Dog Suicides At Overtoun Bridge

In Scotland, the Victorian stone mansion known as Overtoun House. It was originally built in the 1860s as the private retreat of industrialist and philanthropist James White. The heavy granite structure spans the shallow, rocky creek called Overtoun Bridge, 15 meters below the roadway. Something about the bridge has an unusual affect on dogs. The story goes that over the past few decades, at least fifty dogs have leapt the walls and fallen to their deaths on the creek bottom far below. In 1995, a border collie named Ben, owned by Donna Cooper, jumped the wall and fell. Ben 's death got picked up by the newspapers, and Overtoun Bridge became a phenomenon. Stories about the dog suicides at Overtoun became so widespread that even the Daily Mail newspaper.

The Daily Mail concluded "So perhaps the dogs jumped to their deaths because they picked up on some human." Some point to the idea of the graveyard of the whales, or the secret place in the jungle where the elephants all go to die, as if they are precedents for a specific location favored by dogs to end their lives. Most popular tellings of the Overtoun Bridge legend mention ghosts that are said to reside at Overtoun House, postulating that perhaps they spook the dogs or somehow haunt them into wanting to jump. It 's also commonly noted that a disturbed man once threw his young son off the bridge, and proposed that this indicates some force affects the mind there and compels the dogs to jump. Such flights of fancy are what we call "explaining an unknown with another unknown," and are not explanations at all. We want to know what 's actually going