Caledonia Mills

This case is unusual because it was investigated properly, at the time, by someone who wrote down what he did. Walter Franklin Prince, principal research officer of the American Society for Psychical Research, travelled up at the request of W. H. Dennis, proprietor of the Halifax Herald and Mail, on the condition that he be in absolute control of the investigation and that he report whatever he found. He and his colleagues occupied the empty house from the afternoon of Tuesday 7 March 1922 until the morning of Monday 13 March — six nights, the last of them alone. Nothing happened while he was there. So he worked on the walls instead. Prince measured every burn mark still visible, room by room, recording its height from the floor. His central finding was a negative one: in no room was there a single burn on wallpaper higher than a person five feet tall could reach. Every wall in the house had an untouched upper band, from one foot three inches deep in the bedroom and parlour to one foot eleven in the dining room, and it began exactly where that reach left off. Over the bed in the small bedroom the burns stopped at the line a five-foot person kneeling on the mattress could reach — and no higher, though Prince, at five foot seven, could easily reach the next crack. In a recess above a door he found a match lying among the remains of a half-burned cotton glove, undisturbed, with the deepest burns in the wood immediately above it. On beams in the kitchen he found bottles of kerosene, turpentine and separator oil, the last of which is odourless and will burn on damp paper. Fires never started when the family was out of the house. They never started in any part of the parlour or dining room that could be seen from the kitchen stove, where everyone gathered. They avoided the area around the girl's own bed. Prince's conclusion, in his own words, was that "the fires were set by human hands, but almost certainly without guilt, probably in an altered state of consciousness and possibly influenced by a discarnate agency". He named the girl of the family as the person whose hands did it, and then spent the rest of the report insisting that this was not an accusation. He argued she was in a dissociated state of the kind he had studied at length elsewhere, noted that Mrs MacDonald described recent "dream states" from which the girl was hard to rouse, and wrote that there was "no blame attachable in such case". He explicitly set aside the testimony of the one honest witness who said he had suspected the girl and watched her, on the grounds that untrained observers under emotional strain make exactly that kind of error — and he added that he did not expect the neighbourhood ever to credit his conclusion. What Prince did not explain away is as important as what he did. He accepted the sounds and the blow on the arm reported by Whidden and detective Peter Owen "Peachy" Carroll, a former Chief of Police of Pictou, as "probably supernormal experiences due to causes which psychical research has not yet determined", and he treated Whidden's two hours of automatic writing on 10 March as a genuine psychological event whose meaning he could not settle. He also dismissed outright the popular "wireless waves" theory, on the ground that radio waves would need a dislike of walls above six and a half feet and a shyness about bursting into flame in front of witnesses. Others read it differently. Hereward Carrington, interviewed in Philadelphia on 6 March 1922 before Prince had even reached the farm, offered two explanations — "a hoax by local practical jokers" or an unconscious effect of "the escaping energy of the human bodies of those present" — and speculated that the same agency might have been at work at Amherst. Whidden, who had been in the house, published his own account and rejected Prince's reading: he concluded that the fires and the loosened cattle were caused by spirits, and added that if Prince were right, the girl "was no more responsible for these acts than was I while under the strange influence for over two hours". One more thing belongs in any honest account. Prince recorded in a footnote that while his party was cut off in the woods, three long articles were circulated over the name of a member of the party who had never sent a line, along with "a forged interview with me and one with Mary Ellen, attributing to her sentences which she could not have formulated to save her life". She was a sixteen-year-old with, by every description including Prince's, a marked intellectual disability, and words she never spoke were printed across two countries in her name. Prince said he would probably never again investigate under a newspaper's auspices.