The Bell Witch

It started with an animal in the corn.

One day in 1817, a farmer named John Bell was walking his rows along the Red River in northern Tennessee when he saw something sitting among the stalks. He would later describe it as having the body of a dog and the head of a rabbit. He raised his gun and fired. The creature vanished.

John Bell was not a fanciful man. He was a respected planter in his late sixties who had moved his family from North Carolina to the fertile Robertson County frontier around 1804, built a sturdy log house, acquired land and enslaved workers, and become a church elder. He had a large family, most of them still living at home. He was, by every account, sober, stubborn and practical.

He shrugged off the thing in the cornfield. He would not be able to shrug off what came next.

The Knocking

It began at night with sounds on the outside of the house — a knocking and scratching at the doors and the log walls, like something trying to get in. When the family went to look, they found nothing.

Then the sounds moved inside.

The Bell children described hearing something gnawing on the bedposts in the dark, like a rat chewing wood. They heard what sounded like dogs fighting, but no dogs were in the room. They heard chains being dragged across the floor. Covers were pulled from their beds. Pillows were yanked out from under their heads. The noises grew louder over months, until the entire house shook with them, and neighbors who came to sit up overnight left shaken and pale.

And then the thing began to touch them.

It focused, from the beginning, on two people. One was John Bell himself. The other was his youngest daughter, Elizabeth “Betsy” Bell, then about twelve years old. Betsy’s hair was pulled so hard she screamed. She was pinched, slapped, and pricked as if with pins. Visitors reported hearing the sound of a blow and seeing red marks rise on the girl’s cheeks in the shape of a hand. The attacks went on for so long that, according to family accounts, Betsy was sent to sleep at neighbors’ houses — and the disturbances followed her there.

The Voice

At first the presence had only made noises. Then, slowly, it learned to speak.

Witnesses described a faint whistling at first, then a whisper, and finally a full voice — clear, sometimes sweet, often savage — coming from no visible source. It could be heard in any room of the house. It talked with visitors, quoted Scripture, sang hymns, and mocked preachers by repeating their sermons word for word in their own voices, even though, as the story goes, the sermons had been delivered miles away at the same hour.

When asked what it was, it gave different answers. It said it was a spirit disturbed from a grave. It said it was the ghost of an immigrant who had buried money nearby. Once it said it was “nothing more nor less than old Kate Batts’s witch” — a reference to a real neighbor, an eccentric woman who was said to have had a dispute with John Bell over a land or slave deal. Mrs. Batts, it should be said, seems to have done nothing to deserve this, and lived out her life under the shadow of it. But the name stuck. To the people of Robertson County, the voice became Kate.

It was, by the accounts, fond of some members of the family. It was gentle with John Bell’s wife, Lucy, bringing her fruit and singing to her when she was ill.

Toward John Bell, it was pure hatred.

The Two Desires

The voice wanted two things, and it made both clear.

First, it wanted Betsy Bell not to marry Joshua Gardner, the young neighbor she loved. Whenever the two were together, the voice would whisper, then plead, then shriek: Please, Betsy Bell, don’t have Joshua Gardner. It harassed the couple relentlessly. In 1821, worn down, Betsy broke off the engagement. She later married her former schoolteacher, Richard Powell.

The second thing the voice wanted was John Bell dead.

It said so, openly and often. It called him “Old Jack.” It promised to torment him until the end of his life. As the haunting went on, John Bell began to suffer a strange affliction: his tongue would swell in his mouth until he could not speak or eat, sometimes for days. His face would twitch uncontrollably. He grew weaker and weaker. The voice gloated over each spell.

On December 19, 1820, John Bell fell into a stupor and could not be roused. When the family looked through the medicine cabinet, they found a small vial of dark, smoky liquid that no one recognized. Neither the doctor nor anyone in the household had put it there.

The voice spoke up at once, according to the family’s account. It said it had put the vial there. It said it had given Old Jack a big dose of it the night before, and that would fix him.

Someone tested the liquid on a cat. The cat, it is said, died almost instantly. The vial was thrown in the fire, where it flared up in a blue flame.

John Bell died the next day, December 20, 1820. At his funeral, as the grave was filled, mourners said they heard the voice laughing and singing a drinking song: Row me up some brandy, O. It sang until the last of the mourners had left the graveyard.

The General Who Didn’t Stay

No account of the Bell Witch is complete without the story of Andrew Jackson.

The legend says that Jackson — then a famous general, later the seventh President of the United States — heard about the haunting and rode north from his home near Nashville with a party of men to see it for himself. As they neared the Bell farm, their wagon stopped dead on a flat road and would not move, though the horses strained against it. Then a disembodied voice said the general could go on, and the wheels rolled free. That night, a self-proclaimed “witch tamer” in Jackson’s party was slapped and kicked around the room by an invisible force until he begged for mercy. Jackson is supposed to have said he would rather fight the British again than face the Bell Witch.

It’s a wonderful story. But I have to tell you that there is no contemporary evidence for it — not in Jackson’s letters, not in his papers, not in any record from his lifetime. The tale first appears decades later. It may have been folklore attaching itself to the most famous man in Tennessee. It may have a seed of truth. We simply don’t know.

The Promise

After John Bell’s death, the haunting gradually quieted. In 1821, the voice announced that it was leaving but would return in seven years. The family heard a loud noise, as if a cannonball had rolled down the chimney, followed by a burst of smoke, and a voice saying goodbye.

According to family accounts, it kept its word. In 1828 it returned to visit John Bell Jr., stayed for a few weeks, talked with him about history, religion and the future, and then left once more — promising to return to one of John Bell’s descendants in 107 years.

That would have been 1935. Nothing on record happened in 1935.

Is Any of It True?

I want to be careful here. The Bell Witch story is often called the most documented haunting in American history, and it is certainly the most famous. But the documentation is not what we’d want.

The main source is a book published in 1894 — more than seventy years after the events — by a Clarksville newspaperman named Martin Van Buren Ingram, titled An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. It includes a manuscript said to have been written in 1846 by John Bell’s son Richard Williams Bell, called “Our Family Trouble.” Richard was only a boy during the haunting. Skeptics have noted that Ingram’s book borrows the language of the dime novels of its era, that some of its witness accounts can’t be verified, and that the original manuscript doesn’t seem to survive.

Over the years, many explanations have been offered. That Betsy produced the phenomena herself, perhaps through ventriloquism or a psychological disturbance. That a schoolteacher or neighbor was behind it. That the whole thing grew from a real family crisis — a dying, embittered father, a frightened adolescent girl, a community full of grudges — into the legend it became.

And yet the story survived because, for generations, families in Robertson County told it the same way. People there still do not take it lightly.