The Mystery of Shami’s Ever-Growing Toy Basket
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In 1975, my wife and I moved from Florissant in north St. Louis County to Ballwin in west St. Louis County.
Moving across St. Louis County was part of a larger journey that began with growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, where so many of the family stories and memories in this collection first took shape.
Ballwin was still being developed then, and we bought a beautiful new home for $52,000.
That sounded like a fortune to me in 1975.
Fortunately, my wife worked for a savings and loan that offered certain employees favorable mortgage rates, which helped make the house possible.
It was quite a change for us.
The house sat in a heavily wooded area with large oak trees and what seemed like a forest stretching behind the property.
Today, much of suburban St. Louis is filled in with houses, subdivisions and shopping centers, but back then you could still buy a house and have something that felt surprisingly close to wilderness behind your backyard.
Those years still feel connected in my memory to the kind of neighborhood life I wrote about in Halloween with popcorn balls, when familiar houses, family routines, and little traditions became the things we remembered decades later.
Not long after we settled in, we added another member to the family.
Her name was Shami.
Shami
Shami was a Shetland Sheepdog—a Sheltie—a small herding breed originally from Scotland’s Shetland Islands.
She was smart, energetic and always ready to play.
And Shami loved toys.
Especially squeaky toys.
Of course, Shami didn’t believe squeaky toys should remain squeaky for very long.
Whenever she received a new one, one of her first objectives was to locate the squeaker and chew it out.
Mission accomplished.
Then the remains would join her growing collection.
She loved chasing toys when we threw them, bringing them back, and playing tug-of-war. Before long, she had an entire basket filled with them.
Every trip to the grocery store seemed to produce another one.
Dog food?
Check.
Groceries?
Check.
Another toy for Shami?
Apparently mandatory.
Eventually I looked at that overflowing basket and decided this was getting ridiculous.
Shami had enough toys.
I told my wife that maybe we should stop buying them for a while.
She agreed.
And we did.
At least I thought we did.
Something Strange Was Happening
Over the next several weeks, I began noticing something peculiar.
There seemed to be more toys in Shami’s basket.
At first I didn’t think much about it.
Then there were more.
And more.
Finally I said something to my wife that probably sounded slightly more accusatory than the situation warranted.
“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to buy Shami any more toys for a while.”
She looked at me.
“I haven’t bought her any.”
Then she told me something even stranger.
She had noticed the new toys too.
She assumed I was buying them.
Apparently she found it amusing that I had made such a big deal about Shami having too many toys and then seemed to be secretly bringing more home, so she decided not to say anything.
Now we had a mystery.
I wasn’t buying them.
She wasn’t buying them.
And unless Shami had somehow obtained a credit card, somebody was supplying that dog with toys.
The Perfect Dog
There was something else unusual about Shami.
Whenever she needed to go outside, we’d simply open the back door.
She’d head into the woods behind the house, do whatever dogs do when their owners aren’t watching, and eventually come back.
We didn’t have to chase her.
We didn’t have to call her.
She didn’t disappear for hours.
She always came home.
We were proud of the fact that Shami never wandered off.
As it turned out, we had seriously misunderstood the situation.
Shami wandered off all the time.
She just always came home when she was finished robbing graves.
One day I decided to do a little exploring in the woods behind our property.
I had never gone very far back there before, and I was curious about what was beyond our little patch of forest.
As I walked through the trees, I came across something I hadn’t expected.
A pet cemetery.
There were small grave markers scattered among the trees.
Dogs.
Cats.
Beloved pets whose owners had buried them there.
And on some of the graves, grieving owners had left little memorials.
Including…
dog toys.
I stood there looking at them.
Then I thought about Shami.
I thought about that mysteriously expanding basket in our house.
I thought about all those trips she had been making into the woods.
And suddenly everything made perfect sense.
The Case of the Mysterious Toys Was Solved
Shami wasn’t simply going outside to do her business.
She was robbing the cemetery.
Our wonderfully obedient dog who always came home without being called had apparently been making side trips to the pet cemetery, helping herself to toys left on the graves, and bringing the loot home.
She wasn’t getting lost in the woods.
She had a route.
And every so often she returned from work with another contribution to her collection.
I went back to the house laughing.
When I told my wife what I had discovered, she thought it was every bit as funny as I did.
For weeks each of us had suspected the other of secretly buying Shami toys.
Neither of us had considered the obvious third suspect.
The dog.
Once we stopped laughing, I suggested that perhaps Shami needed a new name.
Igor.
My wife laughed but declined. Apparently she wasn’t enthusiastic about owning a cemetery-robbing dog named after Frankenstein’s assistant.
For the next few days I tried another suggestion.
“How about Dog of Frankenstein?”
That proposal was rejected even faster.
Apparently my wife had no appreciation for literary horror.
So Shami remained Shami, although I occasionally suspected she was conducting unauthorized archaeological research whenever she disappeared into those woods.
Shami the Grave Robber
I suppose I should have been horrified.
Those toys had been left by people who loved and missed their pets.
But I also couldn’t help imagining Shami’s perspective on the situation.
She didn’t understand cemeteries.
She didn’t understand memorials.
She didn’t understand that somebody had lovingly placed a favorite toy beside the grave of a dog they missed.
Shami understood one thing:
There were perfectly good dog toys sitting unattended in the woods.
Finders keepers.
And apparently she had been operating under that philosophy for weeks.
Funny or not, there was also the matter of those toys belonging on the graves where grieving pet owners had left them.
So eventually I built a fence along the back boundary of our property, separating our yard from the woods and the pet cemetery beyond it.
Shami’s career in grave robbing was officially over.
I’m not sure she ever understood why.
From her point of view, somebody had simply built a fence between her and the greatest free dog-toy store in Missouri.
The Things You Remember
It’s funny what survives in your memory after fifty years.
Some memories stick because they were dramatic, while others survive because they were simply part of family life—like the day Dad took us plane watching or the mystery of a Sheltie whose toy basket kept filling itself.
I remember that house in Ballwin.
I remember the huge oak trees.
I remember the woods behind our property.
I remember paying $52,000 for a house and thinking we had spent an absolute fortune.
And I remember a little Sheltie named Shami with a basket of toys that somehow kept multiplying.
There have been many dogs in my life since then.
But Shami holds one distinction none of the others ever managed to achieve.
She was the only dog I ever owned who became a grave robber.
She was smart enough to make my wife and me suspect each other, clever enough to bring the evidence home and put it right under our noses, and disciplined enough to return from every expedition without being called.
Her crime spree ended only when I built a fence.
And despite my suggestion, we never did rename her Igor.
🗣️ Your Turn
Every family that has owned a dog seems to have at least one story about something that dog did that nobody ever forgot.
Maybe yours escaped from the yard, stole food from the kitchen, buried things in strange places, brought home something it definitely wasn’t supposed to have—or somehow managed to outsmart the entire family.
Shami’s mysterious collection of stolen dog toys became one of those stories in our family. More than fifty years later, I can still picture that overflowing toy basket and remember the moment I discovered where all those toys were coming from.
So what about you?
Was there a dog—or another family pet—from your childhood or younger years that became a family legend?
Tell us the story in the comments. And if your dog was ever involved in anything worse than grave robbing, I definitely want to hear about it.
📚 Continue Exploring
Shami’s criminal career is only one of those family stories that became funnier—and more valuable—with the passing of time. Here are a few more memories from the world I grew up in.
🚗 Route 66 — The Mother Road
Before interstate travel became routine, Route 66 was part highway, part adventure, and part American mythology.
💡 Come Home When the Streetlights Come On
A time when kids disappeared into the neighborhood for hours and one simple instruction usually told us when the day’s adventures were over.
🚲 How Did We Ever Make It to Adulthood?
Bicycle ramps, homemade go-carts, disappearing for hours and a childhood with considerably fewer safety precautions than today’s kids would recognize.
🪁 Kids Didn’t Need Batteries
Before screens and electronics dominated childhood, imagination could turn a backyard, neighborhood or patch of woods into an entire world.
⚠️ Bunker Rule
Before anyone calls the authorities, Shami’s grave-robbing career ended sometime in the 1970s, and I believe the statute of limitations has expired.
This is a place for swapping stories about the dogs, cats, and other animals that became part of our families—and occasionally embarrassed the people who owned them.
If your dog stole the Thanksgiving turkey, destroyed the furniture, escaped from the yard, terrorized the mailman, or brought something home that definitely belonged somewhere else, we want to hear about it.
Just keep it friendly. We’re judging the pets here, not their owners.
And please don’t be too hard on Shami. As far as she was concerned, those toys were just sitting there.
📌 Bunker Notice
This story is based on my memories of Shami, our Shetland Sheepdog, and our home in Ballwin, Missouri, beginning in 1975.
More than fifty years have passed, so some small details and conversations have naturally faded. The central events, however—the mysteriously multiplying toys, discovering the pet cemetery in the woods behind our property, realizing where Shami had been getting her toys, and eventually building a fence that ended her expeditions—are the story as I remember it.
The dialogue and humorous descriptions are recreations of those memories rather than verbatim transcripts of conversations from 1975.
The American Time Capsule preserves stories like this because family history isn’t made only from weddings, birthdays, photographs, and major events. Sometimes it’s a little Sheltie disappearing into the woods and coming home with somebody else’s squeaky toy.
And for the record, despite my suggestion, my wife never allowed me to rename her Igor.