The Great Amherst Haunting Mystery

The haunting of Esther Cox remains a mystery to this day.

The Amherst haunting started in 1888 when Esther Cox lived on Princess Street with her sister Olive, Olive's husband Daniel, their two children, and Esther's siblings. The strange events began in August 1878, when Esther Cox was on a date with what turned out to be an unsavory gentleman. She was sexually assaulted by the male ‘friend’ at gunpoint, which caused her to spiral into a deep emotional trauma response. It is after this horrible assault that the phenomenon began.

How The Amherst Haunting Began

The Amherst haunting began with knockings, bangings, and rustling in the night. Esther began to suffer seizures; her body would visibly swell, and she experienced chills as well. Objects moved on their own in the house. Concerned for her well-being and struggling to find an explanation for the odd events, her family called a doctor. During the doctor's visit, the bedclothes shifted, scratching sounds were heard, and the phrase “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill” appeared on the wall by her bed. The next day, the doctor gave Esther sedatives to help her calm down and sleep, but the noises continued, and objects still flew around the house. They attempted to communicate with the rambunctious spirits, and this led to tapped responses to their questions.

The haunting continued for many months, and the family gained a reputation for having the most haunted house on the block. When people would visit the cottage, including those from the church, they heard banging, knocking, and the movement of objects, and this happened even when Esther was under close observation. In December, Esther fell ill from diphtheria, during which time haunting ceased while she was recovering for two weeks in bed. There was no haunting activity when she spent time at her sister’s home in New Brunswick either. When she returned to Amherst, though, the mysterious events picked up right where they left off. In a horrifying turn, fires broke out in various spots around the house, and Esther claimed to see the ghost, which was threatening to burn down the home unless she stayed away.

Peace away from the house, but phenomena continued.

In January 1879, in an attempt to restore some much-needed tranquility to her home, Esther Cox moved in with another family. However, the haunting persisted, unwavering in its presence. Several people witnessed the manifestations, including conversing with the ghost and receiving rappings for answers. Some people felt sympathy and curiosity, while others were more skeptical. Those who were skeptical believed that Esther was responsible for the odd occurrences and were hostile toward her. Poor Esther was pricked, slapped, and scratched by the ghost, and on one occasion, was even stabbed in the back with a knife.

The news spread far and wide about Esther Cox. In late March, she visited New Brunswick, where she was visited by a few gentlemen with an interest in science. This is where Walter Hubbell enters the picture. He moved into the Teed cottage to study the phenomena more closely. Hubbell was an actor with an interest in psychic phenomena who happened to be in that area of Canada when the mystery began, and he kept a diary of the events in the house. He later developed the diary entries into a book, which was dismissed as a hoax by skeptical investigators.

Hubbell spent several weeks with Esther Cox and her family to study the phenomenon. While in her home, he claimed to have witnessed objects moving on their own, as well as fires and items manifesting from nowhere. He claimed to have witnessed this occurring even when Esther was in full view and not in a position to have caused these things. He and Esther went on a speaking tour to share their experiences but faced significant hostility and skepticism, which ended their efforts. Esther returned to Amherst in an attempt to have an everyday life. She worked for a man, but after his barn burned down, he accused her of causing the fire, and she was found guilty and sentenced to four months in prison. She spent only one month in jail, and when she returned home, the activity had completely ceased as mysteriously as it had started. She married twice and had two sons. Esther moved to Massachusetts and lived there until her death in November 1912.

The Great Amherst Haunting Mystery - Published

Hubbell’s book, titled “The Great Amherst Mystery: A True Narrative About the Supernatural,” about the occurrences at Esther Cox’s house, was published and was successful, with 55,000 copies of his book having been sold. However, there is no solid scientific evidence to suggest that the ghostly activity ever happened beyond Hubbell’s notes.

Local Nova Scotia author Lorri Neilsen Glenn wrote a book about Esther Cox, titled "Haunted Girl: Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery." The book was published by Nimbus Publishing in April 2012. The book includes thirty photos of the locations in Amherst that are related to the house where Esther lived.

The town of Amherst now holds an annual festival, EstherFest, which began in 2017. EstherFest holds numerous activities for the public, including the Fifth Annual Scarecrow Stroll, a Ghost Hunt with Paranormal Phenomena Research and Investigation, a staged reading, and scary movies at Amherst Theatre. Additionally, there will be a ghost walk and a ghost hunt, as well as a youth dance and many other family activities. The festival takes place from October 18 to 30th.

The Great Amherst Mystery will always remain a mystery. We will never know for sure what really happened to Esther Cox and her family and sadly, the house that Esther and her family lived in no longer exists. The tale of Esther Cox in the Great Amherst mystery has inspired many podcasts, a town festival and books. She continues to inspire our minds and hearts today.

Sources:

https://greatamherstmystery.com/events-tickets-2024/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Amherst_Mystery

​https://nimbus.ca/store/haunted-girl.html?srsltid=AfmBOopSSpmGXO47CWffvTzI6NkAQCtqxPnktzc_eCPo4n06Q854RYsh

https://astonishinglegends.com/astonishing-legends/2022/10/9/the-great-amherst-mystery

https://caretakersparanormalinvestigations.blogspot.com (photo credit)

https://publicparapsychology.org/Public%20Parapsych/Poltergeist%20Phenomena%20Primer%20Final.pdf

The Quiet Work of Healing: Mindfulness as a Companion Through Grief

There’s no handbook for grief. No checklist. No fast-forward button. Just you and your pain, moving at the speed of breath—if you can remember to breathe at all. I’ve come to believe that grief doesn’t ask to be solved; it asks to be witnessed. And in that witnessing, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is get still. Not to escape the pain, but to make room for it without letting it devour you. That’s where mindfulness can become something more than a buzzword. It becomes a kind of lifeline.

Meeting the Moment, As It Is

When you’re grieving, everything feels like it comes with jagged edges. The mind races with “what ifs,” regrets, flashes of memory, and that sudden ache in the chest when you remember they're really gone. Mindfulness won’t erase that ache—but it will help you meet it without flinching. It’s the practice of turning toward the moment, without trying to fix or flee it. That might sound simple, but in grief, it’s revolutionary. Instead of pushing emotions away or drowning in them, mindfulness invites you to sit beside them like old friends who don’t need to be solved—just heard.

Staying Open to Light: Mindfulness and a Positive Outlook

It’s easy to spiral when life feels heavy, but mindfulness gives you a way to pause before you slide too deep. By tuning into your breath or simply noticing your surroundings, you interrupt the loop of negative thought patterns that often reinforce grief or anxiety. Without forcing yourself to be cheerful, you start to notice small joys—warm coffee, birdsong, the way the sun lands on your skin—and that shift in awareness changes everything. By embracing the present moment without judgment, you create space for a more positive and balanced mindset.

Creating Tiny Rituals for Presence

Grief doesn’t operate on a schedule. It sneaks up in grocery stores, or when a song comes on the radio. You can’t predict it, but you can create small rituals that give your day structure and make space for your emotions. Lighting a candle at the same time every night. Journaling with your morning coffee. Touching a photograph and whispering a few words. These aren’t big, performative acts. They’re quiet ways of saying: “I’m still here. And so are you, in some way.” Mindfulness loves ritual, not for the sake of repetition, but for the presence it cultivates.

Grieving in the Body, Not Just the Mind

Most of us think of grief as a mental or emotional experience. But grief lives in the body too. You clench your jaw. You hunch your shoulders. You hold your breath without noticing. Mindfulness brings awareness to where your body is holding pain, so you can soften into those places. Practices like gentle yoga, body scans, or simply placing a hand over your heart can remind you that you are not just a brain grieving—you’re a whole person. Tuning into physical sensations can offer clues about your emotional state, even when you can’t name the feeling outright.

Letting the Mind Wander—But With Intention

Meditation doesn’t always mean sitting still in silence. Sometimes, mindful walking through your neighborhood, or even mindfully washing dishes, can be a salve for a restless mind. The key is not in silencing your thoughts, but in noticing them without getting tangled up. If a memory surfaces, you don’t have to shove it down or hold it tightly. You can let it pass like clouds across a sky. Intentional wandering is different from spiraling—it has boundaries. It says: “You’re allowed to feel this, but you don’t have to drown in it.”

Compassion Over Control

Grief often makes people feel like they’re doing it wrong. “Why am I still crying?” “Why can’t I get over this?” Mindfulness teaches you to replace judgment with curiosity. Instead of berating yourself for not being “better” by now, you start to ask, “What does this moment need?” That gentle pivot from criticism to compassion is one of the most powerful shifts you can make. You learn to treat yourself with the same tenderness you’d offer a friend—no timelines, no harsh expectations, just presence.

Learning to Coexist with Absence

There’s a cruel kind of magic in grief: the way it hollows out a space in your life that never fully fills back in. But mindfulness doesn’t try to patch over that absence. It helps you learn to live beside it. That’s the real practice—not erasing the loss, but living with the shape of it, the way a tree grows around a fence. With time, the absence becomes part of your landscape. Not a gaping hole, but a quiet space you return to with reverence instead of resistance.

The world doesn’t know how to grieve well. It wants you to move on, to get back to normal, to smile politely when someone asks how you’re doing. But healing doesn’t happen on anyone else’s timeline. Mindfulness reminds you that you don’t need to rush, perform, or pretend. You just need to show up—fully, honestly, breath by breath. And in that simple, radical act of presence, something starts to shift. Maybe not all at once, and maybe not visibly. But inside, a quiet seed of peace begins to grow. And that, somehow, is enough.

Uncover the mysteries of the unknown and explore the world of the supernatural with Paranormal Daily News – your gateway to the latest in paranormal and parapsychology news from around the globe!

Parapsychology and Possession: A Scientific Paper

The illustrious owner and chief editor of Paranormal Daily News, John Brocas, is also an academic and has a soon-to-be-published paper titled: “Expanding Grof’s Transpersonal Framework to Integrate Parapsychology and Address Spirit Intrusion in Spiritual Crises.” Spiritual intrusion can also be considered as an obsession state or what is known as possession, though the latter is very rare.

For the majority of people not familiar with these terms, Brocas is referring to Czech-born American psychiatrist Stanislav Grof (who, as of this writing, is still alive at the age of 93) and investigated the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics in the 1950’s and 60’s Soviet era. These ideas have caught on in the West only recently. (See the work of Dr. David Luke)

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Grof and Transpersonal Psychology

One of the most notable areas of exploration in psychiatry for Grof was the idea of transpersonal psychology, where non-ordinary (aka exceptional) experiences are taken into account as part of the spectrum of human experiences instead of being treated as a sickness of the mind. These often exceptional experiences are then used to benefit the individual instead of being treated as aberrant behavior.

This paper branches out from the core of transpersonal psychology to introduce another element to be taken into account: nonphysical intelligent entities that attach themselves to people. Brocas uses the term “direct spiritual intrusion,” which is also known as possession, although that term is probably a bit too dramatic. Brocas writes in his paper:

This paper argues for an interdisciplinary framework that redefines pathology, and integrates empirical evidence with spiritual experiences that may be viewed as originating external to the individual . This framework could contribute to a more harmonious relationship between the experiential focus of transpersonal psychology and the empirical methodology of parapsychology. Additionally, it proposes that psychotic disorders such as psychosis and schizophrenia, could, in many cases be interpreted as instances of Intelligent Spirit Intrusion (Brocas, 2018).

It’s Like a Toxic Coworker

Think of spiritual intrusion as being similar in emotional impact to having to deal with a toxic relative or coworker on a daily basis—someone very negative and critical that you can’t really get away from. Their presence is a form of possession. I posed this to Brocas, and he agreed. Such a problem is neither a mental disorder nor lends itself to easy fixes. It weighs on a person and induces strong emotional reactions, but it is largely an external problem, even though the entire effect is on a person’s mental state.

Brocas goes on to provide a definition:

We can differentiate direct spiritual influence or possession states by using the term spiritual subjugation (Brocas, 2018). Spiritual Subjugation is the direct influence of an external force or intelligence where the individual’s will, spirit, or the immediate environment is controlled by the influencing intelligences. The Oppression's existence is demonstrably clear through both subjective and objective empirical data.

What he is saying in the last sentence is that this isn’t a matter of speculation. A proper diagnosis requires subjective (i.e. subject testimony and data from mediumship) and objective data. (observable behavior, emotional states, and intellectual capacity)

Is It an Intrusion or Something Else?

The existence of such entities is difficult to diagnose, and that is why Brocas suggests employing different methods to discern whether an intelligent spiritual intrusion is at play. It was beyond the scope of the article to address how one would go about treating such a condition, but it is an important consideration for further exploration. All of the symptoms begin in the mind, so the question arises about whether the treatment of an internal or external force causing the problem makes any difference. What does one do differently in the healing process when confronted with an external intrusion rather than an internal conflict?

I think that there is a difference. If we look at the example of dealing with a toxic relative or coworker, we observe that the problem a person faces is in maintaining their sense of identity in the face of external forces attempting to create a weaker and more submissive identity for them. Possession can also be treated as an external issue.

Conversely, an internal struggle is one where a person is finding or building their identity in the first place. The former is pushing against manipulation whose purpose is creating a false identity, the latter is a process of discovery. They are quite different goals and therefore require different approaches.

What John Brocas is suggesting here—that we take the idea of spiritual interference seriously—is, I think, a good one. Properly diagnosed, a therapist can then direct a person to focus on productive strategies for dealing with the problem.

Brazilian Methods

To that end, Brocas presents evidence from Brazil, where mediums are used to help determine if a mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, has a basis in spiritual interference. he writes:

A growing body of research [DP1] (Friel, 2024, p. 11) would suggest that psychosis and schizophrenia share the same similarities and experiences that are reported by mediums. This includes hallucinations, hearing voices, visions, and altered states. These symptoms are at risk of being wrongly pathologized (Moreira-Almeida, 2012) and the individual being treated for a psychiatric illness when, in fact, it is a more spiritual expression. In Brazil, spiritists who practice mediumship believe that many mental illnesses are caused by negative spirits. [DP2] They use a mediumistic approach to facilitate DE possession, a practice that mainstream psychiatry would likely pathologize.

He goes on to cite a specific case:

An example where this evidence would support the joint parapsychological approach was in a case in Scotland with a schizophrenic patient who was presenting with a combination of all pathology. The medium could bring forth evidence of the experiences and evidence of the influencing spirit or agency, as well as external phenomena witnessed. The evidence brought forth used a pyramid of evidence approach (Brocas, 2018) that corroborated experiential phenomena, as well as knowledge unknown. This case was a clear case of spiritual subjugation.

Brocas is raising an interesting question here about the basis for some cases of schizophrenia. Could people get some relief by addressing spiritual interference?

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The Conscious Universe Model

If all of this sounds a bit “out there,” bear in mind that that attitude comes from assumptions about the nature of the universe. Many of us assume that the universe is material because that’s what our senses tell us is real. Under those conditions a noncorporeal intelligence seems quite unlikely. However, the world we experience originates in our minds, something that is often forgotten or brushed over. What we take for real is actually a picture that our mind creates. This suggests that consciousness, not the material world, is fundamental to physics. And since this appears to be true, then the existence of beings that are nonphysical is a foregone conclusion. When you remove the assumption of materialist theory, the spiritual interference, which initially appears far-fetched, becomes a concept worth taking seriously.

In the end, it’s not about theory; it’s about helping people in the quickest and effective way. If this approach turns out to be successful in helping people, then that is the only metric that really matters.