In the 1870s Amherst was a busy Nova Scotia town near the New Brunswick border, with a shoe factory, a foundry and a weekly paper. On Princess Street stood a small two-story cottage rented by Daniel Teed, a foreman at the shoe factory. Into it were packed Teed, his wife Olive, their two little boys, Daniel’s brother John, and three of Olive’s younger siblings: William, Jennie and Esther Cox. Esther was 18 and shared a bed with Jennie.
What happened
By the family’s account, the trouble began on the night of September 4, 1878, when Esther cried out that a mouse was moving inside the mattress. The next night the sisters saw a box shift on its own. Soon Esther was having attacks in which her body seemed to swell while loud reports shook the room. Bedclothes slid off, pillows flew, and knocks began answering questions put to them. Words threatening to kill Esther were found scratched into the bedroom plaster. Lighted matches dropped on to her bed, a dress caught fire, and a blaze started in a pile of shavings in the cellar. The family’s doctor, a Dr. Carritte, attended from the start and later vouched for parts of Hubbell’s account.
Crowds gathered outside, and the police had to keep order. Opinion in the town split between electricity, an evil spirit and a wicked girl. Some days before it all started, Esther had gone for a night-time buggy ride with a young man named Bob McNeal and come home in a state; according to her, he had threatened her with a pistol before being interrupted. That rests entirely on her word.
Eventually the landlord wanted her out. Esther went to work for a local businessman and then on a farm, and the disturbances went with her. A barn burned, and she was arrested. Hubbell later wrote that she was convicted of setting the fire and sentenced to four months, serving one; the modern researchers Laurie Glenn Norris and Barbara Thompson say the conviction was actually for stealing clothes. Either way, after about a month in jail the phenomena stopped.
The investigation
Nearly everything known about the case comes from Walter Hubbell, a traveling actor who heard about it in 1879 and saw an opportunity. He first tried a lecture tour with Esther in New Brunswick that June; audiences were unimpressed when nothing happened on stage, and a Halifax church paper declared the affair no mystery at all to anyone who used their eyes. He then lodged with the Teeds for about a month, keeping a diary of knocks, stabbing pins and flying objects. His book appeared later that year as The Haunted House, blaming devils, and was reissued and expanded as The Great Amherst Mystery, eventually selling some 55,000 copies by its tenth edition in 1916.
The book is the problem. In 1919 Walter Franklin Prince of the American Society for Psychical Research published a long critical study of it. He pointed out that although hundreds were said to have witnessed the phenomena, Hubbell’s first edition contained no statement from anyone but himself, and that the newspaper reports he quoted mostly traced back to his own accounts. A sworn testimonial added decades later was written in Hubbell’s own phrases, and Olive Teed had told another researcher, Hereward Carrington, that the book was not accurate. Carrington, who met Esther in 1907, still thought her honest.
The explanations
Prince’s verdict was that Esther produced the effects herself, probably while in a dissociated state in which a second personality had split off from the first. Norris and Thompson’s 2012 book, Haunted Girl, reached a similar conclusion by a different route, setting out reasons an anxious young woman in a crowded house might stage the events: displacement by her nephews, grief, and rivalry with her sister Jennie. Neither study can show how each incident was done, but the fires in particular followed Esther wherever she went, and suspicion fell on her at the time.
Where it stands
Esther married, had a son and lived quietly in poverty, apparently without seeing any of the money the book made. She died on November 8, 1912 at the age of 52. The case has an odd footnote: decades later Lionel Foyster, later rector of Borley in England, served at nearby Sackville, and researchers noticed close parallels between Esther’s story and the phenomena reported around his wife Marianne. As a haunting, Amherst rests on one interested witness; as an episode of human distress, it is well documented.