The Anomalous Archive

A complete, concise Archive account of a case whose surviving record does not support a full investigation.

Near Wallaceburg, present-day Ontario, Canada · Traditionally dated to November 1829

Then part of Upper Canada · Complete and free to read

In the story preserved by the McDonald family, the trouble began in a barn.

Three women were at work when a heavy pole fell from above. They moved it aside. Another came down. Then another.

No one could see what was dislodging them.

What followed would draw neighbours to a farm near Wallaceburg, in what is now south-western Ontario, Canada. Lead struck the windows. Objects moved. Fires appeared in different parts of the property, sometimes before the last had been put out.

By the time the story reached its best-known ending, the family’s troubles had become bound to a strange goose, a young woman with second sight and a bullet made of silver.

But another account survives. It offers a different date, a different ending—and a different understanding of whose home had been disturbed.

The House Beside the Water

The McDonalds lived near the Chenail Ecarté, also known as the Snye, in the country around the former Baldoon settlement.

Scottish families had arrived there in 1804 under a scheme promoted by Lord Selkirk. Flooding and disease undermined the settlement; its lands were sold in 1818. The later haunting belongs to this landscape of farms, waterways and a settlement whose early ambitions had already faltered. [3]

According to the family narrative, the disturbance soon reached the house.

Pieces of lead passed through the windows, leaving holes in the glass. Inside, they seemed to have lost their force. Stones appeared where nobody had seen them thrown. Furniture moved, and ordinary household objects became sources of alarm.

People came to watch. Some would later be named in the printed collection of statements; others entered the story through what relatives remembered them saying.

Then there were the fires.

The accounts describe outbreaks in different places, repeatedly extinguished and repeatedly renewed. The house was eventually destroyed. The barn was also lost.

In the surviving narrative, watching more closely did not make the danger easier to trace. [1]

The Book That Preserved the Story

The fullest familiar account comes through Neil T. McDonald, a son of John T. McDonald. The surviving 1910 booklet, published in Wallaceburg by W. Colwell, identifies itself as a third edition.

Its pages contain more than one kind of writing. A dramatic narrative leads into named statements and recollections. Some contributors describe incidents they say they witnessed. Others repeat what they were told.

The result is a substantial record of the tradition, but not a diary kept as each disturbance occurred.

Even within the collection, the dates do not settle into a single chronology. Its introductory material places the events between 1830 and 1840. A statement gives November 1829 as their beginning.

An earlier book complicates matters further.

In his History of the Ojebway Indians, published in 1861, Peter Jones describes disturbances affecting a Scottish family beside the River St. Clair. There are dying animals, moving utensils, projectiles and a house eventually consumed by fire.

Jones gives the year as 1824. He does not name the McDonalds or Baldoon in this passage.

The resemblance has led the account to be associated with the Baldoon story. Its differences remain part of the record. [1, 2]

A Visitor Who Heard Nothing

Jones’s connection was personal. While travelling as a missionary, he says, he visited the affected house and preached there.

Nothing unusual happened during his visit.

Another minister, the Reverend R. Phelps, told him that his own attempt to preach had been interrupted by small stones and pieces of lead. One had struck him. Jones says Phelps showed him the object.

It is a quieter passage than much of the later booklet: a visit, an uneventful service, a conversation with another man who said his experience had been different.

Yet it brings the account closer to the people involved. Jones was describing his own movements and a conversation he remembered, although his book appeared decades after the date he assigned to the disturbances. [2, pp. 157–159]

The Goose with the Black Head

In the family story, relief comes from outside the household.

John McDonald consults a young woman credited with second sight. She asks about an unfamiliar goose: a grey bird with a black head.

The bird, she tells him, is connected to the enemy responsible for his suffering. Ordinary lead will not end it. He must use silver.

McDonald prepares the bullet and fires. The goose is wounded in the wing.

When he visits an elderly neighbour with whom the family has quarrelled, he finds her with an injured arm. In the narrative, the two wounds reveal the same presence in different forms. The persecution ends.

It is this image that gives Baldoon its enduring shape: a bird moving among the ordinary farmyard flock, carrying a danger nobody else recognises.

The silver weapon and the matching wound belong to a wider tradition of witch stories. At Baldoon, they give the disorder a cause, a human antagonist and a decisive ending. The published account preserves that belief; it cannot establish that the accused woman caused the family’s misfortunes. [1]

Another Ending

Silver appears in Jones’s account as well. The goose does not.

He describes meeting a man named Troyer, summoned to deal with the supposed witchcraft. Jones says Troyer confidently declared that he could end the trouble.

What followed reached Jones second-hand. He was told that Troyer fired guns loaded with silver bullets, believing these could harm witches.

Then a neighbouring magistrate reportedly issued a warrant for Troyer’s arrest. Warned of it, he left.

Jones closes that part of the episode with the practitioner’s departure. His passage neither reproduces the warrant nor gives the wounded-goose resolution found in the later family narrative.

The shared silver bullets draw the accounts together. Their endings pull them apart. [2, pp. 158–159]

A Different Memory of the Land

Jones also asked a chief of Walpole Island what he thought had happened.

He records the name as Pashegee-ghegwaskum. The explanation he attributes to him begins before the settler’s house was built.

The place had belonged to the Mamagwasewug—beings Jones translates as “fairies”. When the newcomer occupied their home, they withdrew to a poplar grove.

Later, the settler cleared and burned that grove too.

The disturbances, in this account, followed a second displacement. The beings’ patience had ended, and they were destroying the property of the man who had destroyed their home.

Here, the story turns on a different question. The household asks what has entered its land. The explanation asks who was there first.

These words reach us through Jones, an Ojibwe Methodist missionary writing from a Christian perspective. They preserve an interpretation attributed to a particular speaker, rather than a statement of what everyone on Walpole Island believed.

They also preserve something the familiar goose story can obscure: the same troubled house could be understood through very different histories of the surrounding land. [2, p. 159]

What Might Have Happened?

A human agency could explain some of the reported activity. Projectiles can be thrown, objects moved and fires deliberately started. The later narrative contains hostility between neighbours, but it supplies no demonstrated culprit.

Accidents could also account for individual incidents. A falling pole or a fire need not share a cause with the next disturbance. What is difficult to recover is the sequence before recollection and storytelling joined the episodes together.

Nor are these possibilities mutually exclusive. A household might have suffered accidents, harassment and mistaken impressions during the same period.

But none of those suggestions reconstructs the case. We have no reliable timetable against which to test who was present, what they could have done, or how each outbreak began.

The supernatural explanations offered their listeners something more complete: an unseen enemy, a violated dwelling, a reason for the misfortune. Their clarity belongs to the surviving stories. The original events remain harder to reach.

Archive Assessment

Baldoon has a recognisable historical setting and a substantial published tradition. Its witnesses are not all anonymous, and Jones’s account includes a visit he says he made himself.

That is enough to take the history of the story seriously. It is not enough to establish the cause of the disturbances.

The gap between events and publication, the conflicting dates and the different endings prevent a confident reconstruction. Jones personally saw nothing unusual. The later statements vary between claimed observation and inherited recollection.

What survives most clearly is the effort to make sense of a household’s troubles.

For one telling, the answer waits among the geese. For another, it lies in a grove that has been burned away.

Between them stands the house beside the water—and the question of what happened there before the story acquired its endings.

Read the Historical Accounts

The two documents below preserve the differences in the story as well as its familiar incidents. Both are already in English.

Continue Through the Archive

A century and a half later, another family’s account of a troubled house would reach a much wider audience. Follow the testimony, publicity and disputes in 112 Ocean Avenue: The Amityville Case.