Observations placeholder
Lethbridge, T C - Ghost and Ghoul - Being watched by a fox
Identifier
021880
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
T C Lethbridge – Ghost and Ghoul
In 1917, as a boy, I was fishing for little brown trout in a stream which ran at the bottom of a tangled piece of woodland in an Exmoor combe. It was a place full of rocks, scrub oaks and hazel bushes. A buzzard, which was then a rare bird, had a nest in an oak near the pool where I was fishing and a dipper had another on the face of an overhanging slab of rock just below me. I was fishing in a most unorthodox manner, with a line running through an eyelet of wire on the end of a walking-stick.
Why there were trout in this stream at all is one of those mysteries which has not yet been satisfactorily answered. The rock slab with the dipper's nest under it threw the water clean out in a waterfall of a dozen feet or so. No trout could have got up it.
Still we are not now concerned with the problem of the trout and whether their eggs were carried above the fall on the feet of wading birds, or how they got there.
As I was cautiously fishing the pool, beneath a tangle of bushes, I felt strongly that I was being watched, but I felt it was a man who was watching me. I had really no clue who it was. I turned slowly round and found I was looking into the face of a big dog-fox, who was sitting up and studying me with great interest. You could feel him thinking, 'So that's how you catch those little fish. I find it most difficult myself.' Then he turned round and trotted off entirely unconcerned. I was the one who was surprised.