The Overtoun Bridge (Overtoun Bridge) is an unremarkable, at first glance, pedestrian bridge, located not far from the Scottish city of Dumbarton. Overtoun Bridge is notable for the fact that in the period from 1951 to 1955 more than 50 dogs were thrown from it. Moreover, those animals that managed to survive repeated attempts at suicide.
For Donna Cooper, the worst consequence of the fatal leap of her collie dog Ben was the impact the incident had on her two-year-old son Callum.
“Almost a year later, Callum is still asking about Ben. He is very upset about the death of the dog and wants to know if the dog went to heaven,”she says.
One day Donna, her husband and son were walking their dog along the scenic Overtone Bridge in Milton, near Dumbarton, Scotland. Without warning, Ben jumped over a parapet on a centuries-old granite bridge and fell 50 feet (15.24 meters) on the rocks below.
“He had a broken paw, a broken jaw, and a badly damaged back. The veterinarian decided that it was impossible to bring the dog back to full life, so we had to put him to sleep,”Donna recalls.
Kenneth Meikle can sympathize with the Cooper family, because he too had to watch with horror as his golden retriever Hendrix jumped from the same unfortunate bridge.
“I was walking with my business partner and with the children, when suddenly the dog just jumped. My daughter screamed and I ran along the bank to where the dog lay and carried it to a safe place.
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“When I did this, I noticed that the animal's hair was falling out in clumps. It must have been a shock, because when we brought the dog home, it was shaking all night. The next day, thank goodness, she was fine. We were lucky because our pet landed on a thick layer of moss, which softened the fall."
50 dogs in the last 50 years
Other dogs are not so lucky. Over the past half century, about 50 dogs have been killed from the same Overtown Bridge. All of the deaths occurred in virtually the same location, between the last two parapets on the right side of the bridge, and almost all of the incidents occurred on clear sunny days. In addition, all of the dogs that died were Labrador, Collie and Retriever.
Right side span of the bridge.
Dorren Graham of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals calls the phenomenon a "heartbreaking mystery." “We know a lot of people whose dogs jumped off this bridge and are trying to figure out why they did it,” he says.
Can dogs intentionally commit suicide?
What is the Overtone Bridge? Built in 1895 by Lord Overtone, the ornate Victorian edifice rises 50 feet above the Overtone Berne stream that flows below.
Thanks to stories posted online, dog owners around the world are asking whether their pets could knowingly commit suicide on this particular bridge, and if so, why?
In an attempt to solve the problem, many experts gathered in Dumbarton to investigate and finally unravel the mystery. It has long been rumored that ghosts and ghosts haunt the bridge and nearby Overtone House. In 1994, a tragedy broke out here at all - a local resident Kevin May threw his little son off the bridge, claiming that the child was the Antichrist. The boy did not survive.
The inscription on the plate: Dangerous bridge. Please keep your dog on a leash.
Soon after, Kevin tried to commit suicide and jumped off the same bridge. However, his suicide attempt was unsuccessful.
Donna Cooper says: “Rumor has it that he did drugs, but he insisted that he was not. May said that this place has a strange effect on both humans and dogs."
The Lost Place
In Celtic mythology, Overtone is known as the "bad place" - the area where our reality intersects with the other world. Of course, many people know that dogs and other animals are more sensitive to all sorts of anomalies than humans.
Were they “frightened” by some supernatural or external force emanating from the bridge and causing them to make the fatal leap to death?
Does the smell attract the dog?
Psychic Mary Armour took her Labrador for a walk across the bridge to test this theory. However, she did not report any unusual sensations. "Animals are supersensitive to the spirit world, but I did not feel any adverse energy."
In fact, Mary said that she experienced a feeling of “pure calm and serenity,” but admitted that her dog did pull her towards the right side of the concrete structure.
Suicidal or depressive feelings
If there is nothing supernatural that prompts animals to die, can they "catch" the suicidal or suppressed feelings of their owners?
Kendal Shepherd, a veterinarian who studies animal behavior, believes that dogs can indeed suffer from psychosis. And anyone who has ever owned a dog would agree that an animal can look lethargic and even refuse to eat when its owner is depressed.
An experiment conducted by Austrian researchers showed that dogs can pick up the thoughts and intentions of their owners from miles away (without even relying on physical prompts) and do what their owners want.
So the dogs might have jumped off the bridge because they were picking up some negative signals from their owners.
Over the past three years, the number of suicides among the local adult population has increased by 200 percent. And nowadays, suicide is the leading cause of death among young people in the area even more than road accidents.
However, none of the owners whose dogs jumped from the Overtown Bridge reported any suicidal feelings. And after careful analysis, Kendal Shepherd concluded: “Human suicide is usually triggered by the feeling that tomorrow will be worse than today. But there is no reason to believe that dogs share the concepts of "today" and "tomorrow."
If not suicide, then what?
If the death of dogs cannot be attributed to suicide, then what is the cause? In an attempt to solve the mystery, canine psychologist Dr. David Sands traveled to Dumbarton to try to see and feel the bridge from an animal's perspective.
His first experiment was to try to cross a bridge with a single dog known to have survived a fall to see how it would react. When he led 19-year-old Hendrix to the scene of her near-death experience, the dog happily walked across the bridge, and only at the very end did she suddenly tense up.
Due to his advanced age, Hendrix did not have the strength to jump, but something clearly caught her attention, and Dr. Sands concluded that one of the three main senses of the animal (sight, hearing or smell) must have been so aroused that the dog experienced an overwhelming urge to investigate.
Animal Experts Visit
Experts from an acoustic company in Glasgow and David Sexton from RSPB (animal habitat expert) visited to find out if the sound or smell was at fault.
The locals thought that the nearby military base in Faslane might be making a sound that could only be heard by dogs. There is also the possibility that adjacent telephone poles or the bridge structure itself may emit sounds that only animals can hear.
However, after monitoring the bridge's sound levels, acoustics experts found nothing suspicious to explain the dogs' deaths.
David Sexton placed the bait in the undergrowth under the bridge and soon discovered that mice and minks lived there, while squirrel nests were also found in the cells embedded in the bridge structure.
To find out what scent might attract dogs, David Sexton spread the scent from all three species in the field. The researcher then released ten dogs from the breeds that died on the bridge to find out which scent would interest them most.
His findings were remarkable. Of the ten dogs tested, only two showed no interest in any of the "scents," while the vast majority - 70 percent - rushed directly to the source of the scent emitted by the mink.
Could the smell of mink be the cause?
The anal glands of the mink leave a kind of "marks" wherever the animal walks. And the strong musty smell they give off is clearly attractive to dogs. It would also explain why all deaths occurred on sunny, dry days, when the mink smell was not mitigated by wet weather.
In addition, the theory is consistent with the death schedule - minks were introduced to Scotland in the twenties, but did not begin to breed in large numbers until the fifties, when the mysterious deaths of dogs began.
But there are 26,000 minks in Scotland. Why do the dogs chasing them jump and crash to death only from this bridge? And why did all the deaths occur in the area of the last two parapets on the right side?
Until a satisfactory answer is found, how many dog lovers will feel brave enough to walk their animals on the mysterious flights of the canine suicide bridge?