Welcome to the spookiest week of the year! To celebrate Old Scratch's favorite week, here at the Daily Science Fact, we'll be offering seven days of terror facts!
That the beloved comic strip dog, Snoopy, was based on a real dog? It’s true! But things get even more true than that! You see, Snoopy was actually based on … a ghost dog!
Back when Charles Schulz was growing up, there was a sort of urban myth in his neighborhood about a dog who was also a ghost who would cause mischief after the sun went down. The acts attributed to “Spooky” were pretty classic neighborhood ghost antics—stealing melons, taping cats to trees, screaming into windows—but as Charles got older, he became interested in the origins of Spooky the ghost dog.
As it turned out, the stories of Spooky could be dated back to a particular incident that occurred right around the turn of the 20th century. A baby in Charles’ neighborhood had gone missing, and the only trace of what may have occurred was a track of dog prints in the yard where the baby had been playing. Dogs were, of course, highly illegal in Charles’ town at the time, and this, added to the sad fact that Baby Cheodore was never found, led the townsfolk to believe that some sort of spectral dog had committed the deed. The tales took off from there.
Further research and just a modicum of critical thought reveal the true offender, in all likelihood, to be a wolf, or maybe a pair of wolves. Cheodore had been set in the yard next to a cooling pie, and the scent of the pie probably attracted wolves, but wolves don’t eat pie, they eat babies, and so …. But Charles was much more interested in the story of a baby-stealing ghost dog (“the greatest story never told”). This is why early Peanuts strips feature far more kidnappings, at least until the character of Spooky was renamed to the now-familiar Snoopy.
Boo!
PS—Is this science? Well, it’s about an animal and critical thinking, so, yeah, duh, it is.
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