A Dog Called Soddy

Easter 1966 saw me and my girlfriend (we were married the following year) staying with some friends in a lovely little place in the north east of England. This couple had a dog, a very scruffy grey and white mongrel which they had named Soddy, on account of the fact that it would attempt to engage in sexual intercourse with anything of any gender. Male, female, table leg, your leg, anything.

The trip by coach to their hamlet was long and tiring, followed by a drive around the countryside with the friends and a few drinks at a club before retiring to bed for the night. Needless to say, we were very tired. My bed was a double put-you-up sofa in the front room of their small house whilst my girlfriend occupied a single bed in a small back bedroom. Our friends had the front bedroom and Soddy the dog had his place in the kitchen. The kitchen was at the back of the house and at the end of a hallway running from the front door where the stairs to the upper floor were situated.

Eventually my girlfriend and I found out which were our correct beds and I left her to sleep whilst I went back downstairs to the front room. It was probably about one in the morning by this time and I lay on my back looking to the large window in front of me covered by dark red floor to ceiling curtains, and tried to get to sleep.

As I started to drift off I was suddenly awakened by the sound of Soddy whining in the kitchen. After some minutes I got up and went to see what the problem was with the dog. He was lying with his head between his two paws in the kitchen facing down the hallway to the front door and stairs. Despite me trying all my dog threats and pleas to shut up and go to sleep I took him by the collar and dragged him down the hallway, thinking that maybe he wanted to be upstairs with his 'mum and dad'. As we got to the foot of the stairs the dog's hair on the back of his neck stood up on end and he glared at an old armchair which was placed at the foot of the stairs. As soon as he got to the chair he shot up the stairs and disappeared. I thought no more of it and went back to my bed in the front room.

No more than ten minutes later the door to the front room opened and a visibly frightened girlfriend crept in saying that "something is breathing at me out of the wall in the bedroom." She snuggled down into bed with me and we tried to get off to sleep.  Some minutes later as we lay side by side trying to get off to sleep I was suddenly aware that her breathing had stopped and this of course threw me wide awake. I lay for a second or two listening to her then became aware of something staring at me from the curtains covering the window in front of me. It was two Eurasian eyes. They had red irises and were slightly curved upwards at the outside edge. I too stopped breathing, then told my girlfriend to go to sleep as there was nothing there.  She started to breath again and after a few seconds the eyes slowly evaporated into nothing.

The following morning the four of us met up for breakfast in the kitchen. I mentioned to our friends about Soddy's antics the previous night. They looked around for the dog, but it was nowhere in sight. I told them that he had shot upstairs after looking in a very scared way at the chair. We all went up to their bedroom and there was Soddy lying under their bed flat to the floor. He had never done this before, and in fact had been chastised more than once for trying to get into the room in the past. Soddy came down with us looking very happy to see us all once again.

Before I went on to tell them the rest of the incident from the night before I told David to go into the kitchen with my girlfriend whilst I went into the front room with his wife, where we both related to them what we had see whilst lying in bed. Bear in mind that my girlfriend and had not discussed what had happened to us in bed the previous night.

I told our friends wife what I had seen, then the four of us got back together and the two friends compared the stories my girlfriend and I had told them. What my girlfriend and I had seen was identical, Eurasian red eyes in the middle of the curtain which eventually faded to nothing.

When I told them about Soddy and his antics in the kitchen and at the foot of the stairs David said, "That's strange. That chair used to belong to my grandmother, and in fact she was found dead in it some years ago."

So that's the story, as it happened, no embellishments, no additions, no explanations.