The John Bovee Dods Haunting

John Bovee Dods was born on 26 September 1795 in Florida, Montgomery County, New York. Visions came early. At about 13 or 14 he saw his recently dead father "standing under a tree, a short distance before him." By 1824 he was the Congregational minister in Levant, in Penobscot County, Maine. He lived in a house he had built himself.

1823. While Dods was preaching in Levant, "the spirit of a female relative, who had been drowned, appeared to him four times in succession." The first two times he saw her alone. The third time his wife saw her too. She was in bed beside him. The spirit had a message. She "had been appointed to come to him to prepare his mind for an important work." And some of the doctrines he was preaching were erroneous.

January, 1824. There were "sounds like the striking of heavy stones forcibly thrown against the building." There were "rumbling sounds, explosions as of a cannon near the house." The whole building shook violently. Furniture moved, "even to that of a bed with a heavy man upon it." And all of it happened "without any discoverable cause."

It lasted about three months. Excitement spread across the State. One account says hundreds flocked to witness it. Another says perhaps a hundred.

Then came the strangest moment of all. After the disturbances ceased, the spirit came to Dods once more, as he stood in an open field. She appeared "with exceeding brilliancy, floating in the atmosphere above his head." His hat seemed to be drawn to her hand. She carried it over his house, over a neighbouring house, around a circuit of about a mile in diameter. Then she returned the hat to him.

Opinion split. Some ascribed the events to collusion and machinery. Others blamed the devil. Dods saw it differently. He considered the phenomena a divine blessing, and what the spirits taught him turned him toward universal salvation. He became a Universalist. In the end he was obliged to give away the home he had built and move away. The Bangor Daily News later wrote that townsfolk forced him out to Union.

Almost everything comes from Dods himself. On 2 March 1856 he spoke at Boston's Music Hall, and Alonzo Eliot Newton summarised the talk in the New-England Spiritualist on 15 March. That was about 32 years after the events, printed by a Spiritualist editor while Dods was promoting Spiritualism.

One earlier source survives. In 1829 Bernard Whitman described a haunted house in Maine in A Lecture on Popular Superstitions. The building and furniture were shaken, "dreadful noises were heard, dismal sights were seen, and heavy blows were received." The occupant had left a calvinistic theological seminary and become a universalist preacher. Whitman names no one, but Newton cites his work, and the details match. Whitman was unmoved. "Whoever understands the influence of the imagination, will find no difficulty in accounting for the occurrences."

Dods went on to mesmerism and electrical psychology. For a time he doubted his own visions, and his 1854 book Spirit Manifestations Examined and Explained offered a medical explanation for such phenomena. Then, in 1855, four spirits appeared to him one day, one of them his father. His faith in spirit communion returned. He died in Brooklyn on 21 March 1872. In 2023 the Bangor Daily News called the case "one of the only documented cases of a reputed poltergeist in Maine."