Foreshock
IndexOtherNo. 45 declining

Great Amherst Mystery

1870s poltergeist story

23×
vs its own baseline
21×
year on year
-10.7%
per month, last 90 days
62
confidence / 100
Share of all English Wikipedia traffic · weekly 104 weeks to 2 Sep 2026 Normalised — sitewide swings removed

Why we think this is real

Six tests · all shown, pass or fail

The floor moved, not just the peak

Its quietest recent week still sits 173% above the old baseline. A news spike leaves the floor where it was.

2.73×

Not one event

Share of the last four months of extra attention that landed in its busiest seven days. High means a single story, not a trend.

59%

Not the calendar

How much of this topic's shape repeats every year. The annual cycle is estimated per topic and divided out before anything is measured.

53%

Human traffic

Bot and scraper traffic is flat across the week. Anything with implausibly low day-to-day variation, or with no weekday/weekend pattern at all, is dropped before it reaches this page.

0.88× weekend

Enough history to judge

Long enough to separate this year's move from last year's level.

2071 days

Confirmed somewhere else

No second source yet. Common for consumer and culture topics, which do not show up in developer data.

0 of 4 sources

What it is

Wikipedia

The Great Amherst Mystery was a notorious case of reported poltergeist activity in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada between 1878 and 1879. It was the subject of an investigation by Walter Hubbell, an actor with an interest in psychic phenomena, who kept what he claimed was a diary of events in the house, later expanded into a popular book. The case was dismissed as a hoax by skeptical investigators.

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