Additional information
by Chris Hastings (Introduction by), Walter Hubbell (Author)
A terrified scream echoed around the walls of the cramped cottage. The cries were those of 18-year-old Esther Cox and the moment would mark the beginning of one of the world's most notorious unsolved cases of poltergeist activity on record. The writer and actor, Walter Hubbell spent several weeks living with the family in the haunted house and carefully documented the terrifying and life-threatening events. The accounts, reported in newspapers at the time and then more fully in Hubbell's book, gripped readers around the world. Witnessed by hundreds of people over the course of many months, and with no obvious signs of this being a hoax, The Great Amherst Mystery, as it was called at the time, remains one of the most baffling and unexplained demonstrations of apparent supernatural power. Even its most vocal critic admitted that the case was a classic which had produced an impact of one kind or another on hundreds of thousands of people. This new and complete edition of the written testimony of Walter Hubbell, who witnessed and first investigated these extraordinary events from 1878, includes the official statements of those present. This edition also contains an introduction written by Chris Hastings which sets the scene for the modern reader. Those sceptical of the supernatural will find The Great Amherst Mystery one of the greatest of challenges. It is harder to explain how this could be a hoax than it is to accept that ghosts were responsible. "When I read the accounts now in my journal, from which my experience is copied, I am almost speechless with wonder that I ever lived to behold such sights." - Walter Hubbell.
Author Biography
Walter Hubbell first heard about The Great Amherst Mystery when he was in Canada with a touring company of actors. A self-professed debunker of fake mediums and hoaxers, Hubbell was determined to expose Esther Cox as a fraud. What he eventually discovered was so astonishing that he came to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of ghosts and the supernatural. He also devised a theory as to how ghosts are able to interact with the real world, based on his experiences, and was passionately convinced that one day the existence of the spiritual world and astral bodies would be understood and explained scientifically. His book, based on the journal of his experiences and originally published in 1879, went into many editions worldwide and had sold 55,000 copies by 1908. Walter Hubbell was born in 1851 in Philadelphia, USA. His grandfather, Trueman Mallory Hubbell, was the original "Deerslayer" in the novel The Deerslayer by his friend, the author James Fenimore Cooper. At the age of 21, Walter Hubbell became an actor based in New York but was regularly on tour with both Shakespeare and modern productions. Although he wrote a number of books such as The Curse of Marriage in 1888 and Marcus Brutus, and Other Verses in 1886, he is best remembered for The Great Amherst Mystery. Walter Hubbell died in 1932 in New York.
