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The Potter's Cottage
Dundas, Ontario, Canada

The amazing personal story in a historic cottage
takes place in haunted Dundas.
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Sometime between 1819 and 1847, an Englishman of various talents (potter, brick maker, butcher and policeman) arrived in Dundas to start his new life in Upper Canada.

By the 1850’s, he had built his family a cozy little stone cottage, and set up various enterprises.

Archival records show that he lived, he prospered, and he died, leaving his widow with the house for another 18 years.

Many years and many owners passed before my husband, David, and I recognized the little stone cottage as the house we had always been seeking.  We promptly bought it.

It wasn’t long before strange things started happening.  Out of the kind of deep sleep that one usually enjoys around 3 am, we woke to loud footsteps, like someone wearing heavy, hard-soled boots, striding briskly throughout the house, opening and slamming doors.

We bolted out of bed to investigate. Well, I bolted…. my husband, who was being treated for cancer, and somewhat weak from the medication, was slower to react but no less startled by the intrusion.

Together we searched every corner of the house but found nothing out of place and all the doors still firmly locked. 

A few nights later, another event occurred, sending chills down our spine and logical reasoning out the window.  We had both been watching TV in the basement family room, when I got up from my chair to head upstairs on an errand.  For some reason I stopped and turned towards David to speak, when something heavy crashed down beside me, landing with a blast and causing us both to jump.

There was nothing there.  How could that be?  I even felt the air move as “it” fell.

Similar occurrences continued – but no longer for me.  I later realized I only experienced those two in David’s presence.

As his illness sped up, my husband was forced to leave work and spend his days at home, where he heard other strange goings-on.  Although frustrating, because we couldn’t explain any reasonable causes for these noises, nothing had actually harmed us… or so I thought.

As with many things in life, retrospection brings new meanings to past events and so it is interesting that at some point in these first few months, a psychically sensitive friend of mine came to visit and immediately sensed that the house needed to be “cleansed”.

Lara returned with burning sage and sea salt to perform what she explained was necessary to remove undesirable energy.  Previously I would have chuckled at her room-by-room, corner-by-corner murmurings and smoke waving, but at this point I was becoming more accepting of just about anything. Besides, not too much earlier, a neighbour’s elderly mother, who had been visiting her daughter focused on my house and remarked, “That house needs to be cleansed of bad energy”.

After administering her ritual, Lara disclosed a particularly “hot” west wall in my bedroom.  Presently (6 years later), I can recall connections I failed to identify with that wall, at the time.  

A previously healthy house plant relocated to that window, withered and died within a few days.  The fleece of a small sheepskin rug on that side of the bed turned yellow, even though its match on the other side of the bed remained perfectly white, and I found an outside vent from the furnace which extended through the west wall, smashed into pieces.  Yet none of the neighbours or my bed-ridden husband (who slept on that side) saw or heard anything.

By now we had lived in the potter’s cottage for about 8 months, yet still nothing could have prepared me for the actual encounter to come.

It was evening, and I was marking papers while David sat beside me on the sofa, struggling to complete a writing activity.  He interrupted our companionable silence, and in a distracted, almost casual tone he asked, “Do you ever see figures in the house?”

Instinctively I felt that I knew where this was going as a shiver passed along my spine, but hoping I was wrong I stupidly replied with, “Do you mean figures like numbers?”

“No. People”, he continued, staring straight ahead. “Like the woman standing over there in the doorway”.

Well, I immediately understood the popular phrase: “the little hairs standing up on the back of your neck” and all I wanted to do was back up (which I couldn’t because of the sofa) and run out the rear door.

I stared at the doorway but could see nothing.  David sensed my terror and went on to say that she was not scary, that none of them were.  This woman, he went on, was the clearest of the figures, and also stayed the longest.  She was dressed in old fashioned clothes and had a kindly face, but was a stranger to him.

About a week later, David entered the hospital, and within another week he passed away.

When his sister-in-law and niece came over from England for the funeral, the three of us shared a quiet conversation in my living room, when I told them the story of the spirit lady who visited David.

Both of the women literally dropped their jaws, not to mention what they had been holding.  After a shocked silence, David’s brother’s widow went on to tell me that all the men in his family back in England had been visited by a female apparition two weeks before they died.

Although she was under the impression that each man knew this woman, David clearly did not know his visitor and I don’t believe he had ever heard that family story in the past. If he had, he was the kind of man who wouldn’t have paid any attention to it, and besides, he had not lived among his English relatives for many years, so was out of the loop with any family lore.

And what has happened in the way of strange noises, negative energy and sightings since my husband passed?  Nothing.

In fact, I feel comforted, protected and strangely – never lonely in my little stone cottage that the potter built over 155 years ago.  Maybe because a little energy remains from the many, many souls that once called this house their home.

L. Dodds

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