with my name. I stopped reading, got up and placed the book with the bookmark in it on my desk across the room and walked to the closet on the adjacent wall. I was leaning against the closet door deciding what I would wear that day when above me on the door I heard a loud crack. I felt something land on my shoulder and it was my brass bookmark. I told my parents about this, but they just shrugged it off and blamed it on my little sister... Who was sleeping.

Because of this, I kept everything else that happened to myself. Every week or so things that I thought I had placed in stable positions would fall off of my desk at night and wake me up. I constantly found myself staring out of my bedroom door at night when this would happen because it felt like I wasn't alone. I started sleeping with my door closed and the stuff stopped falling off of my desk.

Things were pretty quiet for a while but I started waking up to strange noises coming from my door. It sounded like a quiet whimper and sometimes it sounded like scratching at the base of the door like the sound of a small dog that wanted inside. I never went to open the door during all of this because I figured that if there was something out there I would rather it not be in the same room with me!

The reason that I am posting this now, after all of these years is because even though I have gone off to college, I still come back home and the last visit scared me a great deal. Since I went to college, I had not experienced anything since the strange noises during my senior year. I recently went home for spring break and stayed in my old bedroom. Since high school, I have reverted back to sleeping with my door open, and so I left my bedroom door open that night. I woke up at about 3a.m. With a sense of dread and looked at the doorway to find a large black German shepherd. At first I thought it was my own dog Kipcha, as she is mostly black and is a large shepherd mix, but this was definitely not her. The dog just stared at me for a few seconds and turned around and then I never saw it again.

I've don't some research since then to find a thing called a "Black Shuck" but I really hope that is not the case! I also ran Google earth on the house and it was clear from the old photo that the previous owners had dogs, however I only saw what looked like small ones. Let me know what you think.