The Lunenburg Werewolf (15 page)

The next day, the fires resumed. Janet and Alexander watched in surprised terror as a fire spontaneously ignited above their heads, again in the kitchen loft. Janet clambered up the ladder to the loft, tore the smouldering board from the floor, and flung it out the window into the snow below.

A half hour later, the fires continued. A wall over the door leading from the kitchen into the main section of the house caught fire. Several other fires broke out in the main house. Alexander, fearful for his family, sent Janet and Mary Ellen out on that stormy evening to go and get whatever help they could find. They bundled up in parkas and galoshes and made their way to their nearest neighbours, the MacGillivrays, who lived two kilometres up the road from them.

Dan and Leo MacGillivray and their visiting brother-in-law, Duncan MacDonald, accompanied the two women back to help Alexander fight the flames. When they arrived everything seemed normal. The four men went over the house with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any trace of fire, but could find none.

Finally, Dan MacGillivray went home. Everything seemed fine to him. Leo and Duncan stayed where they were, however. It just didn't seem right to them to abandon a neighbour who had asked for their help.

Their caution proved wise. A short time after Dan left, another fire broke out. This time it was on a parlour window blind. A half hour later, a calendar hanging by the parlour stove caught fire. The parlour stove wasn't lit at the time. In fact, it hadn't been lit in several days. A few minutes later, a bed in the guest room caught fire. The dog's bed also caught fire. For the next couple of hours, the MacDonalds and their neighbours were kept busy patrolling the house for fires and extinguishing them.

In all, thirty-eight fires broke out over the run of that evening. The Fire-Spook kept Alexander, Janet, Leo, Duncan, and Mary Ellen very busy with blazes that broke out in locked dresser drawers and closed kitchen cupboards. By morning there were at least five centimetres of water pooled up on the dining room floor. But even that did not help. A wet dish rag, sopping in a puddle, spontaneously ignited and burned to nothing but blackened ash. The stink from that fire was phenomenally oppressive.

Leo MacGillivray had this to say about the event: “We were in the house about half an hour when the whole house seemed to be strangely illuminated, just as sudden and bright as if a short circuit had occurred on a high-tension wire. The blaze seemed brighter in the parlour so I made a dash for that room. The window blind was enveloped in flames. I tore it off the window and managed to save about half of it. The flame was a pale blue and the only thing that I could liken it to was a short circuit. The flame was not hot and it did not even singe the hair on the back of my hands or eyebrows.”

“I saw paper burning when it was wet,” Duncan MacGillivray testified afterwards. “There was no gasoline or anything inflammable around the house.”

At one point during the night, Duncan MacDonald was sent home to call for help because the MacDonalds' telephone line wasn't working in the intensity of the local storm. He made it to the MacGillivrays' and called the authorities, but most of them were busy fighting the effects of the storm, and they couldn't make it out there until morning.

Mike MacGillivray and John F. Kenny were the first people to arrive at the farmhouse the next morning. “We saw a small black dog, the colour of soot, trailing behind us,” Kenny later stated. “It followed us to the farmhouse and then disappeared. I imagine it ran off into the woods.”

When MacGillivray and Kenny got there, the first thing they saw was a bare arm waving a white rag from the upstairs window.

“Are they surrendering?” Kenny asked.

“Let's go see,” MacGillivray said.

When they walked into the kitchen and asked about the arm waving from the upstairs window, Leo MacGillivray assured them that no one had left the kitchen.

“It must have been a ghost then,” Kenny joked.

No one laughed.

“We aren't staying here another night,” Alexander decided. “If these fires keep up, we are going to wake up burned to death in our beds.” So the McDonalds packed their belongings and spent their first night away from home at the MacGillivray residence.

The following morning, they moved into a house in town that was owned and rented by Duncan MacDonald. Secretly, the MacGillivrays were more than happy to see the flame-cursed family out from beneath their roof.

Word Gets Out

News of the events spread. W. H. Dennis, the editor of the
Halifax Herald
and
Evening Mail
, picked up the story and dispatched a
Herald
reporter by the name of Harold Whidden to the scene of the events.

“Get me the facts on this,” Dennis told Whidden.

Whidden and a photographer spoke to the witnesses and took photos of the house. Whidden took down their stories in great detail and was a little disappointed that no further blazes broke out while he was on the premises. He was equally disappointed that there seemed to be no explanation for these mysterious fires.

But that didn't stop W. H. Dennis. “We'll hold a contest,” he said to Whidden. “We'll offer a reward to the reader who sends in the most plausible explanation.”

The answers that were mailed in were plentiful and varied. Some said it was the work of spirits. Others suggested radio waves or the presence of some sort of mysterious acid or mineral beneath the property. Others suggested a slow-burning chemical compound applied previously by some unknown enemy of the family. And one person was even convinced that the fires were caused by a firefly infestation. In all there were over 150 theories sent in to the
Herald
.

In the end they decided that the theories presented still weren't enough. So they sent for an expert.

Call for a Detective

In February 1922, a former Pictou police chief named Peter Owen Carroll, known as “Peachie” to his friends, declared his interest in the Caledonia Mills case. Peachie was at that time an official provincial detective.

“I will go to Caledonia Mills and live in the house in question,” Peachie declared. “I won't leave until I've got to the bottom of this.”

Harold Whidden agreed to accompany Peachie to the Caledonia Mills farmhouse. By this time the farmhouse had been emptied of furniture and belongings, but that didn't stop the fearless investigators. The two men set up a portable stove in the dining room and heaped fresh hay on the floor for mattresses. But a winter storm blew up and the wind howled through the old farmhouse and the little portable stove they had brought for heat proved sadly inadequate.

“I can't think of a more perfect place to catch my death of pneumonia,” Whidden complained.

Later that evening the storm abated and Alexander MacDonald made his way along the wintered-over road, walking almost two kilometres to bring the two investigators a home-cooked meal. “It seemed the least I could do for two fellows who were so willing to risk their lives to get to the bottom of this situation,” he later said.

At midnight the trouble began. It started with a banging outside, as if someone were pounding on the front door and trying to get in. Only there was no one at the door. Then they heard footsteps creaking across the floorboards. Then Peachie was slapped, as if by an invisible palm. The noises continued throughout the long cold night.

The next morning, Whidden decided to call it quits. The weather was too much for him. Peachie stayed on for a few more weeks and over that time he continued to question all the witnesses of the fire. Although he hadn't actually witnessed any spontaneous fires himself, Peachie had this to say about the Caledonia Mills farmhouse: “I firmly believe that neither the fires nor the strange occurrences were the work of human hands. In my opinion, no one could have any conception of the case without first visiting the house and going into every crumb of evidence with the utmost care.”

However, the authorities were still unconvinced.

In March 1922, the
Herald
invited a psychic researcher, Walter F. Prince of New York, to come to Caledonia Mills and to further investigate the mysterious fires. After a week of interviews and some time spent looking over the flame-scarred farmhouse, Prince came to the conclusion that the fires and banging and mysterious loosing of livestock were all the work of young Mary Ellen.

“The girl has the mind of a six-year-old child,” Prince declared. “She is obsessed with the spiritual world and has demonstrated all of the symptoms of someone who is suffering from delusions inspired by childhood trauma. In my opinion the fires were set by human hand, devoid of guilt.”

But Peachie Carroll disagreed strongly, stating, “Mary Ellen is as bright and alert as any sixteen-year-old girl brought up by her grandparents. There is no definite or satisfactory evidence that any fires broke out without Mary Ellen being close at hand to her grandparents.”

Peachie further argued that Alexander and the other men had spent a long night fighting fires that could not have been set by such a young girl. He then went on to issue a public challenge of Prince's findings, saying that the researcher was a fraud and a liar.

Quiet Endings

The next two months were fairly uneventful. In early May 1922, the MacDonalds returned to the farmhouse and put in their crops. And on May 18, 1922, the fires began again. The MacDonalds put up with the fires until June, keeping very quiet for fear of further publicity. Then they left the farm and the Caledonia Mills area and moved to Alder River, where they moved in with their daughter, Mrs. William Quirk.

One year later, Alexander MacDonald died of influenza, at the age of seventy-six. Janet MacDonald followed her husband seven years later.

Mary Ellen's trail is a little harder to unravel. She lived in Alder River for a short while and then moved to Antigonish and worked as a domestic servant for the Bonner family on St. Ninian Street. She left the Bonners' service shortly after a distant relative from New Glasgow came to her with a scheme for fame and fast money, claiming that she could make a fortune being displayed on the stage as a sort of theatrical freak show. After a few weeks of dusting and sweeping, this life sounded very tempting to Mary Ellen, so she left for New Glasgow.

But when Mary Ellen arrived in New Glasgow, her relative quickly learned that she was more interested in kindling a series of tawdry backdoor romances than participating in a freak show. One of these romances soon took hold and Mary Ellen left New Glasgow, accompanied by a Mr. Jackson. The pair travelled to Montreal and Mary Ellen found life in the big city to be intoxicating.

Unfortunately, when she arrived in Montreal, the only form of employment Mary Ellen could find was that of a waitress. Mary Ellen didn't take very readily to being a waitress. Her feet hurt, her back hurt, and her pockets were mostly empty.

She soon left Mr. Jackson to his own devices and ran off to the nickel town of Sudbury, Ontario, certain that she would strike up some sort of a relationship with a well-to-do miner. She soon found herself married to a man named Austin “Red” McGuire. She and Austin opened up a rooming house for miners, where Austin bootlegged cheap illicit whiskey and Mary Ellen peddled something just as cheap and illicit. The rooming house quickly developed quite a reputation and became known locally as “The Bucket of Blood.”