One of the most striking, violent and active cases of a poltergeist attack on a person, which became known to the general public, occurred in 1878 in the quiet Canadian town of Amherst, on the shores of Nova Scotia.
In those years, a young woman named Esther Cox lived here. She had a sister, Jenny, and her other sister Olive and her husband Daniel Teed, their two children and Daniel's brother John, also lived in their house.
Esther, Jenny and Olive's mother died when Esther was still very little, and their father left his family and went to another woman. But otherwise it was a completely ordinary and unremarkable family. Esther herself was considered a modest and humble young lady.
In 1878, 18-year-old Esther fell in love with a young shoemaker, Bob McNeill, who, in fact, turned out to be a very aggressive and rude type. Once he offered Esther to go for a ride in the forest, and when he brought her into the thicket, he put a gun to her head and began to force her to sleep with him.
Esther miraculously managed to get out of this situation safe and sound, but her psyche was seriously damaged. She became depressed and morose, often cried, and day after day she became deeper and deeper depressed. At the same time, her relatives did not know anything and did not understand what the reason for her suffering was.
This was only the beginning of the strange events that followed.
Shortly after Esther began to suffer from depression, strange things began to happen in her house, which all family members became eyewitnesses. Steps of invisibility began to be heard, someone moaned, knocked and scratched at the walls, people also saw incomprehensible shadows.
Esther and Jenny were settling in their little room one evening. They were sleeping together on the same bed and suddenly saw something alive moving under their blanket, writhing and wobbling like a caterpillar. There were no cats or other pets in the house, and when the frightened girls threw off the blanket, there was nothing under it. Both screamed out of fear.
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Esther Cox (left). On the right is Esther and her sister.
The next evening, the situation repeated itself and the whole family again ran to the heart-rending screams of the frightened girls. This time, they said they heard rustling coming from a cardboard box with scraps of cloth under the bed. When they pulled out the box, it suddenly jumped up by itself from their hands and all its contents scattered around the room.
The family attributed both cases to the tricks of mice and rats. But then stranger things began to happen. Esther suddenly fell ill with a fever-like illness. She was all burning and screaming in agony, trying to rip her clothes off.
Suddenly she started screaming “What's happening to me ?! I'm dying! and when the frightened members of her family ran up to her, they saw that the unfortunate girl writhed and gasped, and something squeezed her neck, so that she turned red and swollen before her eyes. Esther's convulsions became stronger and she fell to the floor and began to wriggle on it, and redness went all over her body.
No one had time to do anything, when suddenly Esther abruptly calmed down, as if what was choking her had gone. Her skin returned to its normal color and she fell into a quiet and restful sleep. And this dream became for her a semblance of a trance, since a day, two, three passed, and Esther was still "asleep."
During her "sleep" everything in the house was in order, there were no strange sounds, knocks and other things. Three days later, Esther woke up and that same evening something attacked her again, causing her to twitch in agony. Again her skin was red and swollen, and her body became very hot. The attack ended after four loud knocks on the walls of the house.
This finally prompted her family to take some action. They called the local doctor Carritte to see the girl. When the doctor arrived, he himself became an eyewitness to abnormal phenomena in the patient's house. No sooner had he entered the small, half-dark room where Esther was sleeping on the bed, when suddenly something invisible pulled a pillow from under the girl's head and threw it on the floor.
Then something began to pull the blanket off the girl, and pulled from different sides. Something started knocking under the bed, then someone screamed and after that they began to scratch against the walls, making frightening sounds. Then there were very loud knocks, like a huge hammer hitting the roof of a house.
The confused and frightened doctor did not see anyone or anything and did not understand what was happening. He looked around the room, thinking he was being played, but found no one. But I found an inscription scratched with something sharp on Esther's wooden bed, which read "Esther Cox, I will kill you."
When the doctor looked at this inscription in bewilderment, a piece of plaster fell off the wall and flew in his direction, almost hitting.
Most people in the place of Dr. Carritte would immediately rush out of the possessed house, but the doctor suddenly turned out to be a daredevil. He returned to Esther the next day and witnessed an even more active poltergeist. Various objects flew around the room by themselves, cold water in the glass suddenly boiled, something moved the heavy cabinet, and the knocks and scratches became even more persistent and louder. The neighbors even heard them and rushed out into the street.
To calm Esther, she was given sleeping pills, but even while she was asleep, her seizures continued. In one of the attacks, she, being passed out, began to talk about how she was almost raped, and when she woke up, she did not remember anything about what she was saying.
In the days that followed, the invisible attacks on Esther continued. The girl was pushed, pinched, scratches and red spots from bruises constantly appeared on her body. This even happened in front of a group of people. Then more frightening attacks began. Esther stabbed with pins and cut with a knife.
When the girl went to church in despair, she was attacked right during the service. Esther began to writhe in pain on the bench, and all the parishioners looked at her in horror. Without a doubt, they all considered the girl possessed by the devil.
Events developed incrementally. Teed's house became more and more famous in the surrounding area and more and more curious people came to it. Even priests came there and most of them saw with their own eyes anomalous phenomena in the house.
When Esther fell ill with diphtheria and temporarily left for the house of a distant relative so as not to infect her family, the anomalies in Theed's house stopped again and resumed when Esther returned. Moreover, they resumed at a new level of aggression.
Now the invisible man threatened to set fire to the house: burning matches mysteriously appeared on the ceiling and fell down on the bed and floor. Then people's clothes began to burn and the stove burst, which almost caused a real fire to start. And then a real ghost began to come to Esther and demand that she leave the house on one particular evening, otherwise he would burn everything.
The attacks on Esther did not stop, only slightly subsiding for a while. And then Walter Hubbell came to Amherst, thanks to whose book the whole world later learned about this case. Hubbell was just a theater actor but had a keen interest in the study of psychic phenomena.
Like Dr. Carritte, Hubbell spent several weeks at the Esther family's home, observing and recording everything that happened. He witnessed the flight of things around the room, teleportation of things from the ceiling, starting here and there for no reason fires, abnormal knocks, creaks, etc. He also saw poor Esther physically suffering from an invisibility attack and developed his own alphabet for dialogue with him using carved letters.
When he began talking to the spirit, he constantly changed his name, introducing himself as Maggie Fisher, Bobby Nickl, Peter Cox, Jane Nickle or Eliza McNeill. These were all Esther's deceased relatives. Hubbell also began asking the spirit questions like "How many coins do I have in my pocket" and questions that had to be answered "yes" or "no." When Hubbell asked the spirit if he had seen the Devil, he answered yes.
As a result, Hubbell was so impressed with the miracles happening with Esther and around her that he began to persuade her to go on a tour of different cities with him. The girl could entertain the audience with her unusual story. Esther agreed, but after several cities she and Hubbell were forced to return to Amherst. The audience decided that this was all charlatanism, booed them and threw eggs.
In addition, Esther's aggressive spirit pursued her on tour. So in one of the cities next to Esther, a large barn caught fire and burned to the ground.
However, the tour was in favor of Esther, her aggressor began to weaken and anomalous phenomena began to occur less and less, until they practically disappeared. Esther died in 1912 in peace and quiet at the age of 52.