56. Heavy Breather
I was about 15 and trying to sleep but found that I was having an asthma attack. Late in the night, I started hearing a rhythmic breathing from the floor next to the bed. It wasn’t scary, more comforting. And it wasn’t me, because my breathing sounded way more messed up than that. It helped me calm down and get to sleep.
Even though I was still sick, I was able to get my hands on an inhaler in the morning. At the time I thought it was a friendly ghost. I later rationalized that maybe I was hearing a family member through the heating ducts. What I realized years later, when I had a dog, was that it had sounded exactly like a big dog sleeping next to the bed.
So now I’m 50/50 on whether a ghost dog came to visit me, or my own dog time-traveled back about ten years before she was born to comfort me.