The Great Amherst Mystery: Canada's Most Violent Poltergeist

On September 4, 1878, Esther Cox and her sister Jennie were in bed in a crowded cottage on Princess Street in Amherst, Nova Scotia, when something seemed to move inside the mattress. They thought it was a mouse. Over the following months the household reported loud knocks, bedclothes pulled off by no visible hand, small fires, pins stuck into Esther’s skin and, one night, words scratched on the wall above her bed. They read “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill.” The case became known across Canada as the Great Amherst Mystery.

It is one of the most famous poltergeist cases in North America. It is also one of the most disputed, because nearly every detail comes from a single source, the actor Walter Hubbell, who lodged in the house in 1879 and wrote a best-selling book about it.

Esther Cox

Esther Cox was about 18 or 19 in 1878. She was an orphan and lived with her married sister Olive and Olive’s husband, Daniel Teed, in a two-storey cottage on Princess Street, near Church Street. Hubbell describes Daniel as a shoemaker and foreman at the Amherst Shoe Factory. The house was full. Besides Daniel, Olive and their two small boys, it held Esther, her sister Jennie, her brother William Cox and Daniel’s brother John Teed.

According to Hubbell, in late August 1878 a young shoemaker named Bob McNeal, who had been courting Esther, drove her out of town in a buggy to a grove. There, he says, McNeal pulled a revolver and ordered her out of the buggy, threatening to kill her. The sound of an approaching carriage made him give up. He drove her home and left Amherst soon after. Later writers describe this as an attempted sexual assault. Hubbell tells it more guardedly, but his meaning is plain. No charge was brought. Within days the strange events began.

The Phenomena Begin

Hubbell dates the first disturbance to September 4, 1878, the night the sisters thought a mouse was in the mattress. Soon after, he writes, Esther cried out that she was swelling, and the family saw her body appear to swell up and then go down again. Loud reports followed, like thunder or blows on the walls and roof.

The family called the local physician, Dr. Thomas Carritte. Hubbell’s account of the doctor’s visit is the most famous scene in the case. The bedclothes moved, there was a sound like writing with a metal point, and those in the room saw the words “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill” on the wall, in letters nearly a foot high. A piece of plaster then flew from the wall and landed at the doctor’s feet. Hubbell writes that Carritte “had heard and seen, and could not doubt his own senses”, but had no theory to offer. Carritte had died before the 1888 edition was printed. We have found no statement in his own words.

Over the following months Hubbell describes the disturbances growing. Objects were thrown. Lighted matches fell from the air onto the bed. Small fires broke out in the house. Pins appeared stuck into Esther. Knocks answered questions in a simple code. The force, through Esther, gave itself names. The chief one was “Bob Nickle”, who claimed to have been a shoemaker. Others called themselves Peter Cox, Maggie Fisher, Mary Fisher, Jane Nickle and Eliza McNeal.

The Investigation

Dr. Carritte, as Hubbell tells it, at first thought Esther’s nerves were to blame and gave her sedatives, but he kept seeing more. The Rev. R. A. Temple, the local Baptist minister, also took an interest and visited the house. Crowds gathered outside at times, and the case was talked about across the Maritimes.

Walter Hubbell was a touring actor. He came to Amherst in the summer of 1879, after the case had died down and then flared up again, and boarded at the Teed cottage for some weeks. The Amherst Gazette of June 27, 1879, noted that he had “determined to spend some time in its investigation”. In his book he describes objects flying at him, including his umbrella and a carving knife, chairs moving, matches falling, fires starting and the voices of the “ghosts” heard through knocks.

His book first appeared in 1879, published in Saint John, New Brunswick, under the title “The Haunted House: A True Ghost Story”. It was reissued in New York in 1888 as “The Great Amherst Mystery: A True Narrative of the Supernatural”. It is said to have sold at least 55,000 copies. The 1888 edition opens with a sworn affidavit in which Hubbell states that he “actually saw and heard the phenomena as stated”. It also reprints items from newspapers of the time.

Hubbell writes in his preface that “hundreds of sane persons saw and heard” the marvels. He gives no list of those witnesses, and he does not print their own signed statements. That is the root of the claim, often repeated, that more than a hundred people saw the phenomena.

The Fires

Fire is the most dangerous thread in the story. In Hubbell’s account matches fell burning from the air and small fires broke out around the house, and at one point someone ran into Princess Street crying “fire!”.

The fires also brought the case to an end. After leaving the Teed house, Esther stayed and worked at other homes, including a farm. Hubbell writes that while she was visiting a family in Amherst, their barn caught fire and burned to the ground, with its outbuildings. The owner was Arthur Davison. Esther was arrested, tried and convicted of arson, and sentenced to four months in jail. According to later accounts she was released after about one month. Hubbell, who blamed the “demon fire-fiend”, complained that “judge and jury did not believe in ghosts”.

The Resolution

After her release, the disturbances faded. Esther later married twice and had a son by each husband. She moved with her second husband to Brockton, Massachusetts. She died on November 8, 1912, aged 52. Hubbell, writing in 1888, had heard that she had not been troubled since her marriage.

Understanding the Phenomena

The case has many of the features found in later poltergeist reports. It centres on a young person, it follows a frightening event, it grows over months and then fades, and it is tied closely to one house and one person.

The Fraud and Dissociation View

The most thorough critique came in 1919 from Walter Franklin Prince, a researcher for the American Society for Psychical Research. Prince went through Hubbell’s book in detail and argued that Esther herself produced the effects, through trickery carried out while in a dissociated state, so that she may not have known what she was doing. He pointed out how often the events happened when she was present and how many could be done by hand. The writer Egon Larsen went further. He suggested that “part of her” played poltergeist, and that the only one who gained from the affair was Hubbell. Larsen said he could find no named witness who backed up Hubbell’s claims, and that the newspaper quotes in the book traced back to Hubbell himself. Arthur Davison, whose barn burned, is reported to have said that Hubbell “painted the facts up to make the book sell”.

The Paranormal View

Believers read the case in two ways. Some see an outside entity that fastened on Esther. Others follow the idea of Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK), which holds that a person under great stress can move objects without knowing it. On that view, Esther was the poltergeist. Supporters point to the fires that put Esther herself at risk, and to events Hubbell says happened while she slept.

What Can Be Said

The case is real in the sense that something disturbed the Teed household for about a year and was talked about in the press. What happened in detail is much less certain. The fullest record was written by an actor who sold it as a ghost story, and the doctor and minister at its heart never published their own accounts.

The Legacy

Hubbell’s book went through many editions and made the case famous. It is still one of the most often cited early poltergeist accounts. Prince’s study has also become a classic of a different kind, a model of how to test a ghost story against its own source. Writers on the subject often link the case to the idea that poltergeist outbreaks follow trauma in a young person. That idea is common in paranormal writing, but the Amherst case cannot prove it.

Visiting Amherst

Amherst is a town of about ten thousand people in Cumberland County, near the New Brunswick border. The Teed cottage on Princess Street no longer stands. The case is part of local lore and turns up in talks and walking tours from time to time.

The Mystery That Remains

Esther Cox lived for more than thirty years after the events that made her name, and seems to have said little about them. What happened in the cottage on Princess Street in 1878 and 1879 still divides readers. To some it was a true haunting. To others it was a frightened young woman, a crowded house and a showman with a book to sell. The surviving record does not settle the question.

Sources

• Walter Hubbell, The Great Amherst Mystery: A True Narrative of the Supernatural (Brentano’s, New York, 1888), Internet Archive
• Walter Hubbell, The Haunted House: A True Ghost Story (Daily News, Saint John, N.B., 1879), Internet Archive
• Wikipedia, “Great Amherst Mystery” (household, Prince and Larsen critiques, later life)
• Walter Franklin Prince, “A Critical Study of ‘The Great Amherst Mystery’”, Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 13 (1919)