So Supernatural - HAUNTED: The Great Amherst Mystery

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

When strange and terrifying events start happening around 18-year-old Esther Cox, locals blame electricity… then ghosts.  

When you think of a haunting, you usually think of a place, an old house or a graveyard, somewhere physical that ghosts can take up residence. But today's story is about a haunted girl. Wherever she went, strange occurrences followed her. Voices, lightning storms, mysterious fires. It seemed like a whole host of evil spirits had made their home inside her body. And in the end, even skeptics had to admit that some of those ghosts were all too real. this is supernatural i'm your host ashley flowers this week i'm talking about esther cox a young girl who was haunted by ghosts in 1878. The poltergeists tortured her, wrote threatening messages on her walls, and tried to burn down her house with her family inside.

And wherever she went, there was no escape. I have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. The town of Amherst, Nova Scotia seems pretty idyllic. It's right by the water, next to the Bay of Fundy. It's a fairly religious community, the sort of Canadian village where you'd expect everyone to be extra friendly. But darkness can lurk anywhere, even in a small town. On August 28th, 1878, a local 18-year-old named Esther Cox is getting ready for a date. She's got to be excited to get out of the house because it is packed in there. She lives with one brother, two sisters, two nephews, and her brother-in-law Dan. There's also John Teed, Dan's brother, all living together in Dan's little cottage.

With so many people, Esther has to help out with a ton of housework. So, of course, when the guy she's into, Bob McNeil, asks her out for a peaceful evening drive, she says yes. But a couple hours later, Esther comes home soaking wet. She runs straight to bed and cries all night. No one asks her what happened, but it's clear the date didn't go so well. For the next week, Esther falls into this mini-depression. She spends several nights sleeping over at friends' houses before she even comes home again. But she's finally like, I'm over this. I'm done thinking about it. Let's move on. Unfortunately, that's when the real problems begin. Esther and her sister Jane share a room.

One night, as Esther gets into bed, she feels something move under her sheets, like a mouse. But the sisters look around and don't see anything, so they head back to sleep. The next night, both of them hear a strange rattling sound. But this time, it's coming from a small box of fabric patches under the bed. The sisters pull the box out to investigate. They slowly open the top, and just when they're about to look inside, it suddenly jumps about a foot into the air on its own. They scream and their brother-in-law, Dan Teed, runs in. They tell him what happened, but he doesn't believe them. No one's ever heard of a haunted fabric box, so they all just go back to bed and forget about it.

But the next day, Esther has a fever. She goes to bed early and in the middle of the night, she suddenly sits up and screams, I'm dying. Jane turns on the light and sees that Esther's body is swelling up. Her face is bright red and her eyes are bulging out. The rest of the family tries to get her to lay down and relax, but when they touch her, she's burning hot. Apparently, it feels like an electrical current is running through her. Finally, this deafening clap of thunder shakes the room.

It's so intense that Esther's other sister, Olive, goes to the window to make sure the house wasn't hit by lightning. But when she opens the curtains, she sees that it's perfectly clear outside. It's not even raining. Just then, three more loud booms erupt through the house, but this time they come from underneath Esther's bed. And right after that, Esther's body stops swelling. She calms down and eventually drifts off to sleep. The family doesn't know what to make of it, so they kind of just hope that this is it for now. But a few nights later, the same thing happens. Esther starts burning and swelling up again. And then the whole family watches as the bedsheets fly off Esther's bed all on their own.

So yeah, something weird is definitely going on. It's time to call a doctor. A local physician, Dr. Kirit, stops by and he's in way over his head. He takes Esther's pulse, looks at her tongue and basically says, no problem here. She's just in shock. But right as he says that, Esther's pillow flies into the air and hovers in the middle of the room all on its own, like it's trying to prove him wrong. Dan's brother starts playing tug-of-war with the pillow, and suddenly the bedsheets fly off Esther's bed again. A loud banging starts, and then everyone hears this scratching sound, like a metal spike scraping the wall. The room gets quiet, the family looks at the space on the wall above

Esther's headboard, and they see a phrase chiseled in thick letters. Esther Cox, you are mine to kill. Now this is frightening enough, but before they can react, a loud noise starts up again, and now it sounds like it's coming from above them, like someone's trying to get through the roof with a sledgehammer. Dr. Kareet runs out to the street to see what's happening, and there's nothing on the roof, even though the sound is still happening. And apparently, it's so loud that the neighbors can hear it 200 yards away.

So obviously, word gets out that something strange is going on at Dan's house. The Teed family starts letting visitors in to take a look for themselves, and their cottage pretty much becomes a popular attraction. So many crowds line up outside that police have to come in to maintain order. One lucky reverend sees something suspicious while he's standing in the kitchen. He notices a bucket of cold water on the table that inexplicably begins to boil. Another respected reverend sees the threatening message on the wall and hears strange thumps coming from Esther's bed. He doesn't believe in ghosts, but he's convinced that Esther isn't making this up. Instead, he suggests that Esther is some sort of human battery.

He thinks that during her date, Esther experienced a shock to her system, both physical and emotional. It was so profound that she became mysteriously electrified. Scientifically, he doesn't really explain how this works but it would explain the strange claps of thunder and the burning feeling invisible flashes of lightning must be shooting out of her but even if she is supercharged it wouldn't explain a message appearing on the wall promising to kill her everyone's at a loss for what to do. So Esther's brother-in-law, Dan, moves her and her sister Jane to another room, hoping that'll solve the problem. But once again, right before bed, a voice whispers in Esther's ear. It says it's going to burn down the house. Jane tells the family, but they're all in on the electric battery theory, so they just

laugh. Dan says electricity can't set a cottage on fire. Remember, this is the 1870s, so I guess no one's ever heard of an electrical fire. But as soon as Dan says this, a lit match falls from the ceiling and onto the bed. Now, it doesn't come from a box of matches or a hole in the ceiling. As far as I can tell, it just materializes out of thin air. Before it can ignite anything, Jane puts it out. But over the next 10 minutes, eight more lighted matches appear in the room, like some ghost is wandering around chain-, the family can barely keep up. Then, in the middle of all of this, one of Esther's dresses rolls itself into a little ball, flies underneath the bed, and promptly bursts into flames. The family manages to prevent any serious fires that night, but a few days later, Olive sees smoke drifting up from the cellar.

She runs downstairs with a bucket of water and sees that a barrel of wood shavings is fully ablaze. The flames reach all the way up to the ceiling. Olive throws the water on the fire, which doesn't do anything. And then she and Esther run out to the street for help. Thankfully, a good Samaritan rushes into the cottage and puts the fire out with a floor mat, but the Teed family is still shaken. This was a close call. Getting to the bottom of this mystery is now a life or death priority, and it doesn't take long for Esther's family, friends, and neighbors to start pointing their fingers at her. Coming up, the whole town turns on Esther. Now, back to the story.

The people of Amherst aren't too happy that the Teeth House is constantly on the verge of catching fire. Remember, this is a windy coastal town. If a building does go up in flames, it could take the rest of the village with it. Clearly, something needs to be done, and everyone has an opinion on what that is. The local newspapers publish heated debates between skeptics and those who believe in the supernatural. But some folks don't think the culprit is electricity or ghosts. They say Esther is the problem. They accuse her of acting out and blaming it on something paranormal. Like, no, it wasn't me who set the cellar on fire. It must have been a ghost. The accusations are brutal. The fire marshals actually say that

Esther is setting the fires herself, and one doctor suggests that the manifestations would stop if Esther was just given a good beating. This is pretty harsh, especially because Esther is still dealing with the poltergeist, And by now, she's started to actually see the ghost. One night, she's sitting in the parlor with the rest of the family when she sees this man in all gray staring at her. The ghost basically tells her that unless she leaves, he's going to burn down the house with everyone inside. This time, they take the threat seriously. So Esther's brother-in-law, Dan, kicks her out. Esther goes to stay with his friend, John White,

and for a few days, everything is quiet. But one day, while Esther's scrubbing the floor, she loses her scrub brush. Like it just disappears from existence. Then she hears the ghost whisper that he's taken it. She screams and the brush falls from the ceiling, almost hitting her in the head. John also owns the saloon where Esther works, and strange stuff is happening there too. Once, she's in the kitchen when the oven door starts opening and shutting all on its own. John shoves an axe handle in front of the door to try and barricade it shut,

but it's no match for the ghost. The oven door just rips off its hinges and flies across the room with the axe still attached. Eventually, John can't handle this stuff anymore, so he kicks Esther out. And since she has no place left to go in Amherst, Dan sends her straight out of town to stay with someone in New Brunswick. Once she's there, a revolving door of occult experts visit. They all want to figure out what's going on with Esther, and eventually, they find a way to speak with the ghost. If you ask a question, the ghost will answer by banging on the wall or furniture. One knock for no, three for yes. When they question the spirit, the experts realize that Esther isn't being haunted by one poltergeist. She has a whole gang of ghosts following her. To figure out their names, they use a sort of

Ouija board system. Someone will read the alphabet out loud, one letter at a time, until the ghosts knock on the floor or wall. It takes a long time to spell things out, but eventually they learn quite a bit about the spirits. One is a sweet old man named Peter Cox who claims to be related to Esther. There's a young girl named Maggie Fisher who went to Esther's elementary school before she died. But the ringleader is this scary old shoemaker named Bob Nickel. He says that he's the one who's been setting the house on fire and threatening to kill Esther. After about three weeks in New Brunswick, though, it seems like the ghosts are done with her. The manifestations stop, and for two months, nothing scary or unusual happens. So Esther finally goes home thinking it's over. But as soon as Esther goes back to Amherst, the paranormal activity begins again.

And this time, there's an amateur ghost hunter there to witness it. In June of 1879, the Teed family takes in this actor named Walter Hubble. He's just finished a theatrical tour of Newfoundland, and when he reads about Esther in the paper, he decides to make a pit stop in Amherst to check it out for himself. Walter claims that he once saved a friend from some con artist pretending to be spiritual medium, so he thinks of himself as a bit of an expert on the paranormal. He also assumes his theater experience will also help him see

if Esther's using any sleight of hand to fake the activity. At seven in the morning, he strides into the Teeds dining room and hangs his umbrella in the corner. He sits down with Esther and Olive to talk about what his investigation will entail. But just five minutes later, Walter's umbrella flies across the room all on its own. Then a huge carving knife shoots over Esther's head and lands at Walter's feet. Walter is shaken. He checks the kitchen to see who threw the knife, but no one's there. He heads to the parlor, but as soon as he sits down, a poltergeist chucks his satchel to the other side of the room. Then a heavy chair drags itself across the floor and slams into Walter's seat. He almost falls over.

Esther walks in then, hands him a steaming cup of coffee and says, I do not think they like you, which is quite the understatement. But eventually, Walter gets used to the manifestations. He's still convinced that somehow Esther is behind it all. One afternoon, he pretends to nap on the sofa, hoping to catch her red-handed, throwing matches or secretly knocking on the walls. Instead, as he's lying on the couch with his eyes half open, he sees a paperweight launch itself at his head. It narrowly misses, but more importantly,

it had nothing to do with Esther. And just like that, he's a believer. The longer he sticks around, Walter realizes the ghost is constantly abusing her. She's definitely the victim here, not the perpetrator. Walter is so intrigued that he starts working on a book about Esther's case. He interviews the Teed family about all the details he missed before he moved in. And he finds out that a year before, right after the haunting started, Esther told a truly terrifying tale that might explain it all. Up next, Esther's disturbing secret. Now back to the story. In the first few days of her haunting, Esther was examined by a local physician, Dr. Kareet. And during one of

his visits, something happened that might unlock the truth about what's going on. While the doctor was standing by Esther's bedside, her arms shot towards her headboard. She seized up and became cold and rigid. In this trance-like state, she told the doctor what actually happened the night Bob McNeil took her out on that date, and it isn't pretty. Apparently, at one point, McNeil pulls his buggy to the side of the road next to the forest. He tells Esther he wants them to go into the woods together. Esther knows that he isn't just looking for a late night hike, so she says no. But McNeil is the type of guy who doesn't take no for an answer. He threatens her with a revolver. Luckily, just in the nick of time, another person drives by

and McNeil puts the gun away. He drives Esther home in the rain, and just to be spiteful, he keeps the top down the whole time, which is why she's so wet when she gets back to the house. When Esther wakes from the trance, Dr. Kareem tells Esther what she just said. She begins to cry and admits that it's all true. When Walter Hubble hears this story, it changes his opinion on what's happening to Esther. He doesn't believe Esther is just acting out or pulling off some sort of hoax. But considering

that the incident happened right before the ghost appeared, he does think that they're related. He speculates that McNeil was literally possessed by a ghost. That night during the date, the attempted sexual assault threw off Esther's vital magnetism, which is Walter's word for the energy that every person has inside of them. This, he thinks, allowed the evil spirit to jump from McNeil's body to Esther's. That's why the hauntings started right afterward. Now, admittedly, the theory's kind of out there. But to be fair, Walter's not even a real expert in the occult. He's an entertainer. And it seems like he smells an opportunity in Esther's trauma. Because at this point, Walter is no longer trying to help her with the ghosts. He's trying to find a way to capitalize on them.

He realizes if so many people are willing to line up at the teat house to see the haunting, why not bring the haunting to them? He and Esther can go on tour and show the world firsthand. Esther agrees and Walter and the bar owner John White strike up a deal to split the profits. Esther, I assume, won't get a penny. And as you might expect, this ghost tour turns out to be a terrible idea. There's a saying in show business, never work with kids and animals, and they should add, but really never work with ghosts. Esther and Walter don't have any control over the phantoms

and they don't seem to want to participate. So instead of a magical experience, the audience just sees Esther standing there while Walter rambles on about the paranormal. The first show is such a failure that an angry mob gathers in the street. When Walter and Esther step outside, the crowd throws stones and pieces

of brick at them. Suffice it to say, the tour ends there. At this point, Dan has had enough of his sister-in-law's shenanigans, so he decides that Esther isn't coming home. Once again, he sends her to stay with some friends. At first, she does all right in her new home, but before too long, her hosts notice that some of their clothes are missing. They suspect Esther of stealing them. Around this time, Esther's working at a farm owned by a man named Arthur Davison, and pretty soon, Arthur's barn suffers the same fate that threatened the Teed house. It burns to the ground. Naturally, Arthur is upset and he confronts Esther. She says that the poltergeist set the barn on fire. Arthur doesn't buy it. He thinks Esther started the blaze on purpose and he presses charges. After everything Esther's been through, all the terror and blame and abandonment by her family,

she's now on trial because of her haunting. Of course, she doesn't have a chance. The legal defense of I'm being haunted by a pyromaniac ghost doesn't sit well with the jury, and Esther is sentenced to four months in jail. But by this point, Esther has fans, people who've read about her in the news or seen the manifestations themselves. And they're like, really? You're just going to throw a girl in prison because she's tormented by ghosts? The pressure is so intense that Esther's charge is actually thrown out. She only spends one month in jail. And at least one good thing comes out of her imprisonment.

All the paranormal activity stops while she's in jail. Even when she gets out, the ghosts don't come back. Ever. Maybe ghosts can't follow her behind bars. Or maybe Esther has been faking all of this and her incarceration scares her into dropping the hoax. Either way, with the haunting apparently over, she manages to move on with her life. She leaves Amherst, marries twice, has two children, and dies in 1912 at the age of 52. Sadly, the best explanation for what was happening to Esther didn't come until seven years after her death. In 1919, a paranormal psychologist named Walter Prince comes up with an explanation that's essentially a more rational version of Walter Hubble's theory. Esther is being haunted by her

emotional trauma, but not in a literal sense. Esther's mind couldn't deal with the attempted sexual assault, so it created a separate personality to process it. When this personality took over, she might have started the fires or wrote on the wall in a trance. Then when she woke up, she had no memory of what she'd done. The kicker here is two of Esther's ghosts said they were called Bob Nickel and Eliza McNeil. Both names sound pretty dang similar to Bob McNeil, the guy who attacked her. The simple explanation is Esther's subconscious created these ghosts as a way to process her trauma. But there's a problem with this theory. Both Dr. Kirit and Walter Hubble say that hundreds of people witnessed the ghostly phenomena.

If this was just a mental health issue, how are there kitchen utensils flying around the house? It can't all be in Esther's head. Unless none of those things actually happened. The accounts of objects flying around the house pretty much all come back to one source, Walter Hubble. In the first edition of his book, he says that plenty of people saw these incidents firsthand, but he doesn't actually quote any eyewitnesses. We just have to take his word for it. And Walter isn't really a guy that I'm bound to trust. I mean, after the failed ghost tour,

it seems pretty clear that his goal was to turn Esther into a money-making spectacle. His book about the Great Amherst Mystery sells 55,000 copies, and he goes on to write 10 more editions. And as you might imagine, Esther doesn't see a cent from it. Even if Esther wasn't haunted by phantoms, she certainly was tormented by McNeil, who tried to assault her. John White, who put her in a circus act, and Walter, who made money off her suffering. Her story was entirely written and passed down by the men in her life. We don't know what truly happened, because we never actually get to hear her side of it. In that sense, the real be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories

hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.