The Cross Keys Hotel's ghostly dog is recorded here with minimal surrounding detail, a haunting that survives in local memory as a bare fact rather than a fuller story. No breed, name, colour, or originating incident has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry, and no date situates the haunting within any particular period of the hotel's own history.
Animal ghosts are considerably rarer in this register than human ones, and their reports, when they do occur, tend to carry an oddly matter-of-fact quality precisely because they lack the obvious human tragedy, a murder, a jilting, a suicide, that usually gives a ghost story its emotional shape. A dog simply remaining attached to a building it once knew, with no further explanation offered or apparently needed, fits that pattern closely.
Recorded here in keeping with this register's practice of preserving even its thinnest local traditions, the Cross Keys dog joins a small collection of animal hauntings scattered across this project's wider survey, a reminder that not every reported presence comes with, or seems to need, a human story attached to it.
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