If it weren’t for John Robert Colombo, writer, educator and filmmaker Christopher Dodd would never have written Unseen Thing: The Mulmur Hills Poltergeist.
It’s early August and Dodd shares the story of how he and his wife purchased a country home in Mulmur Township in 2014. Mulmur is north of Orangeville, Ontario, and with his own experience of hauntings locked in the back of his head, he googled “Mulmur” and “haunted.”
The first thing that came up was Colombo’s book Strange But True: Canadian Stories of Horror and Terror.
“He had collected three or four articles about a farm in Mulmur owned by one Alfred Dobson, and there had been some séances there.”
The Dobsons had been frightened away from their homestead in late fall 1930. It was during the Great Depression and many farmers were losing their land. That tract of land was a bit of a curiosity for the locals and the whole province and it was 12 kilometres south of Dodd’s new home.
“I went to the Museum of Dufferin and made some inquiries there, and the curator at the time said, ‘Oh, you want to know about the Dobson Spook Farm?’”
That led Dodd down the path of 1920s horse mutilations, shaking kitchens, physical threats to the youngest Dobson family member and a full-fledged media circus that would make even Ed and Lorraine Warren envious. The family even went to Queen’s Park looking for help, and that’s when the Toronto newspapers — the Toronto Daily Star, the Globe, the Mail and Empire and the Toronto Evening Telegram — caught wind of it. That prompted spiritualist Ivan Hutchins to explore the events surrounding the Dobsons.
“A horse was found with its tongue missing? I was, ‘Well, this is getting better by the second,’” Dodd said. “I asked, ‘How many people have come here asking about this?’ And (the curator) said, ‘You’re the first.’”
He was given a folder full of local newspaper clippings about the events from the 1930s, and he wondered if it could lend itself to a book. He borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke’s idea of cataloguing phenomena as recurrent features and rated the paranormal phenomena on a scale of one to 10.
Poltergeist cases have been a common fixture within the Canadian paranormal fabric. From the Baldoon Settlement in Wallaceburg, Ontario to the Esther Cox and the Amherst Mystery in Nova Scotia to the Dagg Poltergeist in Shawville, Quebec, Canada has been peppered by instances of psychic phenomena.
With the Dobson case, Dodd looked at objects that seem to disappear from one place and reappear elsewhere, balls of light and disembodied voices.
“It turns out that out of the 15 recurrent features from other Canadian cases, the Dobson case shares 11,” he said. “So, at the end of the book, I basically say, ‘Whether you believe this stuff or not or whether you believe what the Dobsons were alleging happened to them, this story belongs on the shelf next to those other cases.’”
Although Dodd gives credit to Colombo for conjuring up the idea in his head, a past experience that invoked the curiosity to dig into the inexplicable in rural Ontario was when he and his wife were renovating their Richmond Hill home in 2003.
“We removed the 1970s red shag carpet and that cheap wood panelling that was so characteristic of the period,” he recalled. “Anyways, we gutted it right down to the cinder-block floor. I even had to smash it up with a sledgehammer to rearrange some of the pipes for plumbing down there.”
Then they started to experience some “rather unusual” things in the house when nothing had happened before.
First, it was the odd thud and bang that would elicit a call-out of concern.
“I’d be downstairs and I’d hear a bang upstairs and I would holler up to my wife, ‘Are you okay? Did you fall off a chair or something?’” Dodd recalled. “And she would say, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’”
The thumping escalated one night while they were asleep. Their dog hopped up and showed its concern, as did their cat. Dodd said he hopped out of bed thinking they had an intruder in the house. When he opened the door to his bedroom and entered the hall, there was nothing there.
They would experience further phenomena like random broken glass and moved items, including his guitar off its stand with the strings down on the floor.
“I’m a disciple of the scientific method, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it,” he said. “So, I started keeping a journal and writing down air temperature, air pressure inside, outside. All of the science stuff looking for some pattern. And there wasn’t one.”
Dodd uses his scientific method to wrap up his book. He provides two conclusions: one that satisfies those of a skeptical mindset and those of a believer mindset.
Unseen Thing will be available for purchase September 29 through Dundurn Press or at your local bookstore. A book launch is scheduled for October 1 at 7:00 p.m. at the Shelburne Public Library.
Photos courtesy of Christopher Dodd