ESTHER COX

Opening

In late August 1878 Esther Cox, eighteen, was living in the Teed cottage on Princess Street, Amherst, Nova Scotia, with her sister Olive, Olive's husband Daniel, their children, and other kin. After an attempted assault at gunpoint by a man named Bob MacNeil, the house changed. Bedclothes moved. Raps. Esther swelled, in the telling, and wrote in pain. On the plaster above her bed: Esther Cox, you are mine to kill. Dr. Carritte came, gave sedatives, and watched more objects move. The voice that knocked called itself Bob Nickle, a dead shoemaker, and would, Daniel said, run through the sounds of making a shoe.

Papers across the continent picked it up. Walter Hubbell, an American actor who had meant to expose it, boarded in March 1879 and left a book, The Great Amherst Mystery. Esther was taken on a short, unhappy tour. In November 1879 she was jailed four months for a barn fire at a house where she was staying, and released after one month under public pressure. The phenomena stopped. She later married and left the town's front page.

Timeline

Late August 1878The assault. Then the cottage: raps, bedclothes, swelling, the plaster line. Carritte watches objects move and writes like a doctor, not like a showman.

Autumn into winter the papers take AmherstMarch 1879 Hubbell boards. His book is later life that still carries 1878 scenes.

November 1879 a barn fire and a short jail termPublic pressure cuts the sentence. The house goes quiet. Esther leaves the front page by marriage.

Every North American poltergeist list keeps the plaster. That list is later. Princess Street is first.

Key figures

Esther Cox is the girl in the bed and on the tour. Eighteen, already hurt before the raps.

Daniel and Olive Teed own the cottage that had to live with it.

Dr. Carritte owns the first professional look.

Walter Hubbell owns the book. Bob MacNeil owns the gun in the first night. Bob Nickle is a name on knocks.

Physical and documentary trail

What exists:

One: the household account of raps, moving bedclothes, and Esther in pain after the assault.

Two: the plaster sentence over the bed.

Three: Carritte's attendance.

Four: continental press and Hubbell's later book.

There is no photograph of the plaster in a chain. There is no recording of Nickle. There is no body of a shoemaker tied to the knocks.

Esther Cox, you are mine to kill.

Things you might not know

• Esther was 18. She lived in a crowded house with her married sister Olive, Olive's husband Daniel Teed, their two children and three other relatives.
• Her body swelled. During her attacks witnesses described her visibly swelling, swinging between fever and chills.
• The ghost was one of many. Besides Bob Nickle, the voices named themselves Peter Cox, Maggie Fisher, Mary Fisher, Jane Nickle and Eliza McNeal.
• Fires broke out around the house. They began after she came back from a stay in Sackville.
• Her paid tour was shouted down. Audiences paid to hear her story, but the tour was abandoned after hecklers caused a disturbance.
• Her chronicler was an actor. Walter Hubbell was a stage actor interested in psychic phenomena, and his book helped publicise his acting career too.
• Witnesses were interviewed again in 1907. Hereward Carrington took statements from survivors and published them in 1913.
• She lived to 52. Esther married twice, had a son with each husband, and died in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1912.

Competing explanations

A haunting that named itself after an assault. This is the cottage. It has plaster. It has no grave.

A girl acting out after trauma, with a household that could not stop watching. Possible.

A hoax that Hubbell then sold. The first weeks sit before the actor boarded.

Later life of the case

Walter Hubbell's book The Great Amherst Mystery carried the case far beyond Nova Scotia and went through many editions, and the plaster sentence became a standard line in poltergeist collections. Later writers have read the case as the distress of a young woman after an assault as much as a haunting. For another household where the disturbances centred on a girl, see the Enfield poltergeist.

Finding

Esther Cox's Amherst cottage spent the autumn of 1878 with raps, a doctor in the room, and a sentence on the plaster that named her to be killed.

What still will not resolve: a photograph of that plaster in a chain, or a named living hand on the knocks.