By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

The call I received was not unusual by the standards of my work. A man with a large rural property wanted someone to come out and assess what he believed was a supernatural presence on his land. What was unusual was the specificity of his claim. He did not believe he had a ghost. He believed he had a skinwalker, and he believed it was tormenting his dog.

I drove out to his property with an open mind, which is the only way I know how to do this work.

What Skinwalkers Are

Before I describe what I found, it is worth spending a moment on the legend itself, and on why it deserves more respect than the internet typically gives it. The skinwalker originates in Navajo culture, where the figure is known as yee naaldlooshii, a phrase that translates roughly to "by means of it, it goes on all fours" (Legends of America, n.d.). In Navajo belief, a skinwalker is not a ghost or a spirit in the conventional Western sense. It is a witch, a human being who has acquired the ability to transform into or possess animals by crossing a profound moral boundary, one that places them in direct opposition to everything the Navajo worldview values about community, healing, and right relationship (EBSCO, n.d.).

There is an important cultural note here that I take seriously. The nuances of skinwalker lore are not generally meant to be discussed by outsiders, and within Navajo communities there is a genuine taboo around engaging with this knowledge too freely (Legends of America, n.d.). I approach this topic with that understanding in mind. I am not here to sensationalize Navajo spiritual tradition. I am here to describe an investigation and what it revealed.

The Property and the Disturbance

The man's land was substantial, and it did not take long to see why he was unsettled. The property sat on ground that had been inhabited long before him, and he had disturbed some of it. He had come across it not through carelessness or disregard, but in the course of a genuinely hopeful project: he was exploring his acreage with plans to start a Christmas tree farm. In doing that work, he had unknowingly knocked over and excavated what appeared to be ancient structures, markers, and burial features left by the Native Americans who had lived there before him.

He felt enormous guilt about this, and he told me so directly. That matters. He was not a man who had stumbled onto sacred ground and shrugged. He was a man who understood, once he understood what he had found, that he had done something he could not undo, and that awareness was sitting heavily on him throughout everything that followed.

I stood on that land and I understood, at least in part, why he was disturbed. There is something in disturbing a burial site that most people feel regardless of their spiritual framework. The act carries weight. I am not in the business of dismissing what people feel in the presence of ancient human remains, and I am not going to start now. That discomfort was real and it was appropriate.

But the skinwalker claim was specifically about his dog, and that was where my attention went.

What the Dog Was Doing

The dog was a loyal and clearly devoted animal, the kind you recognize immediately as deeply bonded to his owner. And the behavior the man described as supernatural was this: the dog would not stop staring at him. Intensely, persistently, in a way that had begun to feel strange and accusatory and wrong to a man who was already primed to interpret everything on his land through the lens of a supernatural violation.

I spent time with the dog over multiple visits, including overnight observations. What I saw was not a possessed animal. What I saw was a dog trying to communicate something to the person he trusted most in the world and not being understood.

I want to explain why I recognized this when my client could not, because it matters to how I work. I am fifty-one years old, and I have never lived a single day without a dog in my household. Not one. From childhood through every chapter of my adult life, there has always been a dog. And over those decades I have had the experience, more than once, of a dog staring at me with an unusual intensity and finding myself genuinely curious about what it meant. That curiosity led me to conversations with veterinarians and animal caretakers over the years, and what I learned from those conversations has never left me. When a dog stares at its owner with persistent, focused attention, it is almost always communicating. It is attempting to initiate a connection, to direct attention, to say something it has no other way to say.

Research supports this in compelling detail. A landmark study published in Science found that mutual gazing between dogs and their owners triggers a measurable release of oxytocin in both parties, the same bonding hormone associated with parent-child attachment, and that dogs have co-evolved with humans specifically to use eye contact as a primary tool for communication and social bonding (Nagasawa et al., 2015). The American Kennel Club notes that dogs stare at their owners to initiate interaction, to signal need, and to monitor their owner's emotional state and behavior, and that this is one of the most sophisticated communication strategies in the human-animal relationship (American Kennel Club, 2026).

The dog was not staring out of malevolence. He was staring because staring is how dogs ask for help.

My client could not see this, and communication theory offers a precise explanation for why. Walter Lippmann argued that human beings do not respond to reality itself, but to the pictures they carry in their heads about reality, internal representations he called the pseudoenvironment (Lippmann, 1922). By the time I arrived at that property, my client had already assembled a powerful picture. There was the disturbed burial ground, the weight of his own guilt, the local stories about what happens when sacred land is violated, and a cultural framework that provided a ready and coherent explanation for every strange thing that followed. Once that picture was in place, it became the lens through which every subsequent observation was filtered. The dog's stare was no longer simply a dog's stare. It had become evidence of something darker, confirmation of a story that was already written. This was not foolishness. Faced with guilt, uncertainty, and a story that seemed to explain everything, he was interpreting events the way most of us probably would.

Getting him to step outside that picture was the real work of the investigation.

The Method and the Outcome

I did not attempt to argue him out of his belief directly. In my experience, that approach rarely works and often hardens resistance. Instead, I asked him to document. I had him begin keeping a journal of the dog's behavior, specific observations recorded daily: when the staring occurred, for how long, what the dog's body language looked like, whether it was accompanied by any other signals. That process did something that argument alone could not. It gave my client a way to look at the pattern outside the frame of his fear, to examine the evidence on its own terms rather than through the pseudoenvironment he had constructed.

Asking him to take the dog to a veterinarian for a wellness check was still not easy. I have been doing this work long enough to know that many clients do not follow through on the practical recommendations I make, and I was genuinely concerned this would be one of those situations. At that point, my concern was no longer whether the explanation was paranormal. My concern was whether a living animal was receiving the care it needed.

I kept at it. I was direct with him, more direct than I sometimes allow myself to be, because I was looking at a dog who was clearly trying to communicate distress and an owner who was not hearing it. I asked him to consider that the two things, the spiritual weight of the disturbed land and the physical reality of his dog's behavior, did not have to be the same story. He could hold his questions about the land and still take his dog to a veterinarian. Those were not mutually exclusive acts.

Eventually, he went.

The dog had a tumor. The early signs of a cancer that, had it continued undetected, would have moved well beyond the stage where treatment was possible.

What This Investigation Actually Found

My client may still believe there are skinwalkers on his land. That is a question I cannot answer for him, and I want to be honest about that. He disturbed a burial site, and the cultural and spiritual weight of that act is real. Those questions remain open.

What is not open is what his dog was doing. His dog was not possessed. His dog was not a vessel for something malevolent. His dog was sick, and his dog was doing the only thing a dog knows how to do when something is terribly wrong: he was looking at the person he trusted most in the world and asking him to please pay attention.

He was not trying to frighten his owner. He was trying to reach him. Fortunately, his owner finally heard him.

Sometimes the most important communication in an investigation does not come from a ghost, a spirit, or a force we cannot name. Sometimes it comes from a faithful companion who cannot speak but desperately needs to be heard. In this case, learning to listen made all the difference.

The dog is doing well.

References

American Kennel Club. (2026, March 27). Why does my dog stare at me? https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/advice/why-does-my-dog-stare-at-me/

EBSCO Research Starters. (n.d.). Skinwalker (mythology). https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/skinwalker-mythology

Legends of America. (n.d.). Navajo skinwalkers: Witches of the Southwest. https://www.legendsofamerica.com/navajo-skinwalkers/

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Nagasawa, M., Mitsui, S., En, S., Ohtani, N., Ohta, M., Sakuma, Y., Onaka, T., Mogi, K., & Kikusui, T. (2015). Oxytocin-gaze positive loop and the coevolution of human-dog bonds. Science, 348(6232), 333–336. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261022