John Bell and his family lived in a rural Tennesse town in a large but simple home surrounded by
farmland. They tended to the land and lived a quiet country life. Little did they know their
house would become a hub for supernatural events that would lead to unimaginable occurrences,
horror, and even….death. Get ready for one of the most frightening Southern tales out there, often
referred to as “America’s greatest ghost story.” This is the tale… of the Bell Witch Haunting.
The year is 1817. John Bell and his family are living in a farmhouse on around 320
acres of land in Red River, now known as Adams, Tennessee. A large family resides
in the house - the couple has either six or nine children, depending on the source.
John and his wife Lucy gave birth to Jesse, Benjamin, Drewry, John Junior, Esther,
Zadock, Elizabeth - known as Betsy, Richard and Joel. However, in 1817 the oldest few
had already moved out of the house, and one - Benjamin - had tragically died as a baby.
The Bells have already been raising their family in the house and taking care of their farm for
thirteen years since 1804, with no particular issues. But all that was about to change.
One day, John Bell takes a walk out into his fields, carrying his trusty
rifle with him. He spots something odd out of the corner of his eye. Looking over,
Bell sees a large animal sitting in a corn row, which looked almost like a big dog,
with the only difference being...it had the head of a rabbit.
Taken aback and sufficiently disturbed by the sight, Bell fires his guns at
the animal several times, which runs away. He returns to the house distrubed,
but still believing he must have made some sort of mistake; that his eyes had deceived him.
So John puts this strange occurrence out of his mind and sits down to dinner. Little did he know,
the bizarre incidents are only the beginning.
That same night, the entire Bell family starts hearing noises all around the house.
Alternating between what sounds like scratching and someone beating on the wall
outside, the sounds continue throughout the night. A few times, the Bell parents and
the older sons run outside to try and see if they can catch the person behind the sounds,
but to no avail. Every time they run out, there is no one there.
Over the next few evenings, the intensity and frequency of the sounds increase,
with the beatings getting so loud the children
are unable to sleep. But then one evening…..the sounds move inside.
The younger Bell children wake up one night to tell their parents that it sounds like rats
are gnawing at their bedposts. As you might have guessed....there are no rats anywhere to be found.
As if the sound of invisible rodents weren’t enough to keep someone awake,
an invisible force starts yanking bed covers off the children and tossing their pillows
aside. It seems whatever this malevolent force is, it’s only getting stronger.
Soon, a female voice can be heard throughout the house,
soft and unintelligible at first. Faint whispers come through the walls,
and with every day that passes, the voice becomes louder and clearer.
The voice echoing throughout the house sings hymns, quotes scripture,
and even starts having conversations. Eventually, she starts referring to the people in the house
by name. And it becomes clear she has marked one family member….for death.
One day, the entity announces its intentions: she hates John Bell and wants to kill him. Why?
No clear reason is given except one: “Mr. Bell is a bad man”, the entity is quoted as saying.
Frightened and lost, John Bell doesn’t know what to do. He considers his options. He’s
still reluctant to ask any authorities, religious or otherwise for help. After all, John is an elder
of the Red River Baptist Church, and living right in the middle of the Bible Belt. Announcing to the
church, and the town at large, that evil forces are in your home trying to kill you, is a dicey
proposition in a country that was still killing people for being witches just a century before.
So John decides to go to his best friend, James Johnson. At first,
Johnson is understandably skeptical. He requests to spend a night at the Bell
house with his wife so he can see what’s happening for himself. As night descends,
the same supernatural activity that has terrified and exhausted the Bell family
starts again. Johnson has his bed covers yanked, and is even slapped in the face.
He calls on the spirit to ask what it wants. There’s no answer, but the activity ceases.
The next morning, Johnson tells John Bell that whatever is in his house is an “evil spirit,
the kind the Bible talks about”. He convinces John to share these strange events with a local trusted
preacher, and the community at large. John does so, and word of the haunting spreads far and wide.
Unfortunately, the more attention is brought to the evil force inside the Bell home,
the stronger it seems to grow. Neighbors and even those just passing through come
by to try and figure out what the spirit is, call on it,
or make it disappear, and each interaction yields a different response from the entity.
One phantom response goes, “I am a Spirit; I once was very happy,
but I have been disturbed and made unhappy. I am the Spirit of a person who was buried in the woods
nearby and the grave was distrubed, my bones disinterred and scattered,
and one of my teeth was lost under this house. I am here looking for that tooth.”
Some locals checked the Bell farm and confirmed that there were burial
mounds present on the grounds, Native American burial mounds to be specific.
Another time, the spirit said it was “a Spirit from everywhere, Heaven, Hell, the earth;
am in the air, the houses, any place at any time; have been created millions of years.”
However, the explanation neighbors stuck to the most, and the one that gave the
spirit its name, was the spirit’s confession that it was Kate Batts.
Batts was a neighbor of John Bell’s, and already viewed with suspicion throughout the
town for behaving in “strange” ways. Though given that this was a woman in the 1820s,
the strange ways might have been things like “reading”, or “wanting to vote”.
Batts’ brother-in-law, Benjamin,
had a business deal with John Bell go south at some point in the past,
a dispute over the sale of a slave. So….no one involved in this story was a great human being.
Over the years, local people twisted facts and
said the dispute was between Kate and John Bell instead.
Kate, of course, vehemently denies any accusation that she is involved
in witchcraft or responsible for this spirit in any way. Thankfully for her,
the local community had become juuuuust progressive enough to not execute her
over an accusation of witchery. Though many of them still stuck to calling the ghost “Kate”.
However, the idea that a witch is involved sticks throughout history.
Hence, the Bell Witch Haunting.
Besides killing John Bell, the entity haunting the Bell home
has another big objective in mind. She seems to focus a lot of her aggression
and violence on another member of the household: the youngest daughter, Betsy.
Betsy would get scratched, slapped and hit by the ghost constantly. Strangely enough,
the ghost had a specific problem with Betsy: she did not want Betsy to marry
her childhood sweetheart and current fiance, Joshua Gardner. Killing a family member is one
thing for a ghost to threaten; but being against a specific marriage match is incredibly strange.
The repeated threats from the witch against the marriage lead Betsy to the brink of madness.
She eventually meets up with Joshua outside the house and tearfully tells him she cannot
marry him. As a witness to the violence and rage the entity in her house was capable of,
Betsy cannot risk her own or her family’s safety.
In the midst of all this, a future US President - then general - became so
intrigued by tales of the haunting that he decided to venture down to Red River himself.
Three of the Bell sons had fought under him, and he had caught wind of this strange story.
So in 1819, Andrew Jackson comes marching down to the Bell house
with an entourage of military men, horses, and a large wagon.
The first strange occurrence happens before Jackson and his men even reach the house.
The wagon comes to a halt, and despite the fact that it isn’t broken or stuck, it will not start
moving again. Jackson and his men try repeatedly to push the wagon forward, but it will not budge.
Suddenly, a disembodied female voice speaks up: “all right,
General, let the wagon move on. I will see you tonight”.
Jackson and his men continue on to the house and set up tents in the yard to sleep there overnight.
His men are a little perplexed, but hardly rattled by the events so far. In fact,
one of his men even proudly taunts the spirit, proclaiming himself to
be a “witch tamer”. He pulls out a pistol with a silver bullet and tells the rest of
the soldiers that the witch won’t bother him, because she’s too scared of what’s in his gun.
Anyone who’s seen a horror movie can probably guess what happens next.
The “witch tamer” starts screaming as his body jerks spastically in several different directions,
until eventually, he is literally kicked out of the camp by an unseen entity.
The rest of the soldiers are terrified and beg Jackson to leave, which they hurriedly do,
and they are spotted in Springfield very early the next morning.
Unfortunately, it seems terrifying a future President isn’t enough to
satisfy the Bell Witch. She has one more horrific act left to do.
John Bell, now approaching his 70s,
starts to experience erratic and uncontrolled body movements,
facial twitching, and trouble swallowing. Some say his symptoms would be classified
as seizures today. Perhaps, unknown to the rest of the family, he was ailing and fading fast.
However, throughout this whole time, the unseen voice continues to threaten John’s life,
vowing to kill him time and time again.
And on December 20, 1820, John Bell takes his last breath.
The family wakes up to find him dead in his bed.
Since John was 70 years old and experiencing odd symptoms for
the last few months of his life at least, many attribute his death to
natural causes or illness. But there’s one strange detail that counters this.
According to family members, they find a vial of a strange black liquid in a cupboard right
after John’s death. No one has any idea who brought the liquid into the house
or could even recognize it. After testing it on a cat they realize the liquid… is poison.
John Bell’s funeral was one of the largest ever held in Robertson County. People came
from miles away, some who had known him personally or by reputation,
others curious about the haunting that apparently killed a man.
Three priests eulogize John while the funeral attendees stand silent and respectful. As the
mourners prepare to leave the funeral, a voice suddenly breaks the silence. It’s the witch,
laughing and singing, her long-stated goal of killing John Bell finally accomplished.
After John’s death, the witch disappears,
but not before telling the family that she will be back in seven years.
Shockingly enough, in seven years, the Bell children still living in the house
tell the community that the witch is indeed back, as the same knocking,
sounds, and shaking have started up again.
It seems the witches’ aims this time are less malevolent. She has long conversations with
John Junior, makes some noise around the house, and disappears again. This time, she tells the
family that she will be back in 1935. No, we don’t know why her timing is so erratic.
According to some sources, she never returned. Other family members, descendants of the Bells,
say that the witch, in fact, never truly left. She still haunts the Bell
family and the property they lived on, causing disturbances and wreaking havoc to this day.
Tourists flock to Adams, Tennessee to see the Bell Witch Cave, made famous by the tales of
the haunting. Though the cave wasn’t a focus of supernatural activity in the original myth,
it’s the only part of the Bell property that still looks much like it would have
in the early 1800s, as the original house has long since been torn down.
Therefore, visitors go to the undisturbed cave and report supernatural phenomena.
Many historians doubt a lot of the lore surrounding the Bell Witch Haunting. They
insist that many accounts, including that of Andrew Jackson’s visit, are not only
unverified but likely false. A lot of the legends surrounding the entity come from a book called
“Authenticated History of the Bell Witch”, published in 1894 by Martin Van Buren Ingram.
Ingram’s book was written 73 years after the hauntings stopped,
meaning Ingram himself wasn’t even born when the events of the Bell Witch Haunting took place.
He supposedly based his work on Richard Bell’s diary. However, Richard, who was a boy when the
events took place, didn’t even note down the events of the time until thirty years later.
US historians insist that Jackson’s whereabouts between 1814 and 1820 were very well documented,
and nowhere is a visit to Robertson County catalogued. Furthermore, they can’t find
any specific court records or mentions of John Bell’s death, either by natural causes or poison.
Thus, many historians are extremely skeptical of the events of the Bell Witch Haunting,
or that the events even took place. However, the story has spread all over the US,
and it has been told and retold by generations of Southerners since the early 19th century.
Many people, especially those from the local area, still believe in the legend,
and some even believe the Bell Witch may still be with them today…
What do you think of the Bell Witch Haunting? Did it really happen or was it in the Bell
family’s minds? Let us know in the comments! And since you hopefully don’t have a witch
to deal with in your house, spend your time watching one of our other videos right here!