The Hinsdale House Haunting: the Dandy family on McMahon Road

3830 McMahon Road, Hinsdale. A hilltop farmhouse on a dead-end road in rural Cattaraugus County, New York, built in 1853. Around 1970, Phil and Clara Dandy moved in with their four children: Michael, Beth, Laura and Mary. Mike, the eldest, was 17. Phil often worked away.

It began small, with phone calls from unknown callers. Minor vandalism. Cabinet doors that opened by themselves. Then it grew. Over four years the family reported apparitions of multiple people, moving objects, unexplainable scents and unexplained sounds.

Phil saw strange faces at the windows. When he went outside, the faces seemed to be inside the house, "looking at him." Beth saw a woman outside her window in a "long, wet dress," with "bugged out eyes." Mary, the most affected of the children, sensed something under her bed.

At night, mysterious lights appeared on the property. From deep in the woods came chanting and drumming. Objects "often flew around the room, aiming for a human target." A lamp was thrown directly at one of the Dandy daughters.

The family turned to Fr. Alphonsus Trabold, a Franciscan theologian at nearby St. Bonaventure University, and asked only for a blessing. When events became "unbearable," they agreed to a story in the Olean Times Herald, hoping readers would know the history of the house. It brought ridicule instead.

Trabold came back for a cleansing, on April 13, 1974 according to researcher Cassidy Nicholas. With him were Alex Tanous, a psychic associated with the American Society for Psychical Research, and a film crew of New York University students. Tanous read the energy of the house and claimed seven murders had taken place there. A second attempt had no effect. The family soon moved out.

Trabold was precise. "There was a cleansing, but not an exorcism, which are two different rites." A building cannot be exorcised, he said, only a person. Clara, later Clara Miller, wrote that he said the exorcism prayer. A tape of the rite was reportedly made, but the student film has never surfaced.

In June 2015 Daniel Klaes, co-founder of the Western New York Paranormal Society, bought the house and saved it from demolition. Tours and overnight investigations followed, and so did new stories. A burial mound, a massacre, a stagecoach inn run by murderers, a hanging tree.

The St. Bonaventure University archive rejects them. "There is no mound or burial ground in the area of the house," it says, and there is no evidence the house was ever a stagecoach inn. Nicholas traces the hanging tree to Tanous's 1974 reading. Nobody has published a finding that the Dandys staged anything. The argument is about the legend, not the family.

Clara Miller published Echoes of a Haunting in 2000 and a revisited edition in 2009. The case was dramatised on A Haunting in 2006 and investigated on Paranormal Lockdown in 2016. Astonishing Legends and Morbid have retold it. A 2019 horror film billed the house as "this generation's Amityville Horror." At its heart remain one family's four years on the hill.