Pastor scents explanation for ‘dog suicide bridge’ mystery

FOR decades, the dog walkers of Dumbarton have known to keep their pets on a lead at a particular bridge to stop them leaping off into the gorge below.

What possesses dogs to jump to their deaths has been the subject of theories ranging from witchcraft to ghosts.

But a local pastor has now claimed to have solved the mystery: they are following the scent of small mammals.

Residents refer to Overtoun Bridge as the “dog suicide bridge” and there is even a sign telling pet owners to keep their dogs on the lead.

Yet decades after the first recorded dog death, a Texan pastor living in a nearby manor believes he has the answer to dispel supernatural theories.

“The dogs catch the scent of mink, pine martens or some other mammal and then they will jump up on the wall of the bridge,” Bob Hill told The New York Times. “And because it’s tapered, they will just topple over.” The pastor, who runs a local centre for women in crisis, moved into the nearby Overtoun House almost 20 years ago and said that he had seen several dogs suddenly dive off the bridge. Despite Scotland being the “kind of a place where there was a lot of the supernatural”, it was the smell of small mammals that lured dogs to their deaths, he said.

However, Paul Owens, a religion and philosophy teacher who has researched the deaths for 11 years and wrote a book – The Baron of Rainbow Bridge: Overtoun’s Death Leaping Dog Mystery Unravelled – disagrees with the theory. He said a ghost “is behind all of this”, identifying it as “The White Lady of Overtoun” – the often-seen ghost of a woman who died in 1908 having never recovered from the death of her husband.

He also argued against the findings of David Sands, an animal behaviourist, who said that it was dogs’ limited perspective as well as a possible “scent theory” that lured dogs to jump. However, even Mr Sands admitted that the bridge had a “strange feeling”.