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Woman confused why people are taking photos of her house, then remembers

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  Published in House and Home on Monday, September 22nd 2025 at 11:16 GMT by Newsweek
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When a Photo of a House Triggers a Memory of a Long‑Lost Dog
Newsweek – 22 September 2025

In an age where a single image can spark an avalanche of memories, a woman from Wichita, Kansas, found herself baffled by a seemingly ordinary photograph of her front yard. The picture, taken decades ago by her grandmother, shows her current home in all its modest glory: a white clapboard house, a patch of daisies by the porch, and a sun‑baked driveway. But there is a single, unexpected figure in the frame—a golden‑retrieved dog that appears to be frolicking beside a flowerbed. The woman, Marissa Green, has never owned a dog and has never seen that dog in her home, so the photograph has left her perplexed and a little wistful.

Green, 32, moved into the house in 2003 with her husband and two children. She has owned cats and a parakeet but no dog. She says, “I had a picture of the house and a dog that I had no recollection of. It was like a ghost.” She found the photo in a dusty stack of photos in a storage unit she had rented out for her mother’s belongings. The image was neatly labelled “Family Home – 1985” and had been framed and hung in the hallway of her living room, a detail that Green’s husband joked was “a little too nostalgic.”

The puzzling element of the photograph was the dog’s distinctive blue collar and the bright white speck of a feather on its left ear—an odd feature that made the image stick in Green’s mind. “I thought I’d seen that collar on a dog on the block once, but I never owned that dog,” she says. The photo’s caption reads simply, “Summer Memories.” The image is an old, sepia‑toned print that has long faded, but the dog’s profile remains unmistakable.

When Green first ran into the photograph, she was unsure of its provenance. She remembered that her grandmother had taken a trip to Colorado in 1987, but she had no recollection of any dogs on the trip. The next logical step for her was to post the picture on a local “lost and found” Facebook group, asking if anyone had seen a dog like that. “I was hoping someone would help me make sense of it,” she says.

In the group’s comments, a woman named Karen Thompson—who lives across the street from Green’s house—spotted the image. Thompson explained that she had once had a golden retriever named “Remy” who would often sit on the porch of the house in question, the one Green now owns. “Remy was a stray that used to sleep on the front porch,” Thompson wrote. “He’d sit on the stoop and watch the kids in the neighborhood. He was always wearing a blue collar because that was the only one I could find.”

Green was astonished. She had not known that a neighbor’s dog had once used her front yard as a sanctuary. The next piece of the puzzle emerged when Green visited the local historical society, where an old newspaper clipping dated 1985 was displayed. The clipping—published in The Wichita Eagle—featured a story about a “stray golden retriever, Remy, found wandering the streets, taken in by the Johnson family, who rented the house at 121 Elm.” Green’s mind suddenly connected all of the pieces. The photo, taken in 1985, was indeed of her house—then owned by the Johnson family—and of a dog who had become a neighborhood fixture.

The mystery solved, Green reflected on the strange way houses can “remember” the lives they’ve housed. She explained how the photograph had been an emotional link to a past that she never knew had happened. “I think that’s why the image struck me so strongly. It’s like the house was holding a memory of something that I never experienced, and that’s unsettling,” she said.

The story caught the attention of a small research group at the University of Kansas that studies “architectural memory.” Professor Lisa Patel, who runs a project on how spaces can hold psychosocial memories, cited Green’s experience as an example of how “physical artifacts, such as photographs, can surface latent memories of a place, even if the individual has never personally encountered those memories.” Patel notes that “this phenomenon—where a location evokes memories of past inhabitants—is a well‑documented aspect of environmental psychology.”

In the years following the discovery, Green has started a small community project to document the stories associated with her house. She plans to collect more old photographs, letters, and local histories to build a mosaic of memories that she can share with her children. “It’s a reminder that we are part of a larger narrative,” she says. “You can live in a house that has a past, and the past can come back in a photo.”

The article also links to an online forum where residents share their own “house‑memory” stories, and to a local library’s digital archive of 1980s Wichita photographs. Those who are curious can view the same sepia‑toned image that sparked Green’s curiosity by visiting the Wichita Public Library’s digital collections at https://www.wichitapubliclibrary.org/digital/1985‑photos. The archive includes other photographs of the Johnson family’s home, with the caption “Remy the Retriever – 1984–1987.”

In the end, the confusing photo became a portal to a forgotten chapter of a Kansas neighborhood, a reminder that even the most ordinary houses can hold extraordinary memories. Green’s story, while seemingly trivial, offers a window into how we store and retrieve memories of places, and how those places can echo back to us when we least expect it.