Can animals see paranormal beings or things or creatures or whatever?

Once, when I moved into a new place, my cat would not go anywhere near the cabinet that housed the water heater. Sometimes she would just sit and stare at it for long periods of time. Once, when I opened it her fur stood on end, and she hissed. She was a very outgoing cat; she loved people and other animals. I can’t explain the behavior. Maybe there was something otherworldly in that cabinet. Who knows.

@tinyfaery, that’s so weird. did anything else ever happen relating to that house or cabinet?

i seem to subconciously believe that animals do “see” ghosts because whenever my animals act weird or freak out and i dont know why at first i always assume its a ghost and get really scared. until i realize it was a beatle or a car driving by or some shit like that.

All three of our cats refuse to go anywhere near our vacuum cleaner. In fact, whenever I get it out they act as if they’ve seen a ghost and take off. Very eerie.

Not that I can remember.

I know they flip out just prior to an earthquake, and the death of an elderly patient.

Weird

@astro hahahaha nice, my cats are the same way, mine must house ghosts as well.

My husband and I were walking our dogs the other evening. Dogs in a house we were walking toward that was about 50 yards away from us were barking. My husband said, “I wonder why those dogs are barking?” I said, “Because of us.”

They can see and hear lots of things we can’t. Ghosts would not be my first thought.

Everytime a fire engine would drive close enough to the house for the siren to be audible, my dog (and others around us) would howl. I heard that they do this because they can “sense” the spirits in trouble.

Cats have a long history of being acquainted with Hell in particular.

I’m not sure what an animal sees/hears, but I do know that they do both outside of a human’s range, which, if you didn’t know, is very limited to begin with. We have just a very basic range of audio/visual reception.

As several people have noted, we only sense a tiny sliver of the world. A dog’s sense of smell, for example, can distinguish between caprylic acid and caproic acid in highly diluted solutions (the only differece between the two is an extra pair of carbon atoms on the chain. However, I think it extremely unlikely that they are sensing otherworldly entities.

It’s important to remember two things. First, Occam’s razor tells us to “not multiply entities unnecessarily”, that is, if there are two ways to explain something, the one that requires us to assume the existence of as few things as possible is the most likely to be true. My cat is often scared of the vacuum cleaner. One way to explain this is that he is simply frightened of the sound, perceiving it as a threatening roar. Another is to assume that he hears ghosts in it, which requires the assumption that humans have spirits, which live on after us and haunt vacuum cleaners. Using Occam’s razor, I assume the first explanation to be the correct one.

The second thing is that, if we can’t determine why something happens (why dogs howl at fire-trucks), any two explanations are equally likely, if both are unsupported. For example, perhaps the firetruck carries around an invisible portal of a sort we haven’t discovered, which connects to a universe of giant sentient sponges, and it is their high-frequency squishing that makes the dogs howl. This explanation and the explanation assuming ghosts are equally likely to be true, and the only reason we prefer the ghost one is that there are centuries of culture and myth surrounding it.

Or it could just be that wolves (and their domestic cousins dogs) howl, and the pack always joins in.

If cats and dogs have heightened senses (better vision, hearing, smell), I guess its natural for them to experience the world quite different than we humans do. Maybe my cat was freaked by a sound made by the water heater that I could not hear. It might seem otherworldly to us (or not) just because they animals perceive on a “higher” level.

We have had many cats over the years and one thing that KILLS me is how they know how to get PERFECTLY in your way as you’re coming up to the front door with an armful of groceries! If cats are so “sensitive”, why can’t they “sense” that I’m about to kick ‘em in the arse?

@strat They do that on purpose. Your cats are more important than you are. Haven’t you figured that out yet? :)

@tinyfaery: Yeah, you know the old adage: Feed a dog and he thinks you’re God; feed a cat and he thinks HE’s God!

I don’t know if they see them, or just sense them…

We bought my ex mother in laws house. It was old, though I’m not sure the exact age. My dog was 13 years old. He’d come with me every time we went to clean the house and get it ready for us to move in. My dog came in with us once, but refused every time after that. He would stick around out in the yard. I had to have him put to sleep before we moved in.

After we moved in, we had a much younger female dog, who would lay on my feet as I sat on the couch, after the kids went to bed. She would lay there, staring up the stairs with her ears up, and cocking her head.

Our cat would sit and stare into the bathroom….