A canvas bag found near Cashtown Corners held something terrible – or did it?
The Coates Creek Horror
by Christopher Dodd
October returns, and with it the restless whisper of leaves. They stir old stories, and this disturbing mystery rises again from the murky depths of our past.
In 1944, Weird Tales published Ray Bradbury’s The Jar, the tale of a farmer who buys a carnival oddity: a jar containing a grotesque, unidentifiable thing. Neighbours who peer through the dark glass each see a different horror – revealing their own hidden fears, secret shames, and buried guilt. Half a century before Bradbury set pen to paper to write that story, something eerily similar unsettled the people of Creemore.
Cashtown Corners was little more than a dirt-road intersection with a tavern and hotel in June of 1894. Forests still pressed close, giving way reluctantly to farmland. One summer day, Mrs. William Coe followed a swampy path alongside Coates Creek when a foul stench caught her attention and drew her eyes to something half-buried in the muck. A canvas bag. Using a stick, she flipped it open – then recoiled, horrified.
She scraped soil over the bag and hurried home, but the image haunted her, and she soon told her neighbours what she had seen.
They listened, aghast. Most refused to look for themselves, but Alexander Kennedy went to the swamp. The smell led him to it like a beacon. Opening the bag, he considered what he saw. It was just as Mrs. Coe had said. He reburied it. Others followed. One after another, the bag was unearthed, and its contents confirmed.
Word spread until a Creemore doctor and a local journalist set out to investigate. The newspaper man gagged as the doctor examined the object in the bag and declared it to be – as everyone had said – the putrefied remains of a small infant. Together, they buried the bag once more and headed back to Creemore to report the incident to the authorities. Oddly, the police were slow to act.
In the meantime, the curious continued to dig. Each swore the same: the bag held a tiny child’s body.
But soon, new stories began to circulate, compelling the Creemore doctor to return with a medical student. By then, the muddy ground was churned with footprints. When they opened the bag, what they saw made them freeze. Inside, long dead and rotting, lay a fish.
The doctor swore he had not been mistaken, that he had seen arms, legs, human structures. Had someone switched the contents to conceal a crime? Or had fear and suggestion deceived him – and everyone else – into seeing what was never there? There was no answer.
The Mad River Star carried the bizarre account on July 12, 1894, under the headline A Horrible Find. Then the story was filed away into the bottom drawer of local history.
Even now, questions linger. If the remains had initially been those of a child, the implications are grim. Infanticide was not unheard of in rural Ontario. Yet if it had always been just a decomposing fish, then perhaps pareidolia and the power of suggestion had tricked every witness, even a trained physician. Each observer might have projected their own fears onto an ambiguous shape.
Yet another possibility whispers through this dark tale: that the bag held something neither wholly fish nor completely human, some weird form that blurred the line between the two. Folklore, across centuries, is full of such beings – half-child, half-creature – lurking at the edges of rivers and swamps. The rational mind rejects the notion even as the imagination is provoked.
Looking back at this story from 1894, we can’t help but feel dismayed by the actions of those involved, yet at the same time, we see echoes of ourselves. Over a century later, the story may seem absurd, yet the human impulse to see more than is truly there remains deeply familiar. Today, we peer through the dark glass of our devices into a different sort of swamp – an online murk – where misinformation and disinformation blur the line between fact and fiction.
The Coates Creek mystery remains unsolved. The bag is long gone, along with whatever it contained. We have only the story now – strange and perplexing – and like Bradbury’s jar, it poses another question: if you had been one of the people to venture into that swamp, driven by curiosity to dig up the bag, and look inside… what would you have seen?
Christopher Dodd is a teacher, writer, and filmmaker. Discover more about this story – and other regional mysteries – on his YouTube channel, Canadian Strange: www.youtube.com/@ CanadianStrange.
This story was unearthed in The Mad River Star, July 12, 1894.
