Christopher Dodd has unearthed a century old mystery in his new book Unseen Thing: The Mulmur Hills Poltergeist.

Having been fascinated with strange stories for as long as he can remember, Dodd was sucked in by the story of the “Dobson Spook Farm,” which made headlines in local and national newspapers. He combed through those articles to piece together the story of the Dobson family, whose members claimed to have been pestered by an unknown force while living on a farm on the Fourth Line of Mulmur.

“I’ve been pre-wired for dark and strange stories ever since I was a kid,” said Dodd.

“I’ve become fascinated with Canadian folklore... When people are talking about their strange experiences, whether they’ve had an encounter with a ghost, or they’ve seen some something in the woods, or a UFO in the sky, there’s almost never any physical evidence. There’s just their word and their earnestness to what they experienced, and then that story it gets passed around over time.”

In the book, Dodd recounts how at the beginning of 1930 the Dobson family began hearing “odd scratching in the walls, weird thuds, loud solitary knocks, and minute rattles of items in the kitchen. These sounds grew slowly louder, occurring with great frequency and lasting longer, eventually separating themselves from the rhythm and pattern of the house’s natural clamour.”

The noises were dismissed and explained away. This was during the Great Depression and the family had bigger worries.

“The noises in the house dialled themselves up and asserted their presence, seemingly doing so in unison with the rising tension among the house’s inhabitants,” writes Dodd. “A psychological screw was tightening. It was now painfully clear that Alfred and Oliver could no longer continue making mortgage payments on the farm that father and son co-owned.”

Dodd draws on archival material to retell the family’s claim that the unseen thing became stronger, moving objects and opening windows.

The book, a decade in the making, was mostly written at his weekend home in Mulmur but Dodd said he had his own strange encounter in 2003 at his Richmond Hill home. That is where, for a time during a basement renovation project, he and his wife heard strange noises and found objects inexplicably relocated.

“When I was reading the old newspaper articles and the Dobsons are describing what happened to them, I guess I could relate to it on some level,” said Dodd.

“I don’t consider myself a believer. I’m just interested in it.”

He said when the odd events happened at his house in 2003 and 2004 he began collecting data, looking for patterns.

He said he took a rational approach to the Dobson story, labeled the Dobson Spook Farm even though the Dobsons never claimed to have seen a ghost, asking, what happened to these people? Was this a hoax? Was this a bunch of nonsense?

“Because that is still very much kind of in the air even today,” said Dodd. “There was very much an air of, oh, it was a bunch of foolishness. It was nonsense. But when I was looking at the story, I wanted to really like give it a fair chance. Could they have been trying to accurately state what happened to them, and were they sincerely trying to reach out for help in trying to understand what happened?”

Dodd said during his research, those patterns he was looking for started to emerge.

Unexplained livestock mutilations (four years earlier their horse had been mysteriously injured, its neck slashed. A horse was also found dead with its tongue cut out), exploding windows, projectiles, balls of light witnessed by many during a seance, all make a case that something truly strange was happening at the Dobson farm.

Image: The Dobson Spook Farm, circa 1940