1925

In 1925, a decade after Jud Crandall buried his own dog Spot in the Pet Sematary, the place once again became the focal point of a child's confrontation with death. Billy Holloway, a local boy of about ten, lost his dog to poisoned bait—a fate that, according to Jud, was the consensus explanation in town. The dog, a mongrel that Billy loved deeply, had to be buried, and the task fell to the children of Ludlow.

The Funeral and the Encyclopedia

Billy's parents were initially hesitant about a burial in the Pet Sematary because their son had been suffering from terrible nightmares—dreams of corpses rising from the ground. Despite these fears, the funeral went ahead. Two older boys, the Hall twins Dean and Dana, built a coffin for the dog. A dispute arose over who would serve as pallbearers: the Hall twins argued they deserved the honor since they had made the coffin and because they were a "matched set," while Billy insisted that only close friends, not "jest any carpenter," should carry his dog. The argument nearly came to blows until Billy's sister, Mandy Holloway, fetched the fourth volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. She opened it to the entry on FUNERALS, which featured a picture of Queen Victoria's ceremonial send-off with dozens of pallbearers. Mandy declared, "When it's a ceremonial funeral of state, you can have as many as you want! The book says so!" This settled the dispute: about twenty children lined up, each given a wildflower, and they processed to the Pet Sematary, mimicking the grand funeral in the encyclopedia.

Resolution and Legacy

The funeral marked the end of Billy Holloway's bad dreams about the Pet Sematary. He mourned his dog, finished his mourning, and moved on. Billy later became a state senator and ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, though he lost that race just before the Korean War. The story, told by Jud Crandall to Louis Creed on the evening after Norma Crandall's heart attack, served as a counterpoint to the more troubling events surrounding the Pet Sematary. Jud used it to illustrate that for most children, the place was a healthy, if intense, introduction to the reality of death—a necessary step toward making an uneasy peace with a truth that never goes away. The episode also highlighted the community's long-standing, almost ritualistic relationship with the Pet Sematary, a place where children's grief and creativity found expression in the rude markers and carefully tended graves that had accumulated over generations.