Cassie wasn’t feeling herself the day she jumped from Overtoun Bridge. The three-year-old springer spaniel normally sat patiently before her walks, waiting for her owner, Alice Trevorrow, to lock up the car and put her lead on. But on that summer day, something was off; Cassie was agitated, nose in the air. She was fixated on something.
Trevorrow and her son got out of the car, and walked towards Cassie, trying to work out what she was staring at.
Then, suddenly, the dog bolted, jumping straight off the bridge and plummeting 50 feet to rocky ground below.
“Her scream I still hear,” Trevorrow says.
Somehow, Cassie survived. “A miracle really,” Trevorrow says. “She was in so much pain and couldn’t put weight on her back legs but yet nothing was broken. We were blessed but many are not.”
Cassie is one of a supposed legion of dogs who’ve leaped from Overtoun’s gothic arches since 2005. Popular myth has it that the bridge turns hounds into lemmings. The story has been percolated by everyone from William Shatner to a new generation of social media creators, hungry for views. Respected newspapers, like the New York Times, have reported straight-facedly on the ‘dog suicide bridge’. Top ‘estimates’ of dogs that have gone over have hit 600.
Explanations for the phenomenon span the supernatural — a ghost! Who targets dogs! — and the calmly rational — smells! That dogs love! None have been conclusively proven.
In fact, now people are wondering whether any dogs have crossed the bridge to get to the other side. Is Overtoun’s doggy suicide claim to fame actually rooted in fact? I had to find out.
I'm Robbie. Welcome to The Bell, ‘mon in! Stories like this take weeks to report, but we think the legwork is worth it — or maybe we're just barking up on the wrong tree.
This is what we do at The Bell, and it's the type of reporting you can get by signing up. Our free mailing list gets you two totally free editions of The Bell every week.
No ads, no gimmicks: just click the button below and get our unique brand of local journalism straight to your inbox.
The Overtoun window
I start at the beginning: Overtoun Bridge. Calum, my closest dog-owning companion, is along for the ride. His fluffy chow chow, Dumpling, is our (carefully leashed) guinea pig. We’re a few feet from the bridge and the yawning drop under it, when the usually unflappable Dumpling begins vomiting her entire breakfast onto rain-drenched tarmac. Is this a warning from the spirits that haunt this doomed spot to turn back before it’s too late? Or is she just overexcited from Calum’s frenetic musical soundtrack on the car journey from the Gallowgate to Milton? Who knows.
I spot two dogwalkers and manfully leave Calum to clean up the vomit solo.
Jennifer and John Scullion of J&J K9Adventures are drying off a pack of eight energetic dogs by their car. Two of them belong to the couple, who have been walking between eight and ten dogs across the bridge most days for the past six years.
“We are probably talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dogs and not one’s jumped,” Jennifer says.
While she doesn’t doubt it’s happened, she says the stories have been exaggerated over the years. “But you never know what’s going through the dog’s minds when they do it,” she adds.
John takes me over to the bridge to outline one explanation for the phenomenon: the ‘optical illusion’ theory. He points to a wall with a 10ft drop to the grass below, then the next wall, which is only a foot and a half higher, but with sloping parapets and a 50ft drop. It’s thought dogs misjudge the distance, based on the smaller wall.
Mind you: “We’ve stayed in this area all our lives, and I’ve never seen a dog jump off,” he says. “You hear about it more on the internet than you do in Dumbarton”.
‘[Dogs] have secrets worth dying for’
The internet has furiously fanned the flames of Overtoun Bridge’s infamy. Recorded coverage goes back to 2004, when Hendrix, a golden retriever belonging to Kenneth Meikle, jumped off the bridge and survived, with a local paper write-up as his reward. Noughties blogging then spread the legend, initially on forums like Hidden Glasgow (“Read an article in the paper yesterday that at least five dogs have leapt to [their] deaths from the high stone bridge in the grounds of Overtoun House … Dumbartons not that bad surely?” posited one 2005 user). Later, Facebook and YouTube got in on the action.
Eventually, traction was such that National Geographic and Discovery Channel teams rolled into Milton with their cameras. Overtoun was featured in William Shatner’s Weird or What in 2012. “[Dogs] have secrets and thoughts so deep and dark they are worth dying for,” Captain Kirk deadpans to camera, while stroking his chihuahua. The reported number of dog deaths started to swell — suddenly it was 500, and had apparently been a problem since the 1950s. By 2019, even the New York Times was repeating the unverified figure of “hundreds of dogs” having jumped from the bridge.
Today, the Wikipedia entry for Overtoun Bridge proclaims that “research has found at least 300 dogs have been recorded jumping from the bridge, with at least 50 dogs dying from the fall”.
The source? An Independent article, that’s a republish of the 2019 New York Times one. It professes: “Local researchers estimate more than 300 have sailed off the bridge; tabloid reports say it’s 600. At least 50 dogs are said to have died”. The report doesn’t provide any evidence or links in support of these numbers, and the NYT journalist only speaks to one dog owner whose pet went over (and survived).
Who let the dogs jump?
I spend weeks trying to track down someone whose dog actually jumped off the bridge. Many of the names from the old documentaries — Donna Cooper, Kenny Meikle — are dead ends. People are oddly cagey about talking to me. It’s like I’m trying to crack JFK’s assassination, not folklore about doggy suicidal ideation. Other emails to documentary makers go unread.
Eventually though, I come across Colin Walsh via the Facebook group ‘Dumbartons Dogs’. Forty-something Walsh is from Silverton, and recently began taking his German shepherd, Glen, to Overtoun Bridge, precisely because of its notoriety.
In a slow drawl over the phone, Walsh claims this was to “prove people wrong ... You don’t believe what people say, so I took him over to see”.
Initially, Glen was fine, and Walsh thought there was nothing to the legend.
But on a subsequent visit, this time at dusk, when he walked onto the bridge a chill hit him. It made “my hair on my neck stand up and I mean [a] really cold [chill],” he says.
Then Glen made a run for it, yanking furiously at the lead, barking, and pulling Walsh towards the edge. “He was on his back legs which is unusual for a German shepherd, I’ve never seen him do that before,” he says. “You read the story but you don’t actually expect your dog to jump and try and take his own life.”
Walsh took Glen to the vets, convinced he had anxiety, but there was “nothing wrong with him. It must just be whatever spooked him.”
There’s plenty who think a bona fide spook is responsible for Overtoun’s reputation. “The place has always had some kind of strange reputation as a centre for unexplained paranormal activities, of spooky things happening,” Paul Owens says. A local author and historian, Owens documented 30 dog incidents since the 1950s in his book, The Baron of Rainbow Bridge. He used a private detective to track them down. “I interviewed most of these people, and they exist. The dogs are real.” When I ask if he can put me in touch, he tells me they don’t want to talk about it any more.
When it comes to unpacking the dog mystery, there’s two types of camp, he says: the “scientific camp” and the “paranormal or supernatural” camp.
Owens, obviously, belongs to the latter, pointing to: “chemical curses, alchemical curses, spirits; Earth energies around the bridge”. He even thinks the paranormal played a part in Overtoun’s darkest incident. In 1994, a former laboratory assistant threw his two-week-old son to his death off the bridge, believing he was Satan. A paranoid schizophrenic, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to Carstairs. Owens finds it to be a “strange coincidence”. “The bridge seemed to have, in some way, in my opinion, interfered with the mental illness that he had.”
Alice Trevorrow, Cassie’s owner, is also a psychic spiritual medium. She believes that whatever is (or isn’t) happening to dogs at Overtoun is “absolutely” the work of something “supernatural”. Around the time Cassie jumped, Trevorrow, says she saw the lady of Overtoun House at the window — referring to the ghost who is said to lure dogs over the top. I wonder if this might be Melissa Hill, who’s run a residential facility for women in crisis there since the early 2000s.
Lorraine Craig is another dog owner with an interest in the paranormal who’s fallen afoul of Overtoun — a surprisingly sizeable group it turns out. Her childhood dog, Prince, was a collie-cross rescue from Campbeltown. He was less lucky than Cassie.
Craig’s dad had walked dogs over the bridge for “years for years with no issues”. Then, one day in 1986, Prince “just bolted, straight off” one day when Craig was six years old. “He was in the animal hospital for six weeks with a broken back,” she says, clearly still troubled at the memory. The day Prince was meant to be released from the animal hospital, he died.
A month ago, Craig visited Overtoun for the first time in 34 years. A relatively new paranormal investigator, she and her team of fellow psychics and mediums “were picking stuff up on the bridge,” but had to leave because of the weather.
“I'm going to go back again in a couple of weeks and try and see if I find anything. I'm a debunker. So if there’s nothing, there’s nothing. But you know, I’m interested. I’m on the edge with it.”
It’s all gone to the dogs
On the scientific side, I get hold of David Sands, a featured expert in a 2005 Animal Planet Channel documentary on Overtoun. He rules out suicidal intent — “dogs can’t premeditate” — along with the possibility of ghosts, energies and frequencies from nearby nuclear bases or electricity pylons.
His judgement is the same now as it was in 2005: “curiosity killed the dog”.
It’s death — or injury — by “misadventure,” and the sudden drop to a steep gorge within the space of a few metres. “Conspiracy, theories, storytelling, supernatural — it was an easy story to catch fire,” he observes. “It was true that there were a number of dogs — who could tell how many. But by the time the story got to the national press...” he trails off.
One local tells me his springer spaniel once tried to jump a “number of years ago,” but was leashed, so couldn’t. A Japanese film crew later approached him, asking about the “200 dogs” that had jumped. “Total rubbish,” the man says. “At that time there had been maybe 10 or 12”. He hasn’t heard of any since. “It’s a load of nonsense”.
He posits a pattern linking the dozen or so dogs he’s heard of jumping. “Most of them are hunting dogs, in their brain their DNA tells them there is something good down there. I have nothing to prove that.”
Someone who could maybe prove that is David Sexton, a wildlife expert also recruited as a talking head for a mid-noughties Overtoun documentary. Like Sands, he stresses that dogs cannot decide to take their own lives. When Sexton previously investigated Overtoun and its surrounding environment: “the one thing that really stood out to us was the presence of mink”.
The little mammals have been present in Scotland since the 1930s. They have a “very strong smell about them, their anal glands, and their droppings are really pungent,” Sexton explains. “The smell is so pungent that for a dog getting a whiff of that is enough to make it rapidly change course and to potentially go and investigate.” They’re so excited, they don’t clock the drop below.
“That’s why some poor dogs have come to harm,” he says, sounding a bit perplexed that this story continues to dog him.
After weeks of diligent efforts, I’ve directly spoken to two people whose dogs have gone over Overtoun’s edge since 1986 and two whose dogs attempted to jump. Add to this another leaper and attempted leaper in the ‘Dumbartons Dogs’ group. I’ve only been able to confirm one death.
This is far short of 50. So I go to the source: the local journalist who first broke the story on Overtoun Bridge’s doggy deaths, 22 years ago. Alan*, as we’ll call him, published an initial report, after which more people got in touch to say the same thing had happened to them.
Eventually, Alan managed to speak to a patron for the Scottish SPCA who had lived in Milton since the 1920s. She was 92. “She said it had been happening since she was a little girl, at least once a year.” He totted up all the people he’d spoken to directly, then did some rough calculations based on the elderly Miltonian’s account, and came up with the figure of 50.
“It just snowballed,” he says. “One day’s story is the next day’s fish and chip paper, but this one wasn’t, it’s probably the most famous story I’ve ever done.”
Almost certainly. Earlier this month, Dumbarton’s most celebrated musical son, David Byrne, returned to his roots with two gigs at the SEC.
“It’s good to be back,” he told fans at the Armadillo. Behind him, an image of Overtoun House and bridge appeared. “This is where I was born,” he informed the baffled crowd. “Who knows the story of the dogs?”
Byrne then recapped the whole saga of Overtoun Bridge. “There’s one theory that there are mink living under the bridge and the dogs smell it and they go crazy. Another theory is there is a ghost in Overtoun House”.
But Byrne wasn’t there to give clarity. “It remains a mystery, and there are many mysteries in this life,” he said, launching into ‘And She Was’, a song inspired by a blissed-out hippie-chick on a LSD trip. She flies out of her body, floating above the fray of daily life, drifting off into the unknown — just like the dogs of Overtoun Bridge.
Additional research by Rory MacNeish
*denotes a name has been changed
If someone forwarded you this newsletter, click here to sign up to get quality local journalism in your inbox.
