Mysterious Fires.
The American Institute of Scientific Research has been requested by the Editor of the “Halifax (Nova Scotia) Herald” to investigate a remarkable series of incidents which, on the testimony of responsible persons, have occurred in a so-called haunted house at Antigonish, situated in grim isolation in the norther extremity of Nova Scotia, one hundred miles from Halifax.
The facts, as related to Dr Walter Pierce, director of the New York Institute, reveal that since 1916 strange things have happened in the house, which belongs to Mr Alexander Macdonald. Mysterious fires were constantly breaking out in various parts of the house, and one morning Mr Macdonald found cinders on the top of the stove and hole burned in the ceiling. A few minutes later he saw the lounge in the sitting-room was on fire, and, rushing back to the stove, he discovered the chair upon which he had been sitting was ablaze.
A horse which he tied up in the barn was found fastened one morning in an entirely different manner, and the same thing happened on another occasion with another horse.
Mr MacDonald left, but permitted three young men of the neighbourhood to spend the night in his house. From five p.m. until daybreak they were busily engaged in extinguishing thirty-eight separate fires. Recently a police detective and a correspondent of the “Halifax Herald” spent two nights in th ehouse with Mr Macdonald and a neighbour, and while no fires occurred, there were many unexplained noises. The reporter asserts that he felt a strange slap on the arm.
The detective and the newspaper representative declare themselves baffled. A reward of £50 has been offered to anyone who can prove that the occurrences are not of supernatural origin.
Gloucestershire Echo, 1st March 1922.
Ghost’s Exploits.
Said to have started fires and killed cattle.
From our own correspondent. New York, Sunday.
Dr Walter Prince, director of the American Institute for Scientific Research, arrived at Halifax (Nova Scotia), yesterday to investigate the much-discussed ghost of Antigonish. He will to-day go to the haunted house near Caledonian Mills which the former tenant left several months ago, asserting that some occult power started two fires, killed several head of farm stock, and thoroughly frightened his family.
A detective and a newspaper reporter who recently spent a night in the house reported that they had been slapped by an unseen hand for their temerity. The detective formally reported that the fires had been started by some agency other than human.
Nottingham Journal, 6th March 1922.
Fire-raising Spooks.
Scientists Called In To Help.
Family driven out of haunted house.
Whatever it is that has been lighting fires, untying cattle, and laying unseen hands on investigating detectives at the Haunted House of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, will shortly face the cold, stern probe of science, if the American Institute for Scientific Research undertakes the investigation requested in a telegram to Dr Walter Frinklin Pierce, director of the Institute.
This is the latest development in a mystery that has routed a family from its home, sent strange rumours through the countryside, and finally stirred the authorities and the press to attempts at solution, all of which have been baffled.
The Haunted House, as it is now called by general consent, stands in grim isolation at the northern end of Nova Scotia. Antigonish is 100 miles from Halifax. For twenty years it was the home of Alexander MacDonald and his wife and their adopted daughter, Mary Ellen, and it had been the home of MacDonald’s father before him. In 1916 strange things began to happen on the old MacDonald farm. Cattle which MacDonald had tied securely in the evening were found loose in the morning. A horse fastened in his own way when he left the animal was fastened in an entirely different way when he returned. He sold the horse and bought another, and the same thing happened. The barn got a bad name among the superstitious in that region.
Then trouble began in the house. Fires broke out in unexpected places and at strange times. Coming downstairs one morning to light the fire in the stove, MacDonald found cinders on top of the stove, and, looking up, saw a hole burned in the ceiling. A few minutes later he saw that a lounge in an adjoining room was on fire. He rushed to extinguish it, and, coming back, found the chair on which he had been sitting ablaze.
Three young men of the neighbourhood took to solve the mystery by passing a night in the house. They are said to have found thirty-eight separate fires between five o’clock in the evening and eight o’clock next morning. MacDonald and his family left the house next day. The weird situation attracted attention, and got some publicity. The marks of numerous fires are plainly to be seen on floor, walls, ceilings, and furniture.
Recently Detective Peter Owen Carroll and Mr Harold B Whidden, a newspaperman, joined in an attempt to get at the bottom of the trouble. They passed two nights in the house with the owner and a neighbour. As a result of their experiences Carroll declares himself baffled, the newspaper man admits he is puzzled, and a reward has been offered to any one who can prove the occurrences are not of supernatural origin.
There were no fires while they were there, but there were unexpected noises, and the newspaper man felt a strange slap on the arm.
The American Institute for Scientific Research is the main body of which the American Society for Psychical Research is Section B.
Dundee Evening Telegraph, 8th March 1922.
Farm Ghost Mystery.
American Psychologists’ experience.
Possible explanation of strange fires.
Nova Scotia’s latest ghost hunt has come to a conclusion, the party of American psychologists having ended their investigation and returned home without making announcement of the result, although it is stated that they have solved the mystery. Reports have been circulated in Nova Scotia for some time about extraordinary manifestations at the home of Alexander MacDonald, in the back country district of Antigonish. It was declared that mysterious attacks had been made on the cattle, that there had been a series of apparently occult fires, followed by disturbances in the family, which were attributed to ghostly manifestations, until eventually the MacDonald family were driven from their home and sought refuge in another house. A Halifax newspaper took the matter in hand, and sent a reporter and a detective to visit the deserted house, where they complained of extraordinary manifestations during the night and mysterious slapping of their faces and other assaults which made them refuse to stay longer in the homestead.
The story attained such publicity (says the Daily Telegraph) that it attracted the attention of the American Institute of Psychological Research, who sent their investigating officer, Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, with a party, to look into the alleged psychic manifestations. The American party stayed several days in the MacDonald homestead without encountering anything unusual, and eventually induced the family to return in the hope of solving the mystery. Even then they did not succeed in obtaining an interview with the ghostly visitor.
The American party, having now abandoned the ghostly hunt, are expected to arrive in Halifax on Tuesday en route for home. Dr Prince is preparing a report, and has refused to allow members of the party to give any information until this report has been presented to the American Institute for Psychological Research, although he intimates that he has solved the mystery and laid the Antigonish ghost. The whole episode is treated with a certain amount of sceptical amusement by the Canadian newspapers, which are inclined to be incredulous of ghost stories.
While Dr Walter Price, the American scientist, is hunting for the ghost, one of his colleagues, Mr Edward O’Briein, of Boston, makes the striking announcement that the mysterious fires at the farm house are probably due to no spirit, but to the wireless flashes between the two most powerful radio stations on the Atlantic coast.
The ghost farm, Mr. O’Brien says, is situated in the direct line of the Well Fleet and Glace Bay stations, and during certain static conditions there have been many other mysterious fires reported along this route. Mr O’Brien says that Marry Ellen probably mischievously braided the cows’ tails, and that the Halifax newspaper reporter who declared that he had received a ghostly slap, was probably the victim of an imagination excited by tremendous concentration.
Nottingham Evening Post, 14th March, 1922
New York, March 16 (“Times” Correspondent).
The mystery of at least one of the “Aerial Ariels” which have recently been troubling the inhabitants of several towns in the United States and Canada by such antics as setting fire to houses, hitting people from behind, and tying the tails of cattle together has been solved by Dr Walter Prince, Director of the American Society of Scientific Research.
Dr Prince devoted several days investigating strange happenings of this description at a farmhouse near Antigonish (Nova Scotia). On his return to Boston he has published a long report in which he demolishes all the fantastic theories advanced by spiritualists and others, and bluntly declares that the “ghost” is Mary Ellen, the maid-of-all-work. Mary Ellen lighted the mysterious fires, he alleges; Mary Ellen tied the cows’ tails together; Mary Ellen reduced amateur investigators to such a state of nerves that they imagined they were being hit from behind by unseen hands.
Hartlepool Northern Daily Mail, 17th March 1922.
Girl as “ghost”.
Mystery of haunted farm cleared up.
Source of the “occult” fires.
It was Mary Ellen, the 15-year-old foster child of Mr and Mrs Alexander Macdonald, who started the mysterious fires in the “haunted” farmhouse at Caledonia Mills, Nova Scotia. Such (says the Halifax, N.S., correspondent of the “Daily Chronicle”) is the conclusion of Dr Walter Franklin Prince, the New York spook hunter, as indicated in his report on his investigation there.
The braiding of the cows’ tails, and the transference of chained horses and cattle from one stanchion to another, which so greatly perturbed the aged farmer, Dr Prince also ascribes to the girl. As to the slaps which the reporter, Whidden, and Carroll, the detective, claimed were administered to them by ghostly hands, and the noises they heard during their previous sojourn in th ehouse, Dr Prince says: “The sounds and other impressions shared by Messrs. Whidden and Carroll were, judging by the signs they bear in common with other and much larger investigated occurrences of a similar kind, supernormal. This does not necessarily mean spiritualistic, as it may be that some force, not yet understood by science, of a psycho-physiological character was in operation.”
This is taken to mean that they merely thought they were slapped!
Eminent experts, such as Professor Harris Rogers, the inventor of underground wireless, had, in response to inquiries, scouted the theory that the fires were caused by electrical currents between the radio stations at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.
Dr Prince found hidden on a beam a bottle containing an odourless inflammable liquid with shich the wet paper and clothes that burst into flames had evidently been sprinkled. He found that the burns on the wall paper were never above the reach of a person five feet tall, which is the height of the girl in the case. “Over the bed, which fills one end of a room,” he says, “they were never higher than such a person, kneeling, could reach, and in muddy or dewy weather one would not wish to stand on the bed.”
Other slightly higher places on the woodwork were always set on fire by pieces of cloth which could easily have been tossed, for “in a recess over the door where a fire occurred were found fragments of a glove undisturbed, and in the midst of them a match where it could not have been prior to the fire, nor have been placed there after its extinguishment.”
But Dr Prince is emphatically of opinion that the girl is not mentally culpable. “She is mentally exceedingly young for her years,” he says, “and within the past year has had singular ‘dream states’ from which it was difficult to rouse her. It is very probable she was the victim of altered states of consciousness about which psychology has learned so much of late.” In other words, she did not know what she was doing.
Lancashire Evening Post, 17th March 1922.
Hunting the Poltergeist.
I do not know whether I am more amazed or amused by the report of Dr. Walter Prince, Director of the American Society of Psychical Research, on the Antigonish spirit-manifestations, a summary of which appeared in the Times last Friday. Antigonish is in Nova Scotia, and at a farmhouse in its vicinity there have been strange happenings which have lost nothing at the hands of the American reporters. Strange fires broke out apparently spontaneously on the walls of the house, spirit hands tied the cows’ tails together, and boxed the ears of the investigators. Dr. Prince accordingly went to Boston to hunt the poltergeist. He has succeeded in catching him, or rather her, for the “earth bound” spirit turns out to be the maid-of-all-work, Mary Ellen.
But having discovered that it was Mary Ellen’s hands which kindled the fires, tied the cows’ tails together, and boxed the investigators’ ears, Dr. Prince boldly advances the theory that she is neither a perverted humorist nor a criminal. He considers her strange behaviour to be due to an “altered consciousness” during which she is “impelled by discarnate intelligence.” That is the sort of demoniacal possession which usually is effectually cast out of children by means of a good spanking, and if Mary Ellen is not too old I should recommend the Antigonish farmer’s wife to try it. Otherwise we shall find Mary Ellen developing into a professional medium and giving her manifestations at the British College of Psychical Science, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle vouching the genuineness of her gifts as a medium.
Truth, 22th March 1922.