The Caledonia Mills Fire Spook (Mary Ellen Spook Farm)

Caledonia Mills lies about 25 km south of Antigonish, Nova Scotia. In 1887 a farmer named Alexander MacDonald built a house there. He lived with his wife Janet and their adopted daughter, Mary Ellen, then in her mid teens.

The trouble began in the barn. Cows were found loose from their stanchions. Horses stood in the wrong stalls, their tails braided. Ashes turned up in the milk. A blue glowing light was seen in the barn, and a fisherman reported "bluish lights around the MacDonald place."

January 7, 1922. A fire broke out. Once it was put out, another erupted in an empty room at the other end of the home. Then came a stormy night. January 11, according to the author Monica Graham. Small, blue fires started appearing with no cause. On walls. On bedclothes, towels and paper. Even in puddles of water. Neighbours Leo MacGillivray and Duncan MacDonald came to help. By the end of the night, the family had put out 38 fires.

A newspaper at the time described fires behind pictures on the wall, in boxes under sofas, in upholstering. A cushion left upstairs a few moments earlier was found blazing in the parlor downstairs. In the middle of winter, the family fled to Leo MacGillivray's home. The fires stopped.

The Halifax Herald sent reporter Harold B. Whidden and detective Peter Owen "Peachie" Carroll. They spent two days and two nights in the abandoned house. On the second night they heard sounds like footsteps coming from an unoccupied room. Whidden felt a blow on the flat part of his left arm above his elbow, through several layers of shirts, sweaters, two coats and a horse rug. Carroll felt something too.

In March 1922, Walter Franklin Prince, research officer of the American Society for Psychical Research, came to study the poltergeist. He brought traps, a revolver and a camera with magnesium flash. No fires broke out while he was there. But on March 10, Whidden felt a prickly sensation in his fingers. The pencil "began to move slowly, without any effort or intention on my part." This automatic writing promised that the spirit "would trouble the Macdonalds no more."

The burns, Prince wrote, were never found higher than the reach of a person five feet tall, the height of the girl. In one recess lay a half-burned cotton glove and a match. He concluded that Mary Ellen set the fires while in "a form of hysteria," in an altered state she afterwards "imperfectly, or not at all, remembered." He did not hold her to blame. He even left room for the idea that "a discarnate intelligence incited the childish consciousness of the girl."

Carroll never accepted the verdict, arguing that neighbours watching constantly would have caught her. He believed in a supernatural cause for the rest of his life. Mary Ellen denied it and said Prince was "fibbing." A lecturer blamed stray wireless currents. In October 1922 she was arrested over an attempt to burn a barn and committed to the asylum in Dartmouth. She was released in 1926.

Alexander died in March 1923. The house fell to ruin and eventually burned, cause unknown. Mary Ellen moved to northern Ontario, married, and died in Sudbury on June 8, 1987. The nickname Mary Ellen Spook stayed with her. So did the story, retold in Monica Graham's book Fire Spook and the 2025 series The Fire Ghost of Caledonia Mills.