Folklore of the Rio Grande Valley

"The Ghost Duke!"

As told to : Yadira L. Espinoza

By: Agustin T. Espinoza

Once upon a time there was a man who owned a very, very angry dog. One day after the man tied him up, his small ten year old son came up to him. Suddenly the little boy started to cry. The father came up to him and saw that he was bleeding from the lower part of his eye. The man said, "Who did this to you?" The small boy pointed to the dog. Right away the man took the boy to the hospital were he was attended.

When the man came back home he untied the dog from where he was. He got his 22 shot gun and took him to a nearby canal and shot him in the head six times. He checked to see if it was really dead, well it was. The man went home that night and went right to sleep. He thought a lot about what he had done, but he knew it was the right thing to do. The next morning he went back to get the dead dog to burn it, but to his surprise he saw that the dog was not there where he had left him. He wondered where it was or whether some other person had taken him. After about a week later the dog's spirit followed him a lot, and appeared to him where he would always be tied up. It said to the man, ''You are going to pay for what you have done to me". After this happened for about five times the old man never, ever heard from the ghost named "Duke" again. Based on a true story from the 1970's in Matamoros, Mexico.

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