Dodge's case is unusual in this register for having a ready, entirely mundane explanation sitting right alongside the supernatural claim, his ghost-laying reputation understood by most local historians not as a genuine belief in his own exorcisms but as a practical smuggler's cover story, one clever enough that it has outlived the smuggling operation it was built to protect by nearly three centuries.
That reading fits the wider documented pattern of Talland Bay and the neighbouring Polperro coast as an active smuggling landscape throughout the eighteenth century, high import duties of the period having created exactly the profitable black market that made a credulous, ghost-fearing local population a genuine practical asset to men moving contraband past the parish at night.
Whether Dodge himself ever half believed his own performance, after decades of whip-cracking theatre in his own churchyard, is not something any source consulted for this entry can settle, and this register records that ambiguity honestly rather than resolving it, the parson's private state of mind remaining as unrecoverable now as it presumably was to his own startled parishioners at the time.
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