Esther was the youngest child of Archibald Cox, a farmer at Upper Stewiacke. The Amherst cottage was Daniel Teed’s. Hubbell’s 1879 book, The Haunted House, is the long narrative. He dates the start to a drive on 28 August 1878 with Bob McNeal, a shoemaker she had been seeing. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography spells the name MacNeil and calls him her boyfriend. In the book she does not tell the house that night. About three weeks after the doctor’s first visit, Hubbell writes, she went rigid on the bed and talked out the ride: McNeal had stopped the buggy, threatened her with a revolver, and driven her home when he heard another wagon. She cried when they repeated it to her and said it was true. He was not seen in town after that.

The first nights, in Hubbell’s account, are rustling and blows under the bed, then the covers coming off. Daniel Teed fetched Dr. Caritte, who said he would stay and that nothing of the sort would happen while he was in the room. Hubbell has the knocks follow the doctor to the door, the bedding go off again, and then the sound of something writing. On the plaster by the head of the bed, where a moment before there had been blank wall, were the words “Esther Cox, you are mine to kill.” A piece of plaster then came off the wall and fell at the doctor’s feet. He would not give her medicine that night. He said she was suffering from a nervous trouble, that he could not account for the sounds or the moving things, and that they might stop if she grew strong. He kept calling. The biography, working from the 1878–79 papers, says the rappings and the bedclothes came first, that by October furniture was going over, and that some of the wall writing was too foul for the papers to print. The kill sentence is the one they did print.

Visitors followed. Hubbell names Dr. Edwin Clay, a Baptist clergyman, who heard knocks, saw writing, and decided Esther had been turned into a kind of electric battery by the shock of the ride. He also names the Rev. Dr. Temple. Crowds stood outside the cottage, and Hubbell says the village police were called to keep order. In December she had diphtheria and was in bed about two weeks. The manifestations, he writes, stopped. She then spent about two weeks in Sackville with her sister, Mrs. John Snowden, and was quiet there too. After she came back, the accounts add fire: a threat to burn the house, matches, and at least two fires found in the Teed place. She stayed for a time with a local family named White and was quiet at first. The trouble was said to follow her.

In June 1879 Hubbell, who had been living in the house and keeping notes, took her out to speak, with a local businessman, John White. They got through two engagements in New Brunswick. A hostile audience ended it. Back in Amherst she went to work in another household. In November 1879 she was convicted of setting fire to that family’s barn. Later retellings name the owner as Arthur Davison. The sentence was four months. She was let out after about a month, the biography says at public urging. No further disturbances show up in the papers.

She married Adam Porter in Springhill on 3 March 1882 and they had a son. She married Peter Shanahan in Amherst on 23 July 1896. She died in Brockton, Massachusetts, on 8 November 1912, at 52. Hubbell’s book was reprinted in Amherst around 1888 under the title The Great Amherst Mystery. The 1879 printing is what sold. Reports put that sale in the tens of thousands.