A small dog survived a Wizard of Oz-esque ordeal in North Carolina on Monday, when it was swept away in a tornado only to return home a few hours later.
Brittany Memory of Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., says her lost-and-found Yorkshire Terrier, Penny, was swept away when a tornado whipped past her house Monday night. She was in bed when the EF-3 twister came through.
“I actually thought someone was in the house, and I leaned up and turned on the flashlight on my phone,” she told local station WECT. “And about that time it sounded like a train.”
The tornado caused chaos inside Memory’s home, forcing her to scoop up her son and run to the closet to survive.
“I didn’t have time,” she said. “If I had waited a second, me and my son would have been out the back door. I didn’t have time to grab Penny.”
The twister swept the mirrors off Memory’s walls. It also sucked up the sheets on her mattress, and her little dog, too.
“It ripped the sheets off my bed. She was just bundled up in it,” Memory said.
She says she was “terrified” and assumed that Penny had died, although she tried to assure her son that the dog would be OK.
“I just kept telling my little boy, ‘She’s an animal, she’ll be OK, God’s got her. Everything’s going to be all right. We’re safe and everything can be replaced, we can’t.’”
Memory says Penny managed to find her way home a few hours after the storm, and was in good shape despite the brush with disaster.
“She just had a little bit of glass stuck to her,” Memory said. “We took her to the vet and everything is OK.”
Memory got relatively lucky during the tornado, which toppled 18-wheelers, killed three people and injured 10 others.
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