SYMHC Classics: Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. Since today is the last Saturday before Halloween, we have a particularly HALLOWEENI episode for Today's Saturday Classic. It is our episode on Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery, which originally came out October. So early on in this episode, I say that Esther's mother died just a few weeks before she was born. And no, that was not a bizarre medical or maybe supernatural occurrence that we just dropped into the show and then offered no further comment on, instead going on to talk at length about how much premature baby's way when they're nine months old. I just misspoke. And even though three people listen to this episode before it published, none of us noticed it focused it afterwards, though, uh Esser's mother died a few weeks after she was born. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's still October, which means this is a perfect time for what is a haunting episode or is it? And I feel like that could be all of our haunting episodes, and yes, for sure, This episode is all about an alleged haunting that took place in Amherst Nova, Scotia in the eighteen seventies, so Canadian haunting h And as we've done in haunting stories in the past, we're first going to tell it more or less as it is relayed from a believer's point of view, and then we're going to discuss it from a more skeptical side. So I witnessed to this haunting, Walter Hubble, and we're going to get into his involvement in the story later because it's pretty important. Wrote a book detailing a six week period in which he lived in the house with Esther, who is the young woman who allegedly all of this this haunting activity took place around and the introduction to Hubble's book reads, quote, the manifestations described in this story commenced one year ago. No person has yet been able to ascertain their cause. Scientific men from all parts of Canada and the United States have investigated them in vain. Some people think that electricity is the principal agent, others mesmerism, while others again are sure they are produced by the devil. Of the three supposed causes, the latter is certainly the most plausible theory, for some of the manifestations are remarkably devilish in their appearance and effect. So that's what we're in for here. Uh, And just a quick heads up before we get into this story. There is a very brief discussion of attempted sexual assault in this episode. There's not a lot of detail about it. It comes up two times and they're both quite quick. But if that is something that is potentially troubling for you, you might want to skip this one. But we're going to get into Esther Cox in the Great Amherst Mystery. Esther Cox was born on March eighteen sixty in Nova Scotia. Her parents were Archibald T and Esther Cox, and the family had a farm. She was really, really tiny when she was born. According to Hubble's recounting of Esther's childhood, she only weighed five pounds by the time she was nine months old. Her grandmother had to keep her on a pillow to wash and dress her because she was just so delicate. Esther's mother also died just a few weeks before Esther was born. I immediately was incredulous when reading that account. I'm like a nine month old that weighs five pounds seems very weird to me. I'm sure we will get a flood of people who say no, no, I have evidence, um, just having known a number of very early premise I think most of them had passed five pounds by the time they were nine months But that immediately kind of red flag to me. Just f y I in case you heard that went what. Esther was described by Hubble as a young woman as short, quote inclined to be stout, earnest, and honest. She was also strong willed, and she would sometimes sulk, but the writer assures the reader of her goodness. By the time she was a young woman. Esther, her sister Jane, and their brother William all lived with their older sister, Olive and her family. Daniel and Olive Teed had two sons named William George. Willie was five when Esther moved in with the family, and George had just passed his first birthday. Daniel's brother John lived with the family as well. Hubble described the Teed cottage as pleasant, with its interior adornments quote so tastefully arranged, so scrupulously clean, and so comfortable that the visitor feels at home in a moment, being confident that everything is looked after by a thrifty housewife. On August Sight, Esther, he was eighteen, started her day as normal with breakfast with the family and then she did her chores around the house. That evening, her boyfriend Bob McNeil came to call and asked her to go for a ride with him. He had missed a date to visit her the night before, and he promised to explain what had happened during their ride. Allegedly, as the pair were riding through a wooded area, Bob's demeanor changed abruptly. He jumped down from the buggy, pulled a gun and ordered Esther to do the same that his exit the buggy or he would kill her. She did not do as he ordered, and instead told him to stop acting like a crazy man and drive her home, and this incensed Bob, and he was allegedly about to shoot Esther point blank when they heard another buggy approaching, and at that point, Bob jumped back into the driver's seat and raced back to the teed home. As Esther ran into the house, Bob and the buggy raced away. This incident as it's relayed in the Walter Hubble account, is like it's described above, although there's all so the mention that Bob quote uttered several terrible oaths. Often, though, this incident is characterized as an attempted sexual assault, and it's not clear due to the possibility that it was sanitized and publication for the sake of propriety. But as we're about to discuss, whatever took place on that ride was very traumatic for ester This incident really did take a severe toll on her and Esther's family. None of him who had ever really particularly approved of Bob McLean, presumed that the pair had gotten into an argument and broken up. Esther did not reveal to them what had happened in terms of him threatening her, and they didn't pry into what they thought was a basic lover's quarrel. But not long after McNeil's attack, a series of unusual things began happening. For the next week, Esther was quite understandably distraught. She cried a lot. She had trouble sleeping on the night of September four, as their believed that there was a mouse in her bed. She felt some thing rustling under the sheet. Her sister Jane, who slept in the same room with her, assured her that even if it was a mouse, it wouldn't hurt them, that they should just try to get some rest. The following night, what they believed was a mouse once again disrupted their sleep. This time they heard what they thought were mouse noises from within a box of patchwork. Esther resolved that they were going to kill the mouse so that they would not have the same problem of poor sleep night after night after night. So the two young women removed the box from its place under the bed and they put it in the center of the floor, preparing to deal with this mouse. While they were watching, the box rose up into the air, roughly a foot off the floor, and then it tipped onto its side. As it fell back down, Jane put the box in the center of the room, and the same thing happened again. They started screaming, not surprisingly, and their screams drew their brother in law Daniel, into the room, but he laughed off the account of the levitating box, insisting it they had just dreamed it or they had shared some moment of delusion. The next day, everyone went about their usual routine, but that evening, Esther felt ill, and she went to bed early. Jane went to bed later, but she was awakened in the night by Esther, who had jumped out of bed and exclaimed that she was dying. Jane little lamp, and she saw that Esther's appearance was changed in really upsetting ways. Esther's face was bright red, her hair was standing on end, and she was shaking and gripping a chair so tightly that her fingernails had sunk down into the woods. So Jane called for help. After the adult members of the household rushed into the room, Esther's color went pale and she became very, very weak. She was assisted to her bed, where she sat for a moment before jumping up and yelling that she thought she was going to burst. Jane soothed her. She got into her bed, but Esther kept saying that she was going to burst and that she was swelling. Her family looked at her, and she was swelling and turning red once again. She was also hot to the touch, and then they all heard a loud sound that Olive initially thought was lightning striking the house. It scared all of so much that she actually went to check on her two little boys. She was worried that something might have happened to them, but they were both fast asleep peacefully, and they appeared to have not heard this sound that everyone in Esther's room had heard. There was absolutely no storm outside. There were three more loud noises, which all seemed to come from under the bed, and then Esther's swelling vanished, her temperature returned to normal. She fell deeply asleep until nine o'clock the next morning. The family discussed the oddness of the previous night, but because there was no discernible cause and Esther seemed to be okay other than having a slightly reduced appetite, they let the matter drop. We're going to talk about the odd happenings around Esther intensifying after this, but before we do, we're gonna take a little break and pause for a word from one of our sponsors. Things at the Teed house were normal for four nights, and then another swelling incident happened. This time Esther was just getting into bed when it started, and Jane advised her to just lie still and be quiet and hope that the attack would just pass. But as they waited for the swelling and the fever to subside, all of the bedclothes flew off the bed and landed in a corner. Jane, terrified, screamed and fainted. When the rest of the family rested into the room, having heard all the screaming, at first they were afraid that Jane was dead. Olive quickly gathered up the bed coverings and put them back on our sisters, but once again they flew into the corner and a ball. The bed covers were replaced once more, and this time Olive, Daniel, William, and John sat on the edges of the bed to keep the covers in place as Ster's pillow shot out from under her head and it hit John in the face, which frightened him out of the room. As Esther's brother, William brought a bucket of cold water to try to soothe her aching and feverish head, there were, as in the first swelling incident, several loud noises from under the bed, after which Esther's swelling vanished and she once again slept peacefully. But the next day, as the family conferred on what had happened, it was decided that they absolutely needed a doctor to check on Esther. Daniel visited the family doctor, doctor Curit, and he described to him all that had happened, and while the doctor thought it sounded like utter nonsense, he did agree that he would go to the house in the evening and that he would stay until one am and observe. He initially examined Esther and said that she appeared to have had a shock and she was experiencing nervous excitement. Then he saw the pillow under her head move on its own as before. The pillow shot out then from under Esther's head, and this time John tried to grab it, but it felt as though some other force was pulling in in opposition. Loud sounds once again came, initially from under the bed, but then as the doctor, who seemed to keep a pretty cool head through all of this, started walking around the room, those noises seemed to follow him under the floorboards. Then words appeared to be etched into the wall over the bed that said Esther Cox, you are mine to kill. Next, a piece of plaster came loose from the wall and flew across the room. Then the banging sounds again, and the noise continued for two full hours and then stopped abruptly, the doctor left, promising that he would visit again in the morning to check on Esther. When doctor Kat was in the house the next day, Esther was up. She was feeling fairly normal and going about her chores. She went into the cellar, but soon she ran back upstairs, vinced that someone was hiding there and had thrown a piece of wood planking at her. The doctor investigated, but he found nothing. He asked Esther to come down into the cellar with him, and once she was there, the pair were pelted with potatoes, uh and they both immediately ran back upstairs. That evening, the doctor gave Esther several sedatives at bedtime and the hopes that she would be able to rest, but the pounding took place once again, this time louder and faster than on previous occasions. Eventually it shifted so that it sounded like it was coming from the roof. And up to this point, the family had kept all of these strange events from their neighbors, but words soon began to spread this something very unusual was happening, and this was due in part to the fact that the pounding sounds started going on all throughout the day. And night, and they were so loud that people simply heard them. A few weeks after the doctor's first visit, Esther had a spasm or a seizure while he was there. One night, she went quite still and then relayed what had taken place between her and Bob McNeil. Yeah, there are a few instances where she sort of goes into this almost trance like state and has discussions that she doesn't really recall. It comes up again later. And it was at this same time that esther sister Jane put forth the idea that whatever the entity was that was making these noises could also, she thought, here and understand the family, And so they decided to test this idea. So they started to ask questions of whatever it was, things like can you hear us? Three knocks in response, And then they asked how many people are in this room? And five knocks came in response, which was a correct answer. The family also started to realize that what was happening was centered around Esther. None of these things were happening whenever she was out of the house. A well known Baptist minister named Dr Edwin Clay had heard stories of the happenings at the Teed house, and he came to investigate, and after spending a brief time there and hearing the knocking in response to questions and seeing the writing appearing on the walls, he was convinced that it was not a hoax. But he thought that the shock of being held at gunpoint by her boyfriend had actually caused Esther to manifest a sort of electrical charge. If you remember, the intro at the top of the episode said that electricity might have been the cause, and Clay was really the proponent of this, and he actually toured and gave lectures on this theory, and in the process of those lectures, he defended Esther against those who believed she was perpetrating a hoax. As the story ballooned and more and more respected members of the community attested to seeing strange things like water boiling in a bucket on its own, the Ted's home became overrun with curious onlookers. There was a constant stream of visitors and a steady throng of people outside. There was ongoing debate about whether this was really happening, or whether it was an elaborate theatricality, or even if Esther was somehow exerting mind control over people. Yeah. One of the theories was that she was planting these ideas in people's heads, that they weren't actually seeing any of these things, but they believed that they had. In December of eighteen seventy eight, all of the poltergeist, which is what it was being called at this point, activity stopped when Esther was ill with dip syria. She was on bed rest for two weeks, and when she had recovered, she went to visit another sister of theirs in Sackville, New Brunswick for another two weeks, and no events happened while she was in Sackville. Well Esther was away, the family shuffled rooms. They moved Esther in Jane's room to a different part of the house to see if it would stop all these weird problems. On our first night back, Esther told Jane that a voice had told her it was someone who had once been alive, but he had been dead for some time, and that was going to set the house on fire. Jane called everyone in and relayed this odd conversation that Esther said she had had with a ghost, presumably, and while they were discussing all of this, a lighted match was said to fall from the ceiling onto the bed. Jane quickly put this match out, but it was followed by eight to ten more that the rest of the family also put out, and then one of Esther's dresses caught fire. The family was again able to extinguish it quickly. Up to this point, the family had been pretty keen on Dr Clay's theory that Esther was somehow hyper electrical, but this fire event made them question whether something of a darker spirit nature was going on. According to Hubble's account, Daniel said of the phenomenon quote, lightning often sets fire to houses and barns, but it has never yet been known to roam about a man's house as this strange power does. Several days later, a fire started in the cellar when only Esther and Olive were home. The two young boys were home, but they were outside playing. The women tried to put it out this cellar fire with the water bucket from the kitchen, but they were unsuccessful, and so they ran out into the street and yelled for help. People began rushing to them, but it was apparently and this all stood out as very odd to me. A stranger who just showed up out of nowhere off the street and put out the blaze and then left the house without speaking to anyone. He does not appear again in any of the Esther stories. We'll talk about how the village reacted to the fires in a moment, but we're going to take a quick break first for a word from a sponsor. So the family attributed these fires to a ghost. The fire marshals of Amherst, on the other hand, thought it was Esther starting the fires. But regardless, the whole thing made everyone in the village nervous because no matter what the cause, if the teed house were to catch fire, it could spread, and so everyone in the area had a keen awareness of the danger that this situation posed. One evening in January seventy nine, the ghost appeared in the family's parlor and it told Esther that if she didn't leave, would burn the house down. Daniels, he was desperate, told Esther she would have to go, and then it was the ghost's fault and not his. But the problem was that no one wanted to take in a young woman who either set fires herself or had a ghost that did, so that was chasing her UH. There was one neighbor, John White, who had been both fascinated by and sympathetic to Esther's plate, and so Daniel went to White and he asked if Esther could stay in the White home, and John and his wife agreed. For the next two weeks, Esther actually seemed a lot better. There had been no incidents while she stayed with the Whites. The couple treated her as one of their own children. But in the third week, a scrub brush banished out of Esther's hand as she was cleaning, and then it fell from the ceiling onto her head. For the next few weeks, odd things continued to happen, and Esther could once again communicate with this entity call and response style and it would respond with pounding. But all of the various things that were happening there at the White House UH seemed fairly harmless, really, But after six weeks fires began at the White household. John White was afraid to leave Esther at the house when he wasn't there, so we started to take her to his dining saloon during the day. She worked in the kitchen and behind the counter, and it seemed like the Poulter geist followed her there, Esther's ghost opened up the large stove in the saloon's kitchen and through an axe handle that had been used to prop the stove closed. It was allegedly quite heavy, and then the spirit snatched a pocket knife from the hand of Mr White's sun and drove the blade into Esther's back furniture and boxes. One box weighing a reported fifty pounds began to move about the saloon without any obvious source for the motion. Many witnesses were said to have seen these events. At the end of March eighteen seventy nine, Esther traveled once again, this time to St John, New Brunswick. She stayed at the house of Captain James Beck and his wife for three weeks, and her particular problem was observed and examined by a group of science minded men. Hubble's account reports that when the men investigating Esther's poltergeist made contact with it and conversed with it by means of this knocking and response that had been established by Ester's family, other ghost entities also came forth, although the others were all weaker than Esther's preliminary ghost, who claimed to be someone named Bob Nichol. Rather than going directly back to amherst Esther stayed for two months with the Van Amberg's, who lived in the woods several miles from the village and had invited her to stay as a guest. Those weeks passed uneventfully, and Esther was allowed something of arrest from the tumult of her recent life. When she got back to Amhurst, she moved back in with her sister and brother in law, but she continued to work for Mr White during the day, so someone always had an eye on her. Almost immediately, unexplainable things began happening again. It was actually during this time that Walter Hubbell entered Esther's life. He was an actor by trade and wanted to travel to Amhurston determine whether all this news making Poultergeist activity was real or a hoax. He felt that his experience in creating stage illusions gave him enough knowledge to expose a hoax if there was one. He arrived on June twenty one, eighteen seventy nine. We'll talk about it later, but there's an interesting critical essay about all of this. It's like, really, that's what an actor thinks he needs to become like a paranormal investigator. Like I've been in the theater, I've seen people make things look like they're happening when they're not. I can super figure out if this is a real deal or not. Um So, this actor turned paranormal investigator was in the home for roughly five minutes, according to his account, before he witnessed objects, specifically his umbrella and a carving knife, moving through the air with no explanation. After moving to a different room, this activity continued, amplifying to the point that a large chair was hurdled at him. He at that point decided to leave the house for a brief walk before returning. I'm out of here just for a bit. I'll be back and go for a quick stroll. There my head of these objects being thrown. So Hubble began to ask questions of the spirits. That seems the ones who revealed themselves when Esther was in St. John had stuck with her, they answered via knocking, as had become a habit for everybody involved. Yeah, so when she came back from St. John. Just to be clear, all of those other ones that suddenly made themselves apparent. In addition to Bob Nichol came along with her, um like they were suddenly part of the story at this point. Later, Hubble spied on Esther by pretending to be asleep on the sofa in the parlor while she was doing some other things in the parlor herself, but he was secretly watching her through one eye, and he said that he witnessed a paperweight fly through the air that Esther clearly had not thrown herself. Apparently, the apparitions were not fond of Hubble, and they were especially active and belligerent when he was near. He cataloged dozens of events that seemed to be focused on getting him to leave and or causing him harm. Hubble wrote that he quote made the acquaintance of all the ghosts in the home. There were six altogether, and he asked them a series of questions. They answered and the affirmative when he asked us to whether they were in hell and whether they had seen the devil. Apparently they were very affirmative that they had seen the double devil. In particular, Hubble describes having to pull pins at one point from Esther's body, as the ghost would stick her with them through out the day, and they also obliged when he asked for them to throw him a lighted match, although they overdid it by throwing several dozen. It just seems like a very risky thing a match from a pipe and specifically throw it to me. After a week in the house, Hubble and members of the household started to hear a trumpet being played loudly all day long. Pubbill also claimed that the trumpet materialized from the spirit realm and fell to the floor, and that then he kept it. Yeah, he planned to put it in a museum. Walter Hubbell stayed at the Teed house for six weeks, during which he watched the ghosts hurt Esther by cutting her with a bone found in the yard and stab at her face with a fork. He also witnessed Esther falling into the trance like states that we mentioned before, in which she spoke with the dead Uh. He saw firsthand the painful nighttime swelling incidents that had continued since the first manifestation. As the summer war on the fire problem became more intense and Esther once again was moved from the house, she returned back to the woods to the home of Mr. And Mrs Van Amberg, where things were relatively quiet once Esther left the Teed home. All the comphany there came to an end as well. But in November of eighteen seventy nine, Esther was found guilty of arson for the burning of a barn at another home that she was staying at, briefly that of the Davison family, and she claimed that the ghost Bob had set the fire, that the activity had started up once again, but the jury was not convinced of this whole Poultergeist story, but after public outcry, she served only one month of her four months sentence. In nineteen nineteen, forty years after the events surrounding Esther and her possible Poultergeist, Dr Walter F. Prince published a critical study of the Great Amherst mystery in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, and in this paper, Prince makes pretty clear a case that Hubble exaggerated the details of Esther's case. Hubble, he pointed out, first published his notes on the Estercox case in eighteen seventy nine, so the year after it began and the same year that some of this was still going on. He then published a total of ten editions of these notes, augmenting them with each printing and making quite a happy sum of money in the process. The summer after the alleged Poulter guy started its disruption of Esther's life, while the haunting was still happening, she went on a tour to talk about the phenomena. Walter Hubble and John White went with her. But this tour was really a bust. In the first two stops, the audiences were really belligerent and heckled them. All of the other dates were canceled and the tour abruptly ended. So, as you recall, John White was the person that her brother in law Daniel went to desperate and said, will you please take her in? And this is where we mentioned that that lecture tour was actually agreed upon as a business venture by those two men before Hubble had even set foot in Amherst h It begins to be very obvious that from the beginning Walter Hubble saw Esther Cox as a money making opportunity. Prince wrote of Hubble quote, we are disposed to put the most favorable construction upon this tendency to dramatize, embellish and use paint. It's merely histrionic, a projection of the habitudes of the stage. But when the actor becomes investigator and recorder, this tendency will trip him up, especially if it be stimulated by the mercenary lure. One of the interesting distinctions made by Prince is the difference between witnesses and spectators. Uh And while many people are said to have seen the phenomena of the Teed house and other places that Esther was, in Hubble's first edition of his notes, there's merely the assurance that all of these claims have been robberated, but no actual statements from anyone else. In a later edition of the book, Hubble added a statement that was signed by sixteen witnesses, and Hubble himself wrote this so called testamentary document. But Prince points out that the wording only says that the signatories believe what Hubble has written, not that they necessarily saw any of this themselves. As for Olive Teed, she apparently said some contradictory things during Hubble's account. While she is a signer of the testamentary document. She is said to have told an investigator later that Hubble had not given an accurate account. But then some years later, wrote that everything in the book was true. Also, she inadvertently contradicted the Hubble account on a number of different occasions while relaying her own version of events. The details and a lot of instances just don't match up, including the fact that she later told an investigator that she had never actually seen anything fly through the air. Prince also points out that a lot of the stories running in newspapers about Esther's paranormal situation cited a common source, and that source is Walter Hubble. Hubble, in his writing mentioned stories in the paper from before he became involved, but there's no actual citations for any of those once he became part of the story, though there's an abundance of citable newspaper articles. Prince's writing also addresses the possible completely mundane cause if many of the phenomena that we're reported around Esther matches, he points out, can be easily hidden on somebody's person. There's never any mention of Esther being searched during any of these accounts. He also pokes holes and Hubble's account based on its lack of detail, and points out that often no specifics are offered as to the position of Esther during various moments of this seeming paranormal phenomena. Yeah, there's not really a breakdown of like Esther couldn't have done it. Here's why. There just aren't hard details about where she was and how things were playing out. It's kind of like the thing I brought up earlier about this mysterious stranger that shows up and puts out a fire and then vanishes and no one knows who it was, so we can't question him. Uh, there's a lot of that that goes on in the book and the next part. Keep in mind this was written in ninete, so really at a time when psychiatry and psychology was still in its infancy compared to what we know today. But Prince makes a case that Esther was probably a young woman in a great deal of shock after that incident with Bob McClean, which he felt was almost certainly an instance of attempted sexual assault, and in that state where her mental health may have been compromised, she embarked, likely subconsciously, upon the strange behavior that came to be known as the Amherst Poltergeist. After Esther's brief incarceration for arson, the poltergeist Bob seems to have disappeared. Esther went on to Mary twice, first to Adam Porter on March third, eight two in spring Hill, Nova, Scotia, and then again to Peter Shanahan on July in Amherst. Esther died in Brockton, Massachusetts, on November eighth, at the age of fifty two. This is still one of those cases that people um like to point to and talk about, you know how, how very uh realistic. It all seems that clearly this is a real haunting. Um. And of course there are plenty of skeptics as well. I don't think it's a secret that I tend to fall on the skeptic side of things. Well, especially this is this is not the first haunting story we've had on the show where haunting was purportedly happening and mostly the family where the people who know about it and then another person arrives on the scene and later writes a book. Yeah, that's definitely a pattern. Uh. And as the Prince s a an examination points out like that there were business dealings going on around this that clearly we're intended to make money off of the situation, which automatically throws any accounts relaid by those people into some serious doubt. So, uh that is a scoop. Don't be scared of hauntings. Uh. Probably it's just somebody wanting to make a dollar. Hey, so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H