Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery

In 1878, a quiet town in Nova Scotia became the stage for one of Canada’s strangest hauntings. Esther Cox, an ordinary young woman, was suddenly surrounded by raps in the walls, flying objects, and ghostly messages carved into plaster. Neighbors, doctors, ministers — even a touring actor — all claimed to witness the terror firsthand. Was it the work of restless spirits, the echoes of trauma, or a mystery no one will ever solve? Join me as we travel back to Amherst, where a haunting once gripped the Maritimes and left behind one unforgettable name: Esther Cox.

Transcript

The other night my daughter and her girlfriend were curled up on the couch, working their way through The Conjuring movies. You’ve probably seen them — Ed and Lorraine Warren taking on demons, curses, haunted houses. Hollywood loves them, and for good reason. They’ve got the perfect mix of faith, fearlessness, and a flair for the dramatic.

But here’s the thing: the Warrens didn’t invent the role of “paranormal investigator.” Long before the 1970s, and far beyond the borders of the United States, there were people chasing ghosts, documenting strange happenings, and standing by those who claimed to be haunted.

In England, there was Harry Price in the 1920s and ’30s — investigating haunted houses and seances with a mix of skepticism and showmanship. In Australia, you had Charles Bailey, a spiritualist medium who traveled the world performing what he said were supernatural feats. Even in Canada, small-town ministers, doctors, and journalists sometimes found themselves stepping into that same role — trying to explain the unexplainable, and sometimes becoming part of the story themselves.

And that’s exactly what happened in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1878. Decades before Ed and Lorraine Warren were even born, a traveling actor named Walter Hubbell walked into a quiet Maritime town and into one of the most famous ghost stories in Canadian history. It’s a haunting that doesn’t just rival The Conjuring — in some ways, it’s stranger. And at the center of it all was a young woman named Esther Cox.

Welcome to year 5 of the Curator135 podcast. My name is Nathan Olli and this is episode 91 - Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery.

In the late 19th century, Amherst, Nova Scotia, sat quietly near the border with New Brunswick, a modest town nestled in the northern reaches of the Bay of Fundy. It was the kind of place where life moved with the tides and the seasons. The rail line had brought more visitors and trade than in decades past, yet Amherst still carried the easy rhythm of a rural Maritime community. Wooden storefronts lined the main street, their windows displaying bolts of fabric, barrels of molasses, and the occasional imported luxury for those who could afford it. The sound of wagon wheels on dirt roads mixed with the sharper ring of a blacksmith’s hammer or the whistle of a distant train.

The wider Maritimes in the 1870s and 1880s were a land in flux. These were years after Confederation, and while Halifax bustled with shipping and industry, smaller towns like Amherst clung to a balance between tradition and slow modernization. Churches were central gathering places—not just for worship, but for news, courtships, and the subtle, unspoken monitoring of one’s neighbors. The sea was never far from people’s minds, even here inland; shipyards and fishing villages dotted the coasts, and many families had kin working on schooners or in far-off ports. Winters were long, and the wind off the Northumberland Strait could cut to the bone, but communities were close-knit, bound together by necessity as much as by affection.

Gossip traveled quickly in towns like Amherst. A stranger’s arrival was noted, a late-night noise remarked upon, and any hint of scandal could be whispered into every ear before sundown. These were practical people—farmers, merchants, laborers—yet they also carried a deep undercurrent of superstition. The Maritimes, with their blend of Scottish, Irish, Acadian, and Mi’kmaq traditions, held a rich tapestry of ghost tales, second sight, and unexplained happenings. A knock in the night could be a loose shutter—or it could be a sign, a warning, a story to tell in a hushed voice by lamplight.

It was in this atmosphere—half practicality, half wonder—that the events in the Teed household began to unfold. Amherst was not prepared for the storm of whispers and newspaper headlines that would follow, nor for the strange, unsettling fame that would cling to the name of one of its own: Esther Cox.

Esther Cox was born on March 28, 1860, in the rural community of Upper Stewiacke, Nova Scotia, the youngest in a large family. By the late 1870s, her life had already been shaped by both the closeness and the limitations of small-town Maritime existence. Her parents were of modest means, and like many young women of the time, Esther’s adult life began not with marriage, but with work in the homes of others. It was common for girls barely out of their teens to become domestic helpers or to live with relatives in exchange for helping with housework, sewing, and childcare.

When she was eighteen, Esther moved to the town of Amherst to live with her older sister, Olive, and Olive’s husband, Daniel Teed. Their home was a modest, two-story wooden house on Princess Street. The Teeds had children of their own, and with several other family members and boarders also under the roof, the house was full to the brim. In that kind of crowded household, everyone had a role. Esther’s was to help Olive with daily chores—cooking meals, cleaning, minding the younger children, and keeping the home in order while Daniel worked as a shoemaker.

By most accounts, Esther was a quiet and unassuming young woman. She was described as small in stature, with light brown hair and a gentle expression. Neighbors remembered her as polite and soft-spoken, though perhaps a little shy. In the Teed home, she blended into the daily rhythm: fetching water, tending the fire, sewing clothes for the children. Life was predictable, if somewhat cramped.

But in August of 1878, that sense of predictability was shattered. Esther had been keeping company with a young man named Bob McNeil, a carriage painter with a reputation for being moody and quick-tempered. One evening, during a drive in his buggy, McNeil pulled a revolver and threatened to kill her. Whether the weapon was loaded or whether he truly intended harm, the shock of the moment stayed with her. She returned to the Teed house pale and trembling, unable to speak of what had happened for days.

In the close quarters of the Teed home, emotional distress rarely went unnoticed. Olive and Daniel knew something was wrong, though they could not have guessed how deeply the incident had unsettled Esther. It was in the weeks following this encounter with McNeil that the first strange disturbances began—quiet at first, almost dismissible, but growing in volume and strangeness until the whole household was drawn into a series of events that would place their lives, and Esther’s name, in newspapers across Canada and beyond.

At first, the disturbances in the Teed house seemed almost trivial—little more than the sorts of things that could be chalked up to bad luck or loose construction. A faint scratching behind the walls. The sound of footsteps in a hallway when no one was there. Bedclothes pulled slightly askew during the night. But within days, these incidents grew harder to explain. Knocks began sounding from inside the walls, sometimes answering questions as if in a crude form of communication. Footsteps now seemed to pace deliberately through rooms, even when the family sat together in full view of one another.

One night, Esther’s bed trembled as if someone were shaking it, though she was alone in the room. Matches would strike themselves and drop from nowhere, landing on the floor without scorching it. Chairs slid across the room unaided. The most unsettling moment came when, during a visit from the local physician, the sound of scratching filled the air as if someone were carving letters into the wall.

The Teeds’ home was soon a destination for the curious and the concerned. Neighbors came to see for themselves, leaving pale-faced and whispering. Clergy arrived to pray, doctors to examine, and skeptics to scoff—though more than a few left without easy explanations. Amherst was alive with talk of spirits, witchcraft, and divine punishment. In a town so rooted in its Christian morality, the idea that a young woman could be under supernatural attack was both terrifying and scandalously intriguing.

It was around this time that the story reached the ears of Walter Hubbell, an actor and part-time stage manager from Philadelphia. Born in 1851, Hubbell had toured with theatrical companies across the United States and Canada, performing in dramas and variety shows. By his own account, he had little patience for fraud—he had seen enough trickery in the world of stage illusions and spiritualist shows to distrust anything labeled “supernatural.”

When Hubbell first heard the rumors about Amherst, he was curious, but skeptical. He decided to visit, convinced he could uncover the hoax. But instead of a single night’s investigation, Hubbell found himself drawn deeper into the mystery. Convinced there was more to the events than idle gossip or clever sleight of hand, he arranged to board at the Teed house so he could witness the disturbances firsthand.

Hubbell would later claim that during his six-week stay, he saw enough to overturn his skepticism completely—objects moving without cause, physical attacks on Esther, unexplainable fires, and the eerie raps that seemed to follow her from room to room. He took meticulous notes, determined to record every incident in detail. Those notes would become the foundation for the book that would cement Esther Cox’s place in the annals of North American ghost lore: The Haunted House: A True Ghost Story.

Hubbell arrived at the Teed house in the summer of 1879, suitcase in hand and skepticism in tow. The moment he stepped through the front door, he sensed an unusual tension — not the tension of a household in quarrel, but something quieter, heavier.

That first evening, the family gathered in the kitchen while Esther sat pale and still, her hands folded in her lap. A neighbor named Jane was with her, and the two young women spoke in low tones. Hubbell remembered the words clearly:

“Oh, mind your own business, Jane,” Esther said with a faint smile. “Let’s say our prayers and retire.”

The night began in calm, but calm never lasted long in that house.

It was near midnight when the first sounds came. At first it was a faint tapping — too deliberate to be the settling of wood. The taps came again, quicker this time, and seemed to travel along the walls. Hubbell wrote:

“At first were heard the usual tramping and thumping about the house. Then the bedclothes moved as if handled by invisible fingers, and the head of the bedstead was struck several times with great force.”

The family exchanged uneasy glances, but no one spoke. Then came the scratching — sharp, uneven, as though made by a nail on plaster. Everyone turned toward the head of Esther’s bed. Slowly, jagged letters began to appear on the wall.

“All looked at the wall whence the sound of writing came,” Hubbell recorded, “when to their great astonishment there was seen written, near the head of the bed, in large characters, these words: ‘mine to kill.’”

The scratching stopped. The room fell silent except for the sound of Esther’s breathing, shallow and quick.

In the days that followed, Hubbell witnessed objects move without human touch. A pillow would slide from one chair to another. A tin dipper flew across the room. Once, as Esther poured a glass of water, the tumbler slipped from her hand as if jerked by unseen force and shattered against the far wall.

The phenomena seemed to center on Esther herself. Wherever she sat, the knocks would follow. At times, the sound would come from inside the mattress beneath her, so loud it made the springs tremble. Other times, the noise came from inside the walls or ceiling, directly above her head.

One evening, a box of matches lifted from the mantelpiece, hung in the air for a second, then fell at Esther’s feet. Without warning, the heads of the matches burst into flame. Hubbell and Daniel Teed rushed to stamp them out before they caught the carpet. Esther sat frozen, her eyes wide.

It was not long before the raps began to answer questions. A single knock for “yes,” two for “no.”

Hubbell: “Are you the spirit of a human being?”

(One rap.)

Hubbell: “Have you lived on this earth before?”

(One rap.)

Hubbell: “Will you tell us your name?”

(No response, then a loud knock on the wall.)

In later sessions, the spirit identified itself — or perhaps themselves — as several distinct personalities: Bob Nickle, Peter Cox, Mary Fisher, Jane Nickle, and Eliza McNeal. Some claimed to be relatives long dead, others strangers to the family.

The events grew more violent. Esther complained of sharp pains in her legs, and when she pulled up her skirts, red marks in the shape of pinpricks dotted her skin. In Hubbell’s words:

“I saw the flesh of her arm rise up in a lump the size of a hen’s egg. It turned white, then red, then subsided, leaving her pale and trembling.”

On more than one occasion, she was struck by flying objects — a shoe, a chunk of coal — thrown with enough force to bruise, though no one was near enough to throw them.

The constant noise, damage, and attention took its toll. Crowds gathered outside the Teed house at night, hoping to see or hear something. Inside, sleep was a rare luxury. Hubbell wrote:

“It became impossible for the family to enjoy a meal without interruption. Sometimes the plates would rattle on the table, or a fork would be jerked from one’s hand. The very air of the house seemed charged with unrest.”

Finally, in early 1879, the disturbances became so severe that Esther left the Teed home to stay with another family in Amherst, hoping the spirits would leave her be. For a time, the house on Princess Street was quiet. But wherever Esther went, the strange events seemed to follow.

When Esther left the Teed home, she hoped she might also leave behind the thing that had plagued her nights and filled her days with dread. She moved in with a local family named Van Amburgh, who offered her a quiet room and the promise of rest. For a brief moment, it seemed to work. The first few nights passed in relative peace — no knocking, no rattling, no sudden movements in the dark.

But soon enough, the raps returned, sharp and deliberate, as if to announce that whatever followed her from Princess Street had simply needed time to find her again. The disturbances here were as intense as ever: blankets yanked from her bed, objects hurled from across the room, and more of those unnerving, conversational knocks. The Van Amburgh family, initially sympathetic, began to worry about the strange attention the situation was drawing. Visitors arrived asking for “the haunted girl,” peeking in windows or loitering outside to catch a glimpse.

In Hubbell’s account, the events seemed tied to Esther’s emotions. When she was anxious, the activity would build; when she was calmer, it subsided. But there were no days without some incident. One evening, a heavy sewing basket slid itself across the floor toward her. Another time, a potato lifted from a dish on the table and dropped, deliberately, in front of her chair.

The notoriety that had started in Amherst soon spread to other towns. Newspapers in Halifax, Saint John, and even across the border in the United States printed sensational headlines about “The Great Amherst Mystery.” Some journalists treated it as a genuine haunting, describing the physical attacks and supernatural messages in vivid detail. Others dismissed it as a hoax, painting Esther as either a clever fraud or an attention-seeker with nervous fits.

Public opinion in Amherst itself was split. Many neighbors believed Esther was genuinely tormented by something unseen. Others whispered about the buggy ride with Bob McNeil, suggesting that what followed was less about spirits and more about a young woman shaken to her core, her distress manifesting in strange ways.

Hubbell continued to document everything he could. In his writing, he was careful to note that while he could not prove the origin of the phenomena, he had witnessed enough to believe it was real. He described himself as a man who had come to Amherst as a skeptic and left with “the conviction that there is more to our existence than we can yet explain.”

By the time Esther moved again — this time to live with the family of a local clergyman — she was known throughout the Maritimes. But the change of address did not end her ordeal. The disturbances followed her still, stubborn as shadow. Each move seemed to draw more attention, and each new home became the stage for the same unsettling drama.

The toll on Esther was obvious. She lost weight, her face pale and drawn. She became wary of strangers, knowing they might have come not to offer help, but to catch her in the act of supposed trickery. And though the phenomena showed no sign of stopping, the patience of those around her was wearing thin.

It was becoming clear that the Great Amherst Mystery was not just a local haunting anymore — it was a public spectacle. And in the weeks to come, it would push Esther into situations she never could have imagined, from lecture halls to a criminal courtroom.

By the time Walter Hubbell left Amherst, his notebook was full — a day-by-day record of the strange happenings he claimed to have witnessed in the Teed house and beyond. He was certain that if the world could hear Esther’s story, the truth of her ordeal would be undeniable. With his encouragement, a plan took shape: Esther would embark on a speaking tour across the Maritimes, accompanied by Hubbell, to recount the events in her own words.

In theory, it was the perfect next step. Public fascination was at its peak, and people were eager to see the “haunted girl” in person. Esther was no trained performer, but she was willing — perhaps hoping that telling her story might bring some kind of closure. They traveled to halls in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Hubbell reading from his manuscript and Esther answering questions from the audience.

At first, the crowds were large, filling the small-town venues and leaning forward in their seats to catch every detail. But trouble came quickly. Many ticket buyers expected a show — not just a lecture, but a live demonstration of the haunting itself. When the spirits failed to appear on cue, disappointment turned to suspicion. Murmurs of fraud began to follow them from town to town. A few rowdy skeptics heckled from the back rows, asking her to make a chair fly or to summon the writing on the wall. Within weeks, the tour faltered and was abandoned altogether.

The collapse of her public standing was swift. Those who had once been curious now questioned her honesty. Some newspapers that had printed breathless accounts only months before now ran skeptical editorials, suggesting she had fooled an entire town. And in Amherst, patience with the constant attention — and the occasional lingering disturbances when she was in residence — had worn thin.

In 1879, Esther found work as a domestic in a nearby community. But it was here that her life took another dark turn. A barn on the property where she was staying caught fire under suspicious circumstances. No one was injured, but the owner accused Esther of setting the blaze. She was arrested and charged with arson. Whether the accusation was fueled by genuine belief, lingering suspicion from the haunting, or simply a desire to be rid of her, the damage was done.

The trial was brief. Esther was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail. She served just one, released early — some said due to public sympathy, others because there was no solid proof she had lit the fire. But her reputation in Amherst was beyond repair.

When she returned home, she found the disturbances had ceased. No knocks, no flying objects, no phantom writing on the walls. It was as if whatever had plagued her for more than a year had simply… gone. The town’s appetite for the mystery, too, had vanished. People moved on to other gossip, other scandals. The man at the center of her original trauma, Bob McNeil, had slipped away quietly from Amherst life — and, as far as anyone could tell, was never heard from again.

By the early 1880s, Esther had left Nova Scotia altogether. She married a man named Adam Porter and relocated to New Brunswick, where she gave birth to a son. In the years that followed, she crossed the border into the United States, settling eventually in Brockton, Massachusetts. There, far from the streets of Amherst, she lived a quiet life, remarrying in 1896 to Peter Shanahan and raising her children away from the shadow of her notoriety.

Yet even across the border, the story of the Great Amherst Mystery lingered. Hubbell’s book had sold tens of thousands of copies, and the name “Esther Cox” still appeared in paranormal magazines and newspapers from time to time. But for Esther herself, the haunting seemed to be a chapter firmly closed — one that she never again tried to reopen.

In the century after Esther Cox’s death, the Great Amherst Mystery remained a fixture of Maritime ghost lore. Walter Hubbell’s book had kept the haunting alive in print, and countless retellings in newspapers, magazines, and ghost tours ensured that Esther’s name was never entirely forgotten. But for all its popularity, one thing was missing: Esther’s own voice.

That’s where Laurie Glenn Norris comes in. Norris, a historian and former curator of the Cumberland County Museum in Amherst, devoted years to peeling back the layers of myth, exaggeration, and gossip that had wrapped themselves around the story. In 2012, along with co-author Barbara Thompson, she published Haunted Girl: Esther Cox & the Great Amherst Mystery, a work that treated the haunting not just as a supernatural curiosity, but as a deeply human story about a young woman caught in extraordinary and troubling circumstances.

Norris made it her mission to go beyond the 15 months of the haunting. “I wanted to find out what happened in Cox’s life before that 15 months, and then after,” she explained in an interview. To her, Esther was more than a character in a ghost story — she was a flesh-and-blood person whose life, relationships, and struggles mattered as much as the phenomena that had made her famous.

From Norris’s perspective, the haunting can’t be fully understood without acknowledging the context in which it happened. She points to Esther’s encounter with Bob McNeil, the shock and humiliation of that threatened violence, and the claustrophobic environment of Amherst’s small-town life. And she doesn’t shy away from suggesting that some of the events, or at least their presentation, may have given Esther a form of control in a life where she had little: “Esther was a victim, but in some ways she also had agency. Whether she believed this was happening… but I think at some point she said, ‘Hey, I am getting attention with this.’”

It’s a striking reframing — not to dismiss the accounts of paranormal activity, but to remind us that in 1878, a young, unmarried woman’s voice had little public weight unless it came through someone else’s filter. As Norris and Thompson discovered, “not once is [Cox] interviewed” in the contemporary newspapers. The quotes attributed to her came secondhand, filtered through others’ recollections. In that sense, Haunted Girl becomes an act of restoration, placing Esther back in the center of her own story.

Perhaps most compelling is Norris’s view of the so-called “acts” that troubled witnesses in the Teed house — the self-inflicted cuts, the fires. Today, she argues, we might recognize these not as proof of fraud but as signs of trauma. “Cox often set fires or she’d cut herself. All of that was reported in the local papers. Today we’d likely recognize those as responses to trauma.” It’s a reminder that while the knocking walls and flying objects captivate our imagination, the emotional and psychological landscape behind them is no less important — and perhaps more telling.

In Norris’s framing, Esther’s haunting becomes part of a larger pattern: nineteenth-century poltergeist cases involving young women, often living in difficult family situations, navigating the complicated expectations of their time. Seen this way, the Great Amherst Mystery is not only about whether or not a ghost tormented Esther Cox — it’s also about how society responded to a young woman in crisis, and what those responses reveal about the era.

Today, the Great Amherst Mystery sits somewhere between folklore and history — a tale passed down in whispers and retold in books, yet grounded in the life of a real young woman whose world was upended in the span of a year. Walter Hubbell’s sensational account ensured that Esther Cox would be remembered far beyond Nova Scotia, while Laurie Glenn Norris’s Haunted Girl reframed that memory, urging us to see her not just as a haunted figure, but as a human being navigating fear, isolation, and the unpredictable power of public attention.

What happened in Amherst between 1878 and 1879 may never be fully explained. For believers, the raps, the writing on the wall, and the violent poltergeist activity stand as one of the most compelling supernatural cases in Canadian history. For skeptics, the Great Amherst Mystery is an example of human ingenuity, suggestion, and the complex ways trauma can shape behavior. And for others, it’s both — a strange intersection where the unknown meets the deeply personal.

After the disturbances ended, Esther lived the rest of her life quietly, far from the public eye. She married, raised children, crossed the border into the United States, and died in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1912 at the age of 52. Bob McNeil vanished from the historical record, his role in her story never fully confronted.

In Amherst, the Teed house eventually faded into history, replaced by other buildings and other stories. But in certain corners — among Maritime historians, in the pages of Hubbell’s book, and on the lips of those who love a good ghost story — the name Esther Cox still stirs the imagination.

Perhaps that’s the real power of the Great Amherst Mystery: it refuses to be neatly labeled. It’s a ghost story, yes. But it’s also a story about a young woman whose voice was rarely heard in her own time, a community caught between faith and skepticism, and the ways we choose to remember the past. Whether you hear the echoes of a restless spirit or the quieter signals of a troubled heart, one thing is certain — once you’ve heard her name, you won’t soon forget Esther Cox.

Let me know what you think. Nathan@curator135.com Visit the website to see photos and read more about Esther and the town of Amherst. Curator135.com  

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