The Baldoon Mystery

[Magical Realist]

One of the best documented cases of poltergeist haunting ever! Note the consistent details: rain from the ceiling, stones thrown from nearby the property, little fires breaking out, objects flying around, shaking of the house, and farm animals dying. The number of witnesses to these events mark it as solid proof the mystery of paranormal activity.

Canada’s Baldoon Mystery!
BY ANDREW

– SEPTEMBER 14, 2014POSTED IN: GHOSTS, INVESTIGATIONS, PARANORMAL, THE OCCULT

"Today, only a plaque stands at the site of Lord Selkirk’s failed colonization experiment in southwest Ontario, the Baldoon Settlement. The plaque, however, makes no mention of the otherworldly events that made this tiny Scottish settlement the region’s first major tourist attraction in 1829. Infamous among Canadian paranormalists, the popular Baldoon Mystery has even served as the subject of a 1970s play penned by the award-winning writers James Reaney and Marty Gervais.

John MacDonald’s house

The mystery centres around a poltergeist that haunted the family of John MacDonald for three years. John was the eldest son of Donald and Flora MacDonald, two of the original Baldoon pioneers who came from Scotland to Lord Selkirk’s planned settlement in 1804. John had been just six years old when the family emigrated from Kirkcudbrightshire; he grew to maturity on the Baldoon settlement, married a local girl, and in 1826 acquired a farm of his own in Lot A of the 4th Concession.. This lot was coveted by other people in the area, particularly one elderly woman by the name of Buchanan who offered many times to purchase the land from John. He refused her requests and built his large frame farmhouse upon the land.

On 28 October 1829, a pole suddenly crashed down from the ceiling as the women of the family and some neighbour girls were preparing straw in the barn, (The barn was made of logs, having above its main floor a ceiling of poles that formed a loft open at the ends and floored with the poles.) Startled but unnerved, the women assumed it was no matter and resumed their work. Several minutes later, a second pole dropped. Finding this strange, they examined the ceiling but could see no reason as to why the two poles had fallen. They resumed their work and forgot about the fallen poles as they became engrossed in conversation. Suddenly, a third pole crashed into their midst – now terrified, the women dashed out of the barn and into the house.

Recreation of MacDonald’s House

Strange things continued to happen. Stones, seemingly thrown by phantoms, pelted the farmhouse until every window was shattered. When visitors and family members examined the stones, they found that they were smooth and damp, as though they had been flung from the bed of the river that ran right in front of the house. The roof leaked when it wasn’t raining. Mysterious little fires broke out all over the house. “I saw the house take fire upstairs in ten different places at once,” recalled William Fleury, who lived just up the road from the McDonald family. Once the earth moved the very foundations of the house – and only the McDonald house was shaken by this earthquake. Pots and pans inexplicably crashed from the counters and tables.

“At the time of this trouble,” reported local resident William Stewart, “I lived about three quarters of a mile from the place and was present and saw for myself many of these strange things. Mr. Alex Brown, with the others, took a number of lead balls that came in through the window, marked them, tied them in a bag, and dropped them in to the centre of the Channel Ecarte, in about 36 feet of water, and in a short time the ball came back through the window. I was present when the barn was burned and also when a man by the name of Harmon was preaching there. At this time a large stone came right through the door, breaking out one of the panels, and rolled in front of the minister. The stone apparently had come out of the water. A search was made about the house, but no person could be seen. I also saw a loaf of bread move off the table and dance around the room. The owner of the house, John T. McDonald, I know to be a very respectable man.”

As news of these occurrences spread, hundreds of curiosity seekers from the surrounding areas began to visit the house in hopes of witnessing poltergeist activity first-hand – even the Toronto Globe reported the events as they occurred. The McDonalds took advantage of the situation and profited as a tourist attraction until their safety was really threatened:

“I went with my father to see what was going on at Belledoon for I was very young at that time,” H. Drulard later recalled. “We saw a pot rise from a hearth and chase a dog outside and all around the yard. It could not get away from the pot, for it would hit the dog and he would yell and howl with all his might. I saw an old fashioned butcher knife pass through a crowd of fifty men and strike into the wall the whole length of a ten-inch blade. This happened in 1830.”

 

[Magical Realist]

Continued:

"After a local Methodist preacher, Reverend McDorman, tried to exorcise the spirits, the poltergeist became more violent: healthy livestock suddenly began to die in the middle of the night. Horses dropped dead in their stalls; the ox died in the field while still connected to the plough. Hogs and chickens withered and passed away. The family would awaken in the middle of the night to the slow, steady tread of men marching in the kitchen. Robert Baker, a Michigan schoolmaster who had a great interest in the subject of witchcraft, tried next to exorcise the spirit by nailing a horseshoe above the front door of the farmhouse and invoking the Holy Trinity. Not only were his efforts in vain, but local authorities prosecuted him for attempting to perform witchcraft. Mr. Baker was convicted at trial in Sandwich and sentenced to a year in prison; the Lieutenant-Governor, however, heard his appeal and granted him a pardon on 6 May 1830. And still the hauntings continued, and they became more violent. The baby screamed as its cradle rocked of its own volition; it was said that two men had to hold the cradle for the mother to rescue the infant. Guns went off while no one was holding them. The fires broke out with increased frequency and became harder to put out. And then the entire home burned to the ground.

Lauchlan MacDougald, another child of the Baldoon settlement and Wallaceburg pioneer, remembered the event well. “I was going up the river in a boat that morning in company with James Johnson, Sr., and William Fisher,” he said. “When we were opposite MacDonald’s place we perceived that John’s house was on fire, but as we were some distance from it we saw that it would be gone before we could reach it. The family were at breakfast yet and had not discovered the danger. Mr. Dan MacDonald’s house was nearer to us, and as they saw the fire they hailed us and asked us to assist them to carry out their furniture as they expected their own habitation would soon be in flames. We landed and helped them to carry out everything. In the meantime John’s house and barn were reduced to ashes together with all they contained, the family barely escaping with their lives. [John] came to us without his coat, saying that the clothes he had on were all they had saved.” 1

The community helped the MacDonalds to replenish the losses they had suffered in the fire, and the family of five sought temporary refuge with John’s brother-in-law while they undertook efforts to rebuild their log cabin. But no sooner had they taken quarter when similar annoyances began to occur. After several little fires spontaneously broke out, the MacDonalds were forced to seek shelter elsewhere, fearing that the brother-in-law’s house too would burn. The strange activity followed the family wherever it went; and for a period of time they lived like nomads, moving from place to place, unable to find solace. Finally they gathered up all the old sails they could find in the neighbourhood and rigged up a tent to shelter them. But they could not live like that for long; once winter set in, even the haunted log cabin was preferable to the frigid tent. After the family moved back indoors, John resumed all efforts to remove the poltergeist, seeking counsel from Protestant missionaries, native medicine men, and Catholic priests. Nothing worked.

Then John learned from a traveller about a doctor in Long Point, a town eighty miles away, whose daughter was said to be possessed with the gift of second sight. Rev. McDorman accompanied John on the two-day journey to the house of Dr. J. F. Troyner; upon arrival, they implored him to allow a consultation with the fifteen-year-old Dinah. The girl listened to John’s miserable story, and then retired to her bedroom to read her moonstone. Miss Troyner emerged from her chambers, exhausted and dishevelled, three hours later and reported that an old woman who lived in a long log house sought to drive the MacDonalds from their property. This, said Miss Troyner, was the source of all John’s difficulties. She asked John if he had seen a stray goose wandering his farm since the troubles had begun. After he replied that he had been seeing a strange goose in his flock now and again for some time, Miss Troyner told him to shoot it with a bullet cast of solid silver, for lead would do it no harm. The girl insisted that the old woman would be similarly wounded, and the hauntings would come to an end.

As soon as John MacDonald arrived home the next evening, he melted a piece of sterling silver into a bullet just as Miss Troyner had instructed. Rifle in hand, he searched for the goose in the field, and at first sight fired the silver bullet directly into its black wing. The goose gave a shriek like a human being in agony and escaped through the reeds under the cover of darkness. The next day, John and several companions ventured passed the long log house owned by the elderly Mrs. Buchanan. There the old woman sat on her front porch in an agitated state, nursing a broken arm. No more supernatural manifestations disturbed the MacDonald property thereafter.

As the story passed into history, eyewitness testimonials from prominent local figures lent the tale credibility and assured the continued spreading of its fame. Forty years later, Neil McDonald, John’s youngest son, interviewed twenty-six older local villagers that had witnessed the haunting. He collected their statements and published them serially in the Wallaceburg News; afterwards, the stories were collected into a booklet and published under the title, The Baldoon Mystery: An Intriguing Story of Witchcraft near Wallaceburg, Ontario. The story continued to circulate into the twentieth century: in the 1920s, the Northern Navigation Grand Trunk Route offered day-cruises from Detroit to Chatham aboard the Thousand Islander steamship. When the ship passed through Wallaceburg on the Chenal Ecarte, deckhands were quick to point out the “haunted house” to enthusiastic patrons. The Baldoon Mystery soon became one of Ontario’s most famous ghost stories, securing a lasting legacy for the little Scottish settlement."====

- See more at: http://www.paranormal-encounters.com/wp/canadas-baldoon-

 

[Kittamaru]

That is a lovely folk story

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4426

The Baldoon Mystery
The surprising truth behind Canada's most famous ghost story.

by Brian Dunning

Today we're going to go back in time nearly two centuries, to the Great Lakes region of Canada. What is today an expanse of flat, rectangular agricultural fields cleft by winding rivers was then a land of wild green abundance, and the white settlers were blending in with the native Ojibwe peoples. In 1829, the family of John McDonald had a picturesque two-story frame house in a Scottish settlement named Baldoon, near the town of Wallaceburg, Ontario. The story goes that the family suffered an extraordinary series of poltergeist attacks culminating in their house being burned to the ground; whereupon they moved in with their father nearby only to have the attacks continue unabated. While many Canadians today still consider the Baldoon Mystery to be their greatest ghost story, it leaves skeptical researchers an interesting problem on how to regard stories that are so old and so thinly documented.

The Baldoon story has been told and retold so many times over the centuries, and written up in so many histories by so many different authors, that there is considerable variance among the versions. But the gist of the tale is like this. Disturbances began plaguing the family in 1829, mainly consisting of small objects like lead bullets striking people harmlessly as if thrown by unseen hands. But the disturbances increased to a nearly constant bombardment, as described by Neil McDonald, John's son, who wrote it up in his book:

The dishes of water would rise of their own accord from the table, the tongs and shovel bang against each other on the hearth, the chairs and tables fall over with a loud crash, and even that sober domestic creature, the kettle on the hearth, would toss off its lid, tip over on one side, and suddenly, as if seized by unseen hands, dash itself in a paroxysm of fury on the floor. An Indian knife, with a blade ten inches long, was violently dashed against the window frame and its blade stuck fast in the casement.

Neil wrote of many visitors who witnessed such incidents firsthand, and even included the statements offered by 26 family members, relatives, and neighbors who were there and were party to the strange events. But the worst was yet to come:

At last, one day the crisis came. Worn out with anxious watching, the unhappy man was becoming desperate, when flames burst from a dozen sources in his dwelling. No time to save his household goods; the fire razed his habitation to the ground. Not even his coat was saved, and he saw the home to which he had so lately led his happy bride, bouyant with future hope, strewed to the winds in ashes.

The family moved in with John McDonald's father next door, but the events persisted. Neil wrote about the thrown objects as if they were nearly constant, especially the strange cases of objects like rocks and bullets being thrown in wet as if they'd just been taken from the river outside. Sometimes, the family would mark such stones and throw them back into the river, only to have them thrown back in later with the same markings; an event strange enough to safely exclude any mere human mischief as the cause.


The family moved out again, finding no refuge in a new temporary home, and so resolved to return and stay in a tent outside their own home. A number of authorities came to the house: Robert Barker, a local school teacher who was persuaded in the reality of the paranormal and performed fruitless exorcisms on the house; L. McDougal and John McNeil, who stayed in the house and kept having to put out fires, literally; British Army captain Lewis Bennett, who came to solve the mystery but left with nothing other than his own bullets taken away, soaked in the river, and thrown back at him; and a native witch doctor, who had no luck at resolving the problem.

Part 1

 

[Kittamaru]

Part 2
The troubles were finally resolved, however, according to Neil McDonald's and most other versions of the story. The McDonalds were taken on an 80-mile ride — which itself was full of otherworldly terrors — to meet a teenage girl who was said to have "second sight". Neil described:

...a striking looking girl of fifteen years of age, her complexion was sallow and unwholesome, her form fragile, and her eyes had a wierd, far-away expression, but when excited, gleamed with a latent fire. She spoke simply and unaffectedly of her gift of second sight, seeming to take it as a matter of course. The stone, she said, her father had picked up in the field and was by some called the moon-stone. She told them that any attempt on her part to decipher mysteries by aid of the stone was always attended by great physical prostration and much mental agony.

The girl seemed to know a myriad of details about the McDonalds, in particular, that they had had a land dispute with some unpleasant neighbors, mainly an old woman who lived in a "long, low, log house". She also knew that a stray goose had been in McDonald's flock, with a black head and with a single black feather in each wing. The girl advised John McDonald to form a silver bullet and shoot the goose, and all their troubles would be solved.

McDonald did exactly as he was advised, although his shot was imperfect, and he only winged the goose with his silver bullet. Tracking it to finish the job, he soon found himself outside the long, low, log house.

There sat the old woman who had injured him, with her broken arm resting on a hair, and her withered lips, uttering half ejaculated curses. When she saw him she shrank back and John McDonald knew that the silver bullet had found its billet.

And so ended the Baldoon Mystery, which has since taken its place in Canada's libraries of legend in the fields of hauntings, poltergeists, shape shifters, and witchcraft. Now of course, any good piece of folklore is well enough to be left aloneas folklore, but what if we want to learn more? What if we want to know what really happened? What if Neil McDonald's narrative is so thoroughly referenced with 26 statements from respectable people that we can't just leave it as folklore, but rather, we decide we want to track down the truth of what actually happened in those years starting in 1829?

One of the first things we can do is look at the date of Neil's book, 1871, initially serialized in the Wallaceburg newspaper by W. Colwell — 42 years after the events. Neil had been born in 1824, as best as we know, and so had only been 5 years old at the time. More than half of the 26 people whose statements Neil published claimed to have personally witnessed the events; unless they'd all been very young as well, with only scant recollections, it seems really unlikely that so many of them would have still been alive for Neil to have interviewed them. So from where could Neil have gotten his source information for his highly detailed account?

Writing in Fortean Times, researchers Christopher Laursen and Paul Cropper managed to unearth a single publication from the very year the events actually did take place, 1829, giving Neil a concrete foundation upon which to craft his book. An uncredited author wrote in the Detroit Gazette newspaper a single short column. It gave no names, and gave only an outline of the events (very much the same as described by Neil), but stopped short of the quest to find the teenage girl and the silver bullet winging the witch. However, this entire article was only 360 words. If it was Neil's source of information, 99% of his book had to have been made up.

Only one other known publication preceded Neil's serialization, and that's the account of Peter Jones, an Ojibwe native converted to Christianity and educated, who wrote the 1861 book History of the Ojebway Indians. Jones also never named the McDonald family either. He told an abbreviated version of the same story, but from the perspective of the Ojibwe, who were certain that the disturbances were caused by forest fairies. Jones said he visited the house himself, but saw nothing unusual. However, in his book, he had a single character that, years later, was split into three separate men by Neil: the witch doctor whose exorcism was unsuccessful, and the father of the teenage girl, were both rolled into the third character of John Troyer, a "country doctor" who was into witchcraft. Troyer, according to Jones' book, tried to get rid of the fairies by running around firing silver bullets, until he was stopped by authorities and forced to return home.

So, from these two almost uselessly brief accounts — no doubt combined with family folklore passed down by word of mouth — Neil McDonald created the richly detailed history of the Baldoon Mystery, inventing new characters, and adding major story elements.

And there was was still one more Jenga block to be removed from the structure of Neil's narrative. In Neil's book, the final eyewitness account he gave was that of a Mr. L. A. McDougal. This was one of the longest and most detailed, but made no mention of the silver bullets or the teenage girl; though it did confirm elements like the thrown objects and the broken windows and rocks on the floor. By McDougal's detailed narrative, running around and being involved in the events, he must have at least been a young man at the time. But in 1894, a full 65 years after the event, a reporter from the Toronto Globe tracked him down and interviewed him. The reporter asked McDougal what he thought of Neil's book, and he said quite succinctly, "Most of it was lies."

We don't have any record of when McDougal died, but it was 1905, eleven years after the Toronto Globe interview — by which time he almost certainly would have passed — that the edition of Neil's book that exists today was published. McDougal, who clearly thought very little of the veracity of Neil's book, was dead by the time that his lengthy, confirming narrative finally appeared, tacked on as the final chapter in the print book.

It seems clear that some local event did prompt the local Ojibwe population and Scottish immigrants to pass the word that something strange involving thrown objects happened in 1829. But as for the ghost story that exists today — with marked rocks returning from the river, a magical goose, a psychic child, a shape-shifting witch, tormented witnesses, spontaneous fires, and the involvement of the author's own family — we have little reason to suspect it was anything more than the result of Neil McDonald's colorful pulp-fiction imagination.[/quote]

References & Further Reading
Duquette, T. "Famous Baldoon Mystery: Strange Story Adds to Area Folklore." The Windsor Star. 26 Sep. 1964, Newspaper: 43.

Editors. "The Baldoon Mystery." Exhibits. Wallaceburg Museum, 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 24 Jun. 2014. <http://www.kent.net/wallaceburg-museum/Exhibits/mystery.html>

Jones, P. History of the Ojebway Indians; with especial reference to their conversion to Christianity. London: A. W. Bennett, 1860. 157-159.

Laursen, C., Cropper, P. "The Baldoon Mystery." Fortean Times. 1 May 2014, Number 315: 28-37.

Malcolm. "Unsolved Mystery: haunted house of the Baldoon settlement, a Tale of Forty years Ago." Toronto Globe. 8 Sep. 1894, Newspaper: 10.

McDonald, N. The Baldoon Mystery. Wallaceburg: W. Colwell, 1905.

Reference this article:
Dunning, B. "The Baldoon Mystery." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc., 5 Aug 2014. Web. 28 Mar 2015. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4426>​

 

[Magical Realist]

Unfortunately, a folk tale is all it is.

Your own article is speculation at best. Speculation that wants to be taken over the reliability of eyewitness accounts. We don't do that. And in fact, didn't your own "professional debunker" say:

"It seems clear that some local event did prompt the local Ojibwe population and Scottish immigrants to pass the word that something strange involving thrown objects happened in 1829."

The proof as usual is in the pudding. The aspects of poltergeist activity match most all other accounts of poltergeist activity. Rain from the ceiling, rocks thrown from the property, little fires breaking out, objects flying around, and dying farm animals. Happens over and over again. There's no way different accounts of the same exact phenomenon could be made up. People don't make up the same things over and over again. The sheer amount of eyewitnesses to this event makes it an open and shut case. Specious skeptical speculations years later notwithstanding. lol!

"As the story passed into history, eyewitness testimonials from prominent local figures lent the tale credibility and assured the continued spreading of its fame. Forty years later, Neil McDonald, John’s youngest son, interviewed twenty-six older local villagers that had witnessed the haunting. He collected their statements and published them serially in the Wallaceburg News; afterwards, the stories were collected into a booklet and published under the title, The Baldoon Mystery: An Intriguing Story of Witchcraft near Wallaceburg, Ontario."

 

[Kittamaru]

Your own article is speculation at best. Speculation that wants to be taken over the reliability of eyewitness accounts. We don't do that. And in fact, didn't your own "professional debunker" say:

"It seems clear that some local event did prompt the local Ojibwe population and Scottish immigrants to pass the word that something strange involving thrown objects happened in 1829."

The proof as usual is in the pudding. The aspects of poltergeist activity match most all other accounts of poltergeist activity. Rain from the ceiling, rocks thrown from the property, little fires breaking out, objects flying around, and dying farm animals. Happens over and over again. There's no way different accounts of the same exact phenomenon could be made up. People don't make up the same things over and over again. The sheer amount of eyewitnesses to this event makes it an open and shut case. Specious skeptical speculations years later notwithstanding. lol!

Indeed, the proof IS in the pudding - if you'd bother to read the cited references (which your article is strangely lacking... what a surprise) you would see that Brian Dunning has done his research quite well... and what do you know, that research points to this being, at best, a bit of folklore that was passed through time until it was written in that book, with all the embellishments and imaginative additions such a story would naturally gather as it progresses.

In other words, in terms of "scientific veracity", this story has next to none.

 

[Magical Realist]

Indeed, the proof IS in the pudding - if you'd bother to read the cited references (which your article is strangely lacking... what a surprise) you would see that Brian Dunning has done his research quite well... and what do you know, that research points to this being, at best, a bit of folklore that was passed through time until it was written in that book, with all the embellishments and imaginative additions such a story would naturally gather as it progresses.

In other words, in terms of "scientific veracity", this story has next to none.

LOL! He even admits something DID happen. But again, the consistency of the eyewitness accounts prove it beyond all doubt. These are classic aspects of poltergeist activity recorded thruout history. That's how we know it actually happened. It's like if different people thruout history describe seeing a waterfall and all their accounts match each other. The waterfall is obviously real then.

Oh, and note this verification that the career debunker glosses over:

"Only one other known publication preceded Neil's serialization, and that's the account of Peter Jones, an Ojibwe native converted to Christianity and educated, who wrote the 1861 book History of the Ojebway Indians. Jones also never named the McDonald family either. He told an abbreviated version of the same story"

 

[Magical Realist]

"There have been tens of thousands of poltergeist incidents recorded from around the world, with solid objects flying in the air, huge kitchen cabinets levitating, plates, glasses and clothing set on fire, human voices being heard from unknown sources, vases being smashed on floor and walls, matches being lit in the eyes of witnesses—as if some invisible person was lighting a box of matches, stones being thrown and other material things being moved and at times eliciting terror in those who happen to be present.

Michael Gross, a British writer, has written a very scholarly annotated bibliography of 1,111 sources about poltergeist cases from different countries (Gross 1979). Colin Wilson has produced a very easy to read and comprehensive 382-page book packed with cases (Wilson 1981). Guy Playfair's This House is Haunted is an excellent account of the Enfield poltergeist case.

Sometimes hardened police officers have witnessed and testified to this poltergeist phenomenon that cannot be explained other than by a disturbed intelligence from the afterlife. Many times professional mediums were able to contact the poltergeist who was able to explain why it was disturbed.

In Britain

One of Britain's most amazing poltergeist activities was at the Harper home in Enfield and lasted for more than sixteen months in 1977, starting in August 1977 and ending in October 1978. Mrs. Harper, a divorcee, lived there with her four children, two boys and two girls, aged from seven to thirteen.

The disturbances which did not come from physical-human origin were witnessed by a number of different people with different backgrounds and different religious beliefs, including skeptics: police, politicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, journalists and social workers all reported the poltergeist activities.

Two consistent and longitudinal investigators were a writer, Guy Lyon Playfair, a highly experienced observer of poltergeist activities in Brazil, and Maurice Grosse, a highly motivated member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Playfair and Grosse estimated that over 2,000 inexplicable incidents were observed by at least 30 witnesses.

Some of the activities of this particular poltergeist included:

• throwing household items around; chairs were smashed, children's toys were seen flying in the air thrown from an invisible source
• lighting fires which extinguished themselves
• draining the power out of the journalists' camera and other electronic batteries immediately after the batteries had been charged
• throwing an iron grille from the bottom of the fireplace across the room narrowly missing Jimmy, one of the Harper boys
• ripping a heavy gas fire out of the wall.

Answering an investigator, one of the poltergeists stated he was 'Joe Watson.' Asked the reason for the activity the poltergeist answered: 'I was sleeping here,'—implying everybody else was a trespasser!
An indentation appeared on one of the pillows—as if an invisible head was resting there; this was witnessed by the investigator Guy Playfair. Voices saying 'F--- off you', 'I was sleeping here', and, 'I like annoying you’ were heard directed towards investigator Playfair.

In the United States

Thousands of poltergeist cases have been reported in the United States. In one well-attested case the police arrived on the 19th December 1976 at the home of Mrs. Beulah Wilson of Pearisburg, Virginia after she complained of regular poltergeist activities. Previously skeptical, the police had ignored the complaint but when they went into the house it is reported that they witnessed the destructive behavior of some invisible intruder who was smashing dishes, wooden chairs and other household items. In this particular incident the police witnessed the amazing sight of a 200 pound kitchen cabinet floating in the air without any means of support."====http://www.victorzammit.com/book/chapter23.html

 

[Kittamaru]

LOL! He even admits something DID happen. But again, the consistency of the eyewitness accounts prove it beyond all doubt. These are classic aspects of poltergeist activity recorded thruout history. That's how we know it actually happened. It's like if different people thruout history describe seeing a waterfall and all their accounts match each other. The waterfall is obviously real then.

No, that's not how this works... because if the waterfall actually existed, we could go to the location and find evidence of it. However, as has been shown to you time and time again, eye-witness accounts are one of the WORST forms of evidence purely because of how fallible the human mind and senses actually are.

Oh, and note this verification that the career debunker glosses over:

"Only one other known publication preceded Neil's serialization, and that's the account of Peter Jones, an Ojibwe native converted to Christianity and educated, who wrote the 1861 book History of the Ojebway Indians. Jones also never named the McDonald family either. He told an abbreviated version of the same story"

I fail to see how that proves anything other than that this folk tale had been passed down by word of mouth... which INCREASES the likelyhood of puffery...

 

[Kittamaru]

"There have been tens of thousands of poltergeist incidents recorded from around the world, with solid objects flying in the air, huge kitchen cabinets levitating, plates, glasses and clothing set on fire, human voices being heard from unknown sources, vases being smashed on floor and walls, matches being lit in the eyes of witnesses—as if some invisible person was lighting a box of matches, stones being thrown and other material things being moved and at times eliciting terror in those who happen to be present.

Michael Gross, a British writer, has written a very scholarly annotated bibliography of 1,111 sources about poltergeist cases from different countries (Gross 1979). Colin Wilson has produced a very easy to read and comprehensive 382-page book packed with cases (Wilson 1981). Guy Playfair's This House is Haunted is an excellent account of the Enfield poltergeist case.

Sometimes hardened police officers have witnessed and testified to this poltergeist phenomenon that cannot be explained other than by a disturbed intelligence from the afterlife. Many times professional mediums were able to contact the poltergeist who was able to explain why it was disturbed.

In Britain

One of Britain's most amazing poltergeist activities was at the Harper home in Enfield and lasted for more than sixteen months in 1977, starting in August 1977 and ending in October 1978. Mrs. Harper, a divorcee, lived there with her four children, two boys and two girls, aged from seven to thirteen.

The disturbances which did not come from physical-human origin were witnessed by a number of different people with different backgrounds and different religious beliefs, including skeptics: police, politicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, journalists and social workers all reported the poltergeist activities.

Two consistent and longitudinal investigators were a writer, Guy Lyon Playfair, a highly experienced observer of poltergeist activities in Brazil, and Maurice Grosse, a highly motivated member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Playfair and Grosse estimated that over 2,000 inexplicable incidents were observed by at least 30 witnesses.

Some of the activities of this particular poltergeist included:

• throwing household items around; chairs were smashed, children's toys were seen flying in the air thrown from an invisible source
• lighting fires which extinguished themselves
• draining the power out of the journalists' camera and other electronic batteries immediately after the batteries had been charged
• throwing an iron grille from the bottom of the fireplace across the room narrowly missing Jimmy, one of the Harper boys
• ripping a heavy gas fire out of the wall.

Answering an investigator, one of the poltergeists stated he was 'Joe Watson.' Asked the reason for the activity the poltergeist answered: 'I was sleeping here,'—implying everybody else was a trespasser!
An indentation appeared on one of the pillows—as if an invisible head was resting there; this was witnessed by the investigator Guy Playfair. Voices saying 'F--- off you', 'I was sleeping here', and, 'I like annoying you’ were heard directed towards investigator Playfair.

In the United States

Thousands of poltergeist cases have been reported in the United States. In one well-attested case the police arrived on the 19th December 1976 at the home of Mrs. Beulah Wilson of Pearisburg, Virginia after she complained of regular poltergeist activities. Previously skeptical, the police had ignored the complaint but when they went into the house it is reported that they witnessed the destructive behavior of some invisible intruder who was smashing dishes, wooden chairs and other household items. In this particular incident the police witnessed the amazing sight of a 200 pound kitchen cabinet floating in the air without any means of support."====

Two things:

1) CITATIONS, for fucks sake

2) This is entirely off topic and unrelated to the Baldoon Mystery...

 

[Magical Realist]

No, that's not how this works... because if the waterfall actually existed, we could go to the location and find evidence of it. However, as has been shown to you time and time again, eye-witness accounts are one of the WORST forms of evidence purely because of how fallible the human mind and senses actually are.

If the waterfall no longer exists, we can confirm it once existed by the uniformity of the accounts of it. Just like we can with poltergeist phenomena.

I fail to see how that proves anything other than that this folk tale had been passed down by word of mouth... which INCREASES the likelyhood of puffery...

One word...eyewitness accounts. You'll never be able to discount that.

 

[Magical Realist]

Two things:

1) CITATIONS, for fucks sake

2) This is entirely off topic and unrelated to the Baldoon Mystery...

I cited the source. And no, this is confirmation of the consistency of poltergeist phenomena in all their reports. I told you about that. Yet you ignore it. Why?

Here's another recent poltergeist case from 2011. Once again, all sorts of eyewitnesses to this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ge-case-Britains-unlikely-haunted-house-.html

 

[Kittamaru]

If the waterfall no longer exists, we can confirm it once existed by the uniformity of the accounts of it. Just like we can with poltergeist phenomena.

No, there would be physical evidence of a waterfall.... do you wish to deny this fact?

One word...eyewitness accounts. You'll never be able to discount that.

1) "Eyewitness Accounts" is two words... you just continue to prove my assertion that you utterly fail at comprehending the English Language.
2) Eyewitness Accounts are discredited and discounted all the time... as a recent example:

http://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7175967/darren-wilson-charges-michael-brown-ferguson

Also:
http://www.newsweek.com/2014/11/28/end-eyewitness-testimonies-285414.html

Memory, as experts have been trying to teach judges and jurors, does not function like an iPhone camera recording. Memories can not only be deleted; they can be altered or invented without you even realizing it, as shown in astudy published last year in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, which involved 861 U.S. soldiers enrolled in a survival school. As part of training, they endured abusive interrogations. Afterward, many were shown a photo of someone who looked nothing like their interrogator, and interviewers insinuated that the person depicted was the culprit. Eighty-four percent of the soldiers misidentified their interrogators after being misled, and some also remembered weapons or telephones that never existed.

An extensive body of research with similar findings has become increasingly perplexing for the nation’s judicial systems, leading the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to release a sweeping report last month calling for an overhaul of how the courts and law enforcement deal with one of the most powerfully persuasive pieces of evidence that can sway a jury: eyewitness identification.Research has shown that leading questioning or suggestive behavior by psychiatrists, police or acquaintances, as well as accounts in the media, can result in “planting” false memories in the mind of a witness. In some cases, this can lead witnesses to believe they saw incidents that never occurred. In lawsuits recently filed against Castlewood Treatment Center in St. Louis, plaintiffs have argued that therapists used hypnosis and psychiatric drugs to recover “hidden” abuse memories that turned out to be false.

The push to implement procedures like these stems from problematic cases like the 1984 rape of North Carolina college student Jennifer Thompson. During a photo lineup with police, she pointed to a man, Ronald Cotton, and said, “I think this is the guy.” Later, she asked detectives, “Did I do OK?” To which one replied, “You did great.” That reinforcement made her more confident in the choice, and when she was shown a live lineup with Cotton in it, she chose him again. Cotton served a decade in prison before he was exonerated by DNA tests, and the case led North Carolina to adopt revised rules for police lineups.

Eyewitness testimony is quite often not just missing key details or facts, but is utterly and entirely wrong.

I cited the source. And no, this is confirmation of the consistency of poltergeist phenomena in all their reports. I told you about that. Yet you ignore it. Why?

Once again, you cited the source AFTER posting it... why is it so difficult for you to make a complete post?

 

[Kittamaru]

As for your evidence from Victor Zammit...

These are some of the "spirits" he and Helen Duncan claim to have encountered...

First of all, Helen Duncan has been proven time and again to have been an absolute fraud...
Second, those look like cheap masks on coat hangers with blankets over top of them

 

[Magical Realist]

LOL! Uh no. Eyewitness accounts are reliable enough to establish the reality of any event. That's why they convict criminals, and that's why they establish historical events. All of history is based on eyewitness accounts. As for citing my source, I already told you it takes about 3 minutes to do that. Did you forget this from last time when you tried to ban me for it and then had to apologize for that?

 

[Magical Realist]

As for your evidence from Victor Zammit...

These are some of the "spirits" he and Helen Duncan claim to have encountered...

First of all, Helen Duncan has been proven time and again to have been an absolute fraud...
Second, those look like cheap masks on coat hangers with blankets over top of them

Offtopic. We're talking about poltergeist phenomenon. And how do I know he's offering that photo as evidence of anything other than hoaxing. You should cite your source so I can check that.

 

[Kittamaru]

Offtopic. We're talking about poltergeist phenomenon.

So you claim the picture is not a poltergeist, despite the fact that Victor Zammit and Helen Duncan (whom you are USING as evidence and sources) claim they are...

Interesting, that puts you directly at odds with your own sources... pretty dishonest, but then, we're used to that from you.

LOL! Uh no. Eyewitness accounts are reliable enough to establish the reality of any event. That's why they convict criminals, and that's why they establish historical events. All of history is based on eyewitness accounts. As for citing my source, I already told you it takes about 3 minutes to do that. Did you forget this from last time when you tried to ban me for it and then had to apologize for that?

They do convict criminals based on eye-witness accounts... and multiple times said "convictions" have been overturned because real evidence, such as DNA, has proven the conviction (and the eyewitness account) to be WRONG.

Ignoring evidence to support your claims... how sad.

Offtopic. We're talking about poltergeist phenomenon.

PS - Oh, and another thing - you are basically admitted to re-opening a previously locked thread... which is in violation of ANOTHER site rule...

 

[Magical Realist]

PS - Oh, and another thing - you are basically admitted to re-opening a previously locked thread... which is in violation of ANOTHER site rule...

Wrong. It's another thread on the same topic. There's no rule against posting threads on the same topic. Otherwise we'd be banning everyone who does that in other forums. Are you going to ban everyone who posts repeated threads on relativity theory and dark matter? Or are you just trying to find another excuse to ban me?

 

[Kittamaru]

Wrong. It's another thread on the same topic. There's no rule against posting threads on the same topic. Otherwise we'd be banning everyone who does that in other forums. Are you going to ban everyone who posts repeated threads on relativity theory and dark matter? Or are you just trying to find another excuse to ban me?

So you admit to reposting the same locked thread?

Interfering with moderation
20. Interfering with moderation will result in an immediate ban from sciforums. Examples: re-editing or deleting a post that has been edited by a moderator or which has otherwise been the subject of moderator action; reposting a post that has been deleted by a moderator.

I also notice you didn't bother to even try and refute the other points in that post - I would presume that is because you cannot do so.

 

[Magical Realist]

So you admit to reposting the same locked thread?

Interfering with moderation
20. Interfering with moderation will result in an immediate ban from sciforums. Examples: re-editing or deleting a post that has been edited by a moderator or which has otherwise been the subject of moderator action; reposting a post that has been deleted by a moderator.

LOL! Nothing there about posting a thread on the same topic. Where have I deleted a post that has been subject to mod action OR reposted a post that has been deleted by a mod? You're making another lying claim about me.