The Great Amherst Mystery: The Esther Cox Poltergeist

Late August 1878. Esther Cox, 18, was boarding with her eldest sister Olive and her brother-in-law Daniel Teed, a shoemaker, in a neat two story cottage on Princess Street, Amherst. Eight people shared the house. Then came what the actor Walter Hubbell would call a "fatal ride" with a young man named Bob McNeal. Later writers describe it as an assault.

One week later. September 4, 1878. Esther lay in bed and cried out: "I am swelling up and shall certainly burst, I know I shall." Her family saw her body swollen to an enormous size. Then three terrific reports were heard, apparently directly under the bed, so loud that the whole room shook.

The nights filled with knocking, banging and scratching. A pillow left the bed, straightened itself out as if filled with air, and went back again. A cardboard box jumped about a foot into the air. Fires broke out in the cellar, the loft and under the beds. One of Esther's dresses was rolled up and found all in a blaze.

Then words appeared in large characters on the bedroom wall, near the head of her bed. "Esther Cox, you are mine to kill." Through rapping, the presences gave six names. They were Bob Nickle, said to be a dead shoemaker, Peter Cox, Maggie Fisher, Mary Fisher, Jane Nickle and Eliza McNeal.

Dr. Caritte, the local physician, watched the pillow move and saw plaster fall from the wall. In the cellar with Esther, several potatoes came flying at their heads. They both beat a hasty retreat. Rev. R. A. Temple, a Wesleyan minister, saw a bucket of cold water appear to boil on the kitchen table. Dr. Edwin Clay, a Baptist minister, heard the loudest kind of knocks in answer to his questions and concluded that Esther produced none of it herself.

In March 1879, local gentlemen with an interest in science questioned the spirits in Saint John, New Brunswick. That summer Walter Hubbell lodged at the cottage. He reported forty-five matches thrown in a single day, his umbrella flung fifteen feet over his head, all seven parlour chairs falling over, and the sound of a trumpet heard by the whole family. A short public tour with Esther collapsed after two engagements.

In November 1879, her employer Arthur Davison accused her of burning his barn. She was convicted of arson and sentenced to four months. Nothing more was reported.

Hubbell's book sold at least 55,000 copies. Esther lived in poverty, taking in laundry, and earned nothing from it. Hereward Carrington later interviewed surviving witnesses and Esther herself, and believed she was innocent.

In 1919 Walter Franklin Prince argued for trickery by Esther in a dissociative state, noting that Bob Nickle appeared one week after the assault by Bob McNeal. Egon Larsen called Hubbell the most unreliable witness, and Davison reportedly said Hubbell "painted the facts up to make the book sell." Modern retellings read the poltergeist through the lens of trauma.

In 2012 Laurie Glenn Norris and Barbara Thompson revisited the case in Haunted Girl. Charlie Rhindress staged Guilty! in Sackville in 1991, and Amherst held Esther Fest in October 2023, with a mural to mark its strangest story. BBC Radio 4's Uncanny took up the case in 2026. As Rhindress put it: "If this was the United States, there already would've been a movie…"