Gettin' Pretty Spooky Out There!

Barley, a dog, trots up to a Halloween display in a yard, undeterred by the tombstones, skeleton motifs, and plastic-fiber cobwebs.

I wonder what it would take for Barley to find a ghost to be scary. Appearance alone wouldn’t cut it. I’m fully confident that if she was approached by some impossibly tall ghoul with strangely set eyes and Junji Ito rictus smile, she would happily make its acquaintance. If it moved in an uncanny way, that would probably be enough - I’m willing to bet dogs find the herky-jerk kinematics of undead movement just as unsettling as their human owners. But what if ghosts smelled scary? Surely dogs, being such olfactory creatures, would agree that certain classes of smell are spooky by nature, in a comparable way to human agreement about certain forms of visual stimuli. And if they could talk, what sort of analogy would they need to formulate to explain to us what ghosts smell like?