The Baldoon Mystery

One of Canada’s oldest documented poltergeist cases, 1820s

The Baldoon Mystery is the ghost story of Wallaceburg, Ontario, and many Canadians still call it the country's greatest. In 1829, the story goes, the family of John McDonald lived in a two-storey frame house in the Scottish settlement of Baldoon, near Wallaceburg, when the attacks began.

At first it was small things, lead bullets striking people harmlessly as if thrown by unseen hands, then a nearly constant bombardment. Stones and bullets came in through the windows. The family heard the sound of people marching through their kitchen. Dishes of water rose from the table, the tongs and shovel banged together on the hearth, chairs and tables crashed over, and the kettle threw off its lid and dashed itself on the floor. A knife with a ten-inch blade flew against the window frame and stuck fast. Fires broke out around the house until it burned to the ground, and the troubles followed the family to their father's home nearby. A local schoolteacher, Robert Barker, tried exorcisms; two men who stayed in the house spent their time putting out fires; a British Army captain named Lewis Bennett came to solve it and had his own bullets soaked in the river and thrown back at him.

The end came by witchcraft. The McDonalds travelled some 80 miles to consult a girl said to have second sight, who blamed a witch nearby and told them to make a silver bullet and shoot a black-headed goose with it; wound the bird, she said, and you wound the witch. McDonald broke the goose's wing, then came upon an old woman in a rocking chair on her porch with a broken arm, and the disturbances stopped.

Almost everything rests on one book. John's son Neil McDonald published the full account in 1871, first serialised in a Wallaceburg newspaper, 42 years after the events, when he had been about five years old at the time. He included statements from 26 relatives and neighbours, but as the skeptic Brian Dunning points out, it seems unlikely so many eyewitnesses were still alive to be interviewed, and the earlier accounts that survive are brief. In 1894 a Toronto Globe reporter tracked down one of Neil's longest-quoted witnesses, L. A. McDougal, whose own statement never mentioned silver bullets or the girl with second sight. Asked what he thought of the book, McDougal said that most of it was lies.

That has not dimmed the legend. The Baldoon Mystery remains Wallaceburg's own, retold in local histories and museum exhibits for nearly two centuries.