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.