Your
True Tales
June 2006 – Page
19
Bizarre
Cookie-Lover
by Heike
This occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the late summer of 1986. We lived in a duplex located at the corner of two streets not far from downtown Tulsa, only a couple of blocks from the Quiktrip at 11th and Utica. Our duplex was a "shotgun" style. All the rooms except the bathroom occurred in a straight line from front door to back in this order: living room, bedroom, kitchen, utility room, and a small back porch with about 8 steps down to the ground. The small back yard was completely fenced with four-foot-tall "field fence." There was a streetlight on the corner that shed some light into the back yard after dark, and immediately behind the fence a row of brick buildings which were small retail stores began. We had only one window air conditioner, which was located in the bedroom window and provided some cooling to the living room. A heavy curtain separated the "front" (living room and bedroom) from the "back" (kitchen and utility room). The back was not air conditioned, and it was our habit to leave the back door open in the evenings to allow the back part of the house to cool off from the heat of the day.
Approximately two months prior to this date, our small dog had disappeared from our yard and had recently been replaced with a male silky terrier mix from the SPCA. This dog was somewhat aggressive and normally fearless, showing no fear of cats, dogs of any size, strangers, cars, etc. In fact we later returned him to the SPCA for aggressive habits which included numerous attempts to attack dogs four and five times his size. As a result of the disappearance of the previous dog, we had installed a padlock on the fence gate and it was locked at the time of the incident.
That afternoon I came home from work with a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies left over from a luncheon celebration, and they had been placed on top of the refrigerator on an ordinary ceramic (and quite breakable) dinner plate. The refrigerator was too large to fit in the space designed for it in the kitchen, which resulted in it being all by itself on the opposite wall from the cabinets in the space intended to hold a dining table and chairs, which we did not have. No table, chair, cabinet, or shelf was closer than six feet to the refrigerator.
The high temperature that afternoon had been in the upper 90s, and at dusk the ambient outdoor temperature was in the mid 80s. The temperature in our bedroom was in the low 70s and the living room was somewhat warmer, 76 degrees when I checked the thermometer after the incident.
My husband and I were sitting in the living room watching TV, when all of a sudden the dog began to display abnormal behavior. He began to whimper and cower, jumped off the couch, and proceeded to squeeze himself into the tiny space between the back of an easy chair and the living room wall. My husband opened the front door and went out to see if a sudden summer thunderstorm had arisen while I tried to retrieve the dog and calm it. The sky was clear and I had no luck getting the dog out. In fact, when he realized that I was trying to pull him out, he snarled and growled at me and I'm sure he would have tried to bite me if not for the fact that he couldn't turn his head around in that restricted space.
I gave up and stood up, and my husband and I were discussing the dog's bizarre behavior and what to do about it when suddenly we both heard a loud noise, like a clatter of something being dropped, from the back part of the house. Remembering that our back door stood wide open, I took off running first, and he was right behind me. I dashed through the bedroom, pulled aside the curtain to the kitchen, and was hit with the unexpected shock of a blast of icy cold air - so cold that the hairs immediately stood up on my arms. I stopped for a second, but then saw movement at the back door and took off again through the kitchen and into the utility room. I ran out the back door and stopped on the porch at the top of the stairs, transfixed by what I saw.
A large black furry or hairy animal was just leaping over the four-foot-tall fence, and I remember distinctly that it cleared the fence without touching it. It then bounded down the sidewalk and quickly disappeared past the first of the brick buildings behind us. I personally am quite sure that this animal was not a dog or cat. It was very heavy bodied, had small rounded ears, and reminded me of a black bear cub more than anything else. I only saw it from behind and a sort of 3/4 side/back view as it raced off down the street, but it had a heavy, squat body like a bear and a very rounded rump with no visible tail. The legs seemed shorter and stockier in proportion to the body than a dog's would be, and its overall shape was totally uncharacteristic of even the heaviest bodied large cat such as a jaguar. The head also was low in front of the body, not held higher than the shoulders like a dog's is, and if there was a neck it was very short. It ran in the manner of putting both forefeet out and then bringing both hind feet up to meet the forefeet, and then springing out with the forefeet again. In spite of its apparent bulk it moved very quickly and smoothly. My husband joined me on the back porch in time to see it run off down the sidewalk, but he missed its leap over the fence. It didn't really occur to us to try chasing it, and we both returned to our inexplicably cold kitchen to see the plate of cookies, intact and unbroken although the cookies were jumbled about and one had slid off the plate, sitting on the floor next to the refrigerator.
We discussed possibilities for a while, but came up with nothing that could explain the cookies going from the top of the fridge to the floor without breaking the plate and the shocking cold of the kitchen (we agreed that it felt like the kitchen was no more than 50 or maybe 55 degrees F when we first entered although it was now warming up rapidly). Neither of us wanted to even think about eating any of the cookies; we threw them away and ran the plate through the dishwasher. Of course we closed and locked the back door, so It took over an hour for the kitchen to reach a somewhat normal temperature, a few degrees warmer than the bedroom. The dog was willing to come out from behind the chair when my husband and I pulled the chair out from the wall enough to allow him to turn around, but he acted unusually subdued for the rest of the evening and did not seem to us to be "back to normal" until the next morning.
We watched the news and read the paper carefully the next day, but the circus was not in town and there were no reports of animals escaped from the zoo (which in any case is more than 10 miles from where we lived) or any private owner.
So I ask you, because in all these years I haven't been able to figure it out: What terrifies a fearless dog, drops the temperature of a room 30+ degrees, can move a dinner plate from the top of a 66-inch tall refrigerator to the floor without breaking it, can jump over a 4 foot fence easily, and likes chocolate chip cookies?
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