In 1809, as a young teenager, Dods had a waking vision of his recently deceased father, who gave him a message from the spirit world.

In 1824, as a newly appointed Congregationalist pastor in Levant, Maine, his house was visited by other ghostly relatives, and his family became plagued by poltergeist style phenomena.

[4] Moving to Brooklyn for his psychiatric practice, Dods became well known as a debunker of early Spiritualism, and published a book claiming to give a medical explanation for spiritualist phenomena.

He wrote that he tried to explain this as a naturalistic phenomenon but only had more and more visions, and was deluged with questions about his personal experiences when he tried to defend his views in public.

[6] Dods became one of the more well known mesmerists in New England, along with others such as La Roy Sunderland, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby.