The Night the Marsh Caught Fire: Inside the Baldoon Mystery

🔥🌫️ The Night the Marsh Caught Fire: Inside the Baldoon Mystery (12pt)
Author: Juniper Ravenwood

🌾🏚️ A Frontier That Refused to Stay Settled
Long before Amityville, before Enfield, there was Baldoon. In the fall of 1829 a Scottish immigrant family built their dream home on what they thought was empty land. Within weeks that land decided it already had tenants, and they were furious.

💥🪵 The Attacks No One Could Explain
It began innocently enough: pebbles tapping windows, footsteps overhead. Then the violence escalated. Lead musket balls marked with knives reappeared inside the house after being locked away. Haystacks burst into flame simultaneously miles apart. Witnesses watched flames crawl up walls that were ice-cold to the touch. Night after night, neighbors heard the steady tramp of invisible boots circling the roof like a ghostly regiment on eternal patrol.

🦢🔮 The Witch at the Edge of the Swamp
Fear needs a face. The settlement found one in an elderly recluse who had repeatedly tried to buy the McDonald land. Rumors swirled that she practiced the old craft, that she appeared in visions, that she could leave her skin and fly as a huge black-headed goose. Desperate, the family consulted a renowned Mennonite witch-doctor. His diagnosis: wound the goose with pure silver and you wound the witch.

🌙🕳️ The Silver Bullet and the Silence That Followed
One moonlit night the goose appeared. A single shot rang out. The bird screamed, an unearthly human cry, and limped into the reeds. The next morning the old woman was found with her arm shattered in the exact same place. The fires stopped. The stones stopped falling. The marching ceased. The marsh went quiet, for the first time in three years.

🔥❓ Two Centuries Later, the Question Still Burns
Was it mass hysteria in an isolated community? Teenage pranksters with excellent aim and homemade incendiaries? Or did the McDonalds accidentally build their house on ground that something older claimed first? Even today, locals swear that on certain foggy nights you can still smell faint woodsmoke drifting from a homestead that burned down almost two hundred years ago.

If you’re ever driving Highway 40 near Wallaceburg, slow down when you pass McDonald Park. Read the plaque. Then roll your window down and listen. Some say the reeds still remember.

Stay curious. Stay a little afraid.
– Juniper Ravenwood

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