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.
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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.
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