October 4, 2025 • 29 mins
This 2016 episode covers a haunting story from the early 1800s. Many narratives have blossomed from the Bell Witch story, but when you really try to look at the facts, they're few and far between.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. It is October. Today's classic is one where
we kick things off being very excited about it being October,
and that is the bell Witch. Oh. I love this
story and it originally came out on October fifth, twenty sixteen.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(00:23):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frye and I'm Tracy d Wilson. Tracy, what is
that time of year again? Is that time Autumn? It's
(00:44):
the best time of year, not just Autumn, but halloweeny time.
So as we get into October, for any of our
new listeners that might not know, we can talk about
some fun spooks and haunts and scary stories. We can
talk about them year round, there's no law against it,
but we like to get some extra spooky stuff going
on here as we get into the Halloween season and
make a special point. Yeah, it's a special enough point
(01:08):
that for long time listeners last year when literally the
first two podcasts in October were not Halloween, so people
got real mad. And today's topic is one that we
often get requests for, and it's a little bit tricky,
as many stories along these lines can be because a
lot of the information is not just apocryphal, it is
(01:28):
flat out made up. But we're going to talk about
how the legend of the Bell Witch became a well
known part of American lore. But first we are going
to indulge in the fall fantasy of talking about the
alleged paranormal story as it is often told. So the
primary account of the Bell family and what happened on
their Tennessee land is a book that was written in
(01:49):
eighteen ninety four by Martin van Buren Ingram, and it's
entitled An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. But
that book was written more than seventy five years after
the events of the story, and even in the introduction
it kind of sets up this scenario that makes it
impossible to refute. Ingram claimed that he was working from
(02:10):
an account that was written by a member of the family,
William Bell, and that the family had declined to publish
that account while any of the involved parties were still living,
but that he had come in and you know, managed
to make this deal and promised that he would tell
the true story. By the way that manuscript that he
claimed to have used, there's no evidence of it ever existing.
(02:33):
But he also and when I say he, I mean
Ingram also acknowledges that many people had already come to
the conclusion that the entire haunting was a hoax, possibly
perpetrated by members of the Bell family for some sort
of financial gain, but he dismisses that by describing how
William's account was written in an effort to clear the
family name and prove once and for all that the
(02:55):
whole thing really happened. It's one of the things that
once he lays it all out there, like the rebuttal,
is of nah. Right. So first we're going to talk
about the story as it is laid out in that book,
and then we will talk about it from a more
skeptical perspective. The story all starts with the family patriarch,
John Bell, who was born in Halifax County, North Carolina
(03:18):
in seventeen fifty. He apprenticed as a cooper for a while,
but eventually decided to become a farmer. At the age
of thirty two, he got married to Lucy Williams, who
was twenty years younger than he was. Yeah, that was
one of those things that when I first did the
math there I got real creeped out, and then I
(03:39):
was like, oh, this can't be right. And then I
kept looking at other sources and it kept lining up.
The couple had their first child, a son named Jesse,
eight years later, so at that point Lucy would have
been twenty in seventeen ninety, and the Bells initially did
really well with their farm in Edgecombe County, North Carolina,
and they also had three more sons. Over the course
(04:01):
of several years. Starting in eighteen oh one, though, they
started to have issues with their crops, and eventually they
decided to leave that farm in North Carolina and move west,
as so many of their friends and acquaintances had already done. So.
In eighteen oh four, John, Lucy and their children, along
with a slave named Chloe who had been given to
the couple by Lucy's father when they got married, and
(04:23):
Chloe's eight children, made their way to Red River, Tennessee.
This is near the area that's now known as Adams, Tennessee,
which is not far from Nashville, and the Bells were
welcomed into the community, where John bought a home and
some property that included both barnes and an orchard, and
the family established their farm, and they were again pretty prosperous,
(04:44):
and everyone really adored Lucy. That comes up over and
over that everyone just loved this woman. And over time
Bell added to his landholdings and he became one of
the most wealthy, influential, and respected men in the area.
As the farm got bigger, as so often the case,
the family did too. The Bells had several more children,
including a daughter born in eighteen oh five named Elizabeth.
(05:08):
She was called Betsy, and she becomes central to this
whole haunting legend. After thirteen years in Red River, things
started to shift from the happy prosperity that the Bell
family had enjoyed up to that point. Initially, the first
thing that happened was that John Bell saw a weird animal.
He spotted a creature out in the cornfield that he
(05:29):
would later describe as having a dog's body and a
rabbit's head. He shot at it and he missed, and
one of his sons, Drew Bell, saw a massive bird
on a fence near the home. When he went to
get a gun to shoot at it, the bird, which
he thought was a turkey, revealed itself to be a
strange bird that he just couldn't identify. Betsy. At one point,
(05:54):
was walking in the woods with the younger children of
the family one evening when she saw what appeared to
be a little girl in green dress swinging in the trees.
That girl was not actually there. And then one of
their servants named Dean, claimed that he had seen a
black dog on his regular walks to visit who his wife,
who was also a slave and was owned by a
friend of the family named Alex Gunn, and this dog
(06:16):
would allegedly trot along in front of Dean while he
walked over to the gun home, and then the dog
would vanish just as they arrived there. The next strange
happening was a variety of tapping noises inside the family home,
and they couldn't figure out what the source of these
noises was. These noises had actually been going on for
some time, and at first they had been attributed to
(06:38):
much more ordinary things like the children being mischievous, but
it continued to get more frequent and louder. There was
a faint voice that the members allegedly started to hear.
It was too feeble for anyone to make out the
words or the songs, but they sounded like they were
coming from an elderly woman, and according to the Bell children,
(07:01):
their bedding began to be pulled off of them in
the night, and they also reported that animals, possibly rats,
could be heard chewing on their bed posts, but that
whenever the noises were investigated and someone lit a candle
or tried to look, nothing was actually there. Then they
started to report that they heard what sounded like dogs
fighting in the house, and then there were sounds of
(07:23):
chains on the floor, and then additional creepier noises were
also detailed in William Bell's account, including what sounded like
the smacking of lips and occasional gulping. Those are like
the sort of great details for me, Like that's such
a good creepy noise detail. Like if you were just
lying in bed and you heard what sounded like someone
(07:45):
gulping or smacking their lips near you, wouldn't that be
delightfully creepy? And at this point, the symptoms of their
haunting are kind of like a haunting Schmorgus board. It's
like we're just gonna have a buffet things happening, and
then we're gonna new strange things and then different strange things. Yeah,
and the next strange thing was that William recounted that
(08:08):
he felt as though someone had grabbed his hair in
the night and began to lift him off the bed
by his head with it. So this elderly woman's frail
voice we've been talking about that had been too faint
to make out not so much the case when speaking
to Betsy. This witch is said to have given some
(08:29):
very clear direction that Betsy should not marry her intended,
which was a boy named Joshua Gardner. And we were
gonna get back to that in a little bit, but
before we talk about how the family handled all of
this wacky stuff that was happening. Like Tracy said, it
is sort of the haunting Smorgasboard. We're gonna pause for
a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. So getting
(08:59):
back to the John Bell, the patriarch of the family,
started to have some medical issues during all of this,
and his condition gradually worsened. Initially, it was described as
quote a stiffness of tongue. So when he was having
an episode of this illness, he couldn't eat, and he
described it as feeling as though a stick was lodged
(09:20):
sideways in his mouth between his cheeks preventing him from eating,
so when he would try to eat, the food would
kind of fall right back out. At first, john was
encouraging the family to keep the strange happenings at the
farm and his mystery illness under wraps, but eventually he
disclosed what was going on to a neighbor and friend
named James Johnson. Johnson and his wife spent a night
(09:43):
at the Bell home at John Bell's request, and they
were hoping that they could maybe shed some light on
this situation and offer an outsider's perspective as to what's
going on. And after leading the family in prayer and
then retiring to bed, Johnson and his wife witnessed the
same Finni that the Bells had been experiencing, including hearing
(10:03):
all of the noises in racket, having their bed covers
pulled off of them as they slept, and mister Johnson
apparently had the presence of mind to try to speak
with the mysterious entity, and he determined that a it
was intelligent and b it would cease its actions when
spoken to, and then c that John Bell should no
(10:23):
longer keep this situation secret, but should seek the help
of the community. So a lot of people started going
to the Bell Home to visit and to investigate this spirit,
who at this point people were saying was called Kate,
And really all they were figuring out was that Kate
really hated John Bell and seemed like basically a gossipy,
busybody and not an actual problem. Her manifestations did start
(10:46):
to have become stronger, and it became clear that she
was speaking Bible verses and singing hymns. When asked who
she was and what she wanted, she replied, I am
a spirit. I was once very happy, but have been
disturbed later after she grew more adept at communicating. The
spirit apparently said that she had been buried nearby, but
(11:07):
that her grave had been disturbed, and that one of
her teeth was under the Bell Home and she was
looking for it. Yeah, there is a whole wack a
doodle story about an animal's head showing up and a
tooth falling out of it and into a crack in
the floor, but we don't know well. And this whole
thing we were talking about before the break, that was
(11:29):
like and then there were noises, and then there was singing,
and then there was levitation, and then there was someone
grabbing my hair. I'm like, none of these things are
really creepy to me. But then we get to this
part where she's like, and my tooth is under your house,
and I'm like, all right, come out out of the story.
Ghostly Dentistry is where Tracy draws the line. And this witch, though,
(11:51):
was devoted to John's wife Lucy, just like everyone else.
She loved Lucy, And as we said, she had come
to be known as Kate, and this consequently has associated
her with a neighbor of the Bells, a woman named
Kate Bats. And we're going to talk about Kate Bats
a little bit later in the episode, and there's even
the suggestion that she, this disembodied voice claimed herself to
(12:13):
be Kate Bats. But whatever her true origin, whether it
was Kate Bats or just a mystery person, she became
downright famous in the area, and for a time she
almost seems to have been seen as a good influence.
People were just afraid enough of her that they lived good,
honest lives. According to Ingram's writings, quote, everybody got good.
(12:38):
The wicked left off swearing, lying and whiskey drinking. The avaricious.
We're careful not to covet or lay hands on that
which belonged to their neighbors, lest Kate might tell on them.
No man allowed his right hand to do anything that
the left might be ashamed of, And the story of
what the spirit was troubled about, i e. That lost tooth,
(12:59):
among other things, did not stay consistent, though, so later
she told a visitor that she had once had a
great deal of wealth, but had buried it, and she
would only tell Betsy Bell the location of this buried treasure.
She later eventually told several men in the family as
well as close friends of the family, on the stipulation
that they give every dollar that was buried to Betsy.
(13:22):
And these men went out and they dug, and they
dug in the named spot, which was this very tricky area.
I think it was near a stream, but it was
like a there was a lot of heavy rock over it.
And they found nothing. And the spirit when they reported
back to the house that no, there's nothing in that spot,
the spirit allegedly laughed at them that night and taunted
(13:43):
them for being so easily duped. In eighteen eighteen, as
the stories of Kate were becoming a lot more well
known in the area, the church excommunicated John Bell. Sometimes
this is reported as being due to his association with
supernatural events, but there was a more mundane element to
the story. You're going to talk about it in a bit, yeah,
(14:05):
and I will give you a slight spoiler alert that,
for my money, the reason he was excommunicated is way
more troubling than any paranormal thing. There was also allegedly
a notable human visitor to the Bell farm in eighteen nineteen.
The claim is that Major General Andrew Jackson came to
(14:26):
stay and during the War of eighteen twelve, the three
eldest bell Sons had served under Jackson at the Battle
of New Orleans. Jackson had heard, according again to this
tale of the alleged haunting, and even made a joke
that the witch must be holding them up when the
horses he was that were part of his travel group
suddenly stopped as they approached the Bell farm, and according
(14:48):
to Ingram's accounts of the visit, this entourage that was
following Andrew Jackson was intending to spend a week there,
but they left after just one night. She went on
to spend different arns to subsequent visitors to the Bell
home claiming at one point to be the spirit of
a young girl and another to be the ghost of
a family friend's stepmother. Nothing was consistent, much like all
(15:11):
the earlier symptoms of the haunting, and it seems like
things were shifting away from jovial toying into being a
little more sinister. At one point, when family friend William
Porter was staying at the house, Kate claimed to want
to get in the bed with him, and he said
that the bedcovers slowly twisted into a human shape next
(15:34):
to him and sort of curled up next to him,
and thinking at that point that he had the witch captured,
Porter picked up all of those bedclothes and intended to
throw them in the fire, but they began to emit
a really foul smell and he dropped them on the floor.
In September of eighteen twenty, Lucy Bell had pleurisy, and
the spirit allegedly acted as a nursemaid, singing to her
(15:56):
and checking in on her and what's described as a
very loving way. According to William's account, Kate even brought
hazelnuts and grapes to the sick woman, and the manifestations
then had shifted from irritating we said, they kind of
ratcheted up and were less jovial, but then they became
(16:17):
downright chilling. So Betsy Bell began experiencing attacks that harkened
back to the descriptions of spirit torture from the Salem
witch trials that had happened more than one hundred years
prior to the events on the Bell farm. She described
the sensation of feeling like she was being pricked with
pins and as though she was being slapped by a disembodied,
(16:39):
non corporeal hand, and her friends actually said that they
witnessed welts appearing on her face and saw at times
even her shoes being forcibly pulled off of her body.
The attacks on Betsy slowly subsided, but as they did,
John Bell's health really deteriorated. He started having spells that
lasted a day or two, during what his tongue would
(17:01):
once again seem to stiffen and his face would go
into spasms. Once these spells had passed, he seemed to
be in fine health and he went about his life,
but the incidents became more frequent and longer and more
severe over time. Additionally, John Bell was tormented in a
more assaulted way he started to experience this feeling of
(17:21):
being slapped in much the same way that Betsy had described,
as well as also having his shoes jerked off his
feet repeatedly as he attempted to walk in the fields.
On the morning of December nineteenth, eighteen twenty, John Bell
could not be roused from sleep. A vial was found
near his body that contained a dark liquid, and according
to William's story, the family sent for a doctor from
(17:45):
Port Royal, and the spirit could be heard saying that
the family patriarch would never rise from his bed again.
This part's really hard for me, So if you're an
animal person, maybe don't listen for the next twenty seconds.
Contents of that mystery vial were tested by giving it
to a cat, and that cat, of course, quickly died.
(18:06):
The remaining bits of liquid were thrown in the fire
and then produced a blue flame. John Bell died on
December twentieth, and the witch is said to have sung
joyously throughout his burial there on the farm. After John's death,
the spirit is said to have largely stopped in her activities,
although she lingered into eighteen twenty one before she told
Lucy that she would go but return another seven years later.
(18:30):
Of course, she stayed true to that in Ingram's book
and appeared at the farm again in eighteen twenty eight.
So when she reappeared, she started doing the same sorts
of things as she had been doing early on in
eighteen seventeen, tapping around the house pulling covers off of beds.
But this only went on for two weeks and then
(18:51):
Kate once again vanished. So at that point William, his
brother Joel, and their mother Lucy were the only people
still living in the house, and they had all agreed
to it nor the spirit and not engage with it.
And apparently that worked, as she left the Bell family
seemingly for good. And now that we've given some of
the highlights of the Bell Witch's time in Tennessee, as
(19:11):
based on William Bell's alleged recollection, we will talk about
things from a more critical perspective. Before we do that,
we're going to take a brief word from a sponsor.
(19:33):
There are a lot of theories about the reality of
the Bell Witch and what was actually going on at
this farm if it was a ruse. One of the
theories is that someone wanted to break up the relationship
between Betsy Bell and her fiancee, Joshua Gardner, and if
that had been the motivation, the ruse was in fact successful.
Betsy was frightened enough by the witch's admonitions against her
(19:55):
marriage to Gardner that she broke up with him in
eighteen twenty one. One of the can Temprairie explanations, and
one that we alluded to in the intro to the episode,
was that two of the Bell boys had learned ventriloquism
when they had traveled to New Orleans on trading trips,
and then they had taught Betsy the skill, and the
three of them got together to basically lonch to make hopes.
(20:16):
But there were some times during these events of the
alleged haunting when one or the other of the Bell
boys was away from the family home, and then there
were also times when all three of them were present
in plain sight when the noises in the witch's voice
were heard. And Betsy was, by all accounts a lovely
girl and very bright as well, who was admired by
(20:37):
virtually all of the young men in the area, and
there have been theories that a romantic rival may have
been behind the hauntings. And while the issues began when
she was only twelve. By the time she had been
moved to break up with her longtime sweetheart Joshua, she
was sixteen. One of the more likely suspects in the
whole suitor theory is a man named Richard Powell. Richard
(20:59):
had been the Belchi children's teacher, but as Betsy grew
toward adulthood, he seemed to take a romantic interest in her,
and he was also a close friend of the family.
And one of the things that makes Powell look so
suspicious is that while he did not apparently tell his
friends in the area he was married, his wife Esther,
was almost twenty years older than he was, and she
(21:22):
died of unspecified causes the same year that Betsy finally
broke off her engagement to Joshua Gardner. And I just
want to note that while this is mentioned in several
texts with a citation of the records of Robertson County, Tennessee,
I found this little bit of information too late in
the game to actually get eyes on those records for confirmation,
(21:43):
but it does show up in multiple different accounts. Richard
Powell started to openly pursue Betsy after her ties to
Gardner were severed, and he and Betsy were married in
eighteen twenty four. Richard died seventeen years later, and Betsy
remained a widow for the rest of her life her
death in eighteen ninety. So, yeah, some people think that
(22:04):
that sort of chain of events points circumstantially to Richard
Powell having orchestrated the whole thing. And remember that thing
about John Bell being excommunicated from the church. It did
not have to do with anything paranormal. It actually had
to do with some shady lending practices and some usury
in relation to the sale of slaves. So John Bell
(22:26):
was basically making some shady business deals and the church
did not like that, so that is why he was excommunicated.
It did not have anything to do with demonic possession.
Another incongruity from the Ingram Book, which is the primary
source that most other Belwich authors draw from, is that
visit from Andrew Jackson. There's never been anything to document
(22:46):
Jackson making this trip. And Andrew Jackson never wrote about
it in his personal diaries. One would think that such
a novel experience would merit at least a line or
two in a diary. Yeah, and As for Kate Bats,
it's kind of a world of no While there have
been a vast array of rumors about her, including that
(23:08):
she and John Bell had a bad business dealing that
led her to curse him. In another that she was
in fact pregnant by John Bell, and that he killed her.
She actually died decades after John Bell, so she could
not have been vengeance haunting him, and he definitely did
not kill her. It does appear, at least in the
Angrim account, that Kate Bats was kind of an outsider
(23:29):
in the community and was viewed with some suspicion. She
was loud and brash, which for a woman in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century basically meant scary rumors
of witchcraft had been attached to her at various points
in time, but more because it seems like she was
peculiar and not because of any actual malicious behavior, So
it seems like she was really more of a convenient
(23:50):
figure for the people making up this story to pin
on her, rather than somebody that actually was a ghost.
And there was even in that first acout the link
between the two suggesting that Kate Bats was somehow manifesting
the various events through witchcraft. But apparently even when the
Bell Witch was being perceived as a good thing, Kate
(24:11):
Bats was incensed to be associated with it, so that
idea really doesn't hold much water. And she was also
we should point out Lucy Bell's niece. She was related
to the Bells. Her father was actually Lucy Bell's brother.
And there's also no record of this business deal gone
bad between her and John Bell that instigated this ill
(24:33):
will and there's no real motive for her to go
to so much trouble to pester this family. On top
of all these facts that don't really add up, there's
the matter of the Angram Book and its truthfulness. Ingram,
a newspaperman, was writing it two generations removed from the
actual events. We always talk about how unreliable even fresh
eyewitness accounts can be, so even if he did have
(24:55):
a manuscript that really was written by William Bell, that
manuscript would have been written according to Ingram's own introduction
in the eighteen forties, twenty years after the then adolescent
William had experienced the so called Bell Witch events. So
it's number one a book. Ingram was writing much later
after William Bell had allegedly written it down twenty years
(25:18):
after it had purportedly happened. And there's also the possibility
that Ingram assembled this tale as a deceptive fiction to
capitalize on its sensational nature. There are just enough verifiable
details about the family that it might convince readers, while
the supernatural elements of it are entirely unverifiable. None of
(25:40):
it really passes muster as a true historical account of
this alleged haunting. And then, I mean, this reminds me
of when we were talking about Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid.
One of the things that seems the most telling about
how this whole account is that Ingram was incredibly insistent
about how it was completely indisputable. Yeah, here is a
(26:02):
passage that we're going to read that's particularly unrelenting in
how no one with any integrity could possibly ever doubt it.
Knowing the character of the men and women who testify
to these things, no one can disbelieve them or believe
that they would have willfully misrepresented the facts. Nor can
it be reasonably said that so many reputable witnesses had
(26:25):
fallen into an abnormal state of mind and were so
easily deceived in all of their rigid investigations. A man
may be arraigned for trial on the charge of murder,
the court and jury knowing nothing about the facts and circumstances,
but they are bound by both physical and moral law
to believe and find the man guilty on the testimony
(26:45):
of reputable witnesses detailing the facts and circumstances, and yet
may form no opinion or idea as to the state
of mind or cause that prompted the prisoner to commit
the murder. So it is in this instance the testimony
is convincing of the truth of the wonderful phenomena at
John Bell's, but the motive or cause is beyond our comprehension,
(27:07):
and to this extent the fact must be accepted. It
really happened, y'all. You're horrible if you doubt it. Of course, today,
the Bell Witch is a moneymaker. People love a good
haunting story, so it gets told and retold, and the
details shift and changed, just like gooey ectoplasm. Aside from
(27:31):
the dates associated with things like births and deaths, writings
about the Bell Witch often are really different in their details.
I remember somebody telling me a story about the Bell Witch.
I think when I was in college that had basically
a completely different cast of characters. Yeah, there was even
a book written recently by a clairvoyant that dispelled the
(27:53):
long standing myth that the family was cursed, and this
instead indicated that the land that they had moved to
intended was the source of this curse. Not only has
this story been used as an ingredient in numerous films,
but also a variety of quote documentary examinations of the paranormal.
For a small fee, you can tour the bell Witch Cave,
which is on the property and as allegedly haunted, possibly
(28:17):
by Kate herself, So if you're hankering to try to
meet her, you can. It's probably what you're gonna see
as a cave. Yeah, Yeah, it's one of those things
there you'll have people talk about like all of the
various components of it and how you know the blue flame.
One of the things that's a little more science based
(28:39):
is that when they threw that liquid from that vial
into the fire and it burned blue, that that could
be an indication of arsenic so that perhaps someone had
been systematically poisoning John Bell, But again it's unclear who
might have been doing that, although apparently he was kind
of a weasel in some business dealings, so we don't know,
(29:00):
but it definitely doesn't when you really start to look
at the facts of things. All of the elements that
get sensationalized is super spooky don't really hold up to scrutiny.
So that's the scoop on the bell which thanks so
(29:20):
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like
to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. It is October. Today's classic is one where
we kick things off being very excited about it being October,
and that is the bell Witch. Oh. I love this
story and it originally came out on October fifth, twenty sixteen.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
(00:23):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frye and I'm Tracy d Wilson. Tracy, what is
that time of year again? Is that time Autumn? It's
(00:44):
the best time of year, not just Autumn, but halloweeny time.
So as we get into October, for any of our
new listeners that might not know, we can talk about
some fun spooks and haunts and scary stories. We can
talk about them year round, there's no law against it,
but we like to get some extra spooky stuff going
on here as we get into the Halloween season and
make a special point. Yeah, it's a special enough point
(01:08):
that for long time listeners last year when literally the
first two podcasts in October were not Halloween, so people
got real mad. And today's topic is one that we
often get requests for, and it's a little bit tricky,
as many stories along these lines can be because a
lot of the information is not just apocryphal, it is
(01:28):
flat out made up. But we're going to talk about
how the legend of the Bell Witch became a well
known part of American lore. But first we are going
to indulge in the fall fantasy of talking about the
alleged paranormal story as it is often told. So the
primary account of the Bell family and what happened on
their Tennessee land is a book that was written in
(01:49):
eighteen ninety four by Martin van Buren Ingram, and it's
entitled An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. But
that book was written more than seventy five years after
the events of the story, and even in the introduction
it kind of sets up this scenario that makes it
impossible to refute. Ingram claimed that he was working from
(02:10):
an account that was written by a member of the family,
William Bell, and that the family had declined to publish
that account while any of the involved parties were still living,
but that he had come in and you know, managed
to make this deal and promised that he would tell
the true story. By the way that manuscript that he
claimed to have used, there's no evidence of it ever existing.
(02:33):
But he also and when I say he, I mean
Ingram also acknowledges that many people had already come to
the conclusion that the entire haunting was a hoax, possibly
perpetrated by members of the Bell family for some sort
of financial gain, but he dismisses that by describing how
William's account was written in an effort to clear the
family name and prove once and for all that the
(02:55):
whole thing really happened. It's one of the things that
once he lays it all out there, like the rebuttal,
is of nah. Right. So first we're going to talk
about the story as it is laid out in that book,
and then we will talk about it from a more
skeptical perspective. The story all starts with the family patriarch,
John Bell, who was born in Halifax County, North Carolina
(03:18):
in seventeen fifty. He apprenticed as a cooper for a while,
but eventually decided to become a farmer. At the age
of thirty two, he got married to Lucy Williams, who
was twenty years younger than he was. Yeah, that was
one of those things that when I first did the
math there I got real creeped out, and then I
(03:39):
was like, oh, this can't be right. And then I
kept looking at other sources and it kept lining up.
The couple had their first child, a son named Jesse,
eight years later, so at that point Lucy would have
been twenty in seventeen ninety, and the Bells initially did
really well with their farm in Edgecombe County, North Carolina,
and they also had three more sons. Over the course
(04:01):
of several years. Starting in eighteen oh one, though, they
started to have issues with their crops, and eventually they
decided to leave that farm in North Carolina and move west,
as so many of their friends and acquaintances had already done. So.
In eighteen oh four, John, Lucy and their children, along
with a slave named Chloe who had been given to
the couple by Lucy's father when they got married, and
(04:23):
Chloe's eight children, made their way to Red River, Tennessee.
This is near the area that's now known as Adams, Tennessee,
which is not far from Nashville, and the Bells were
welcomed into the community, where John bought a home and
some property that included both barnes and an orchard, and
the family established their farm, and they were again pretty prosperous,
(04:44):
and everyone really adored Lucy. That comes up over and
over that everyone just loved this woman. And over time
Bell added to his landholdings and he became one of
the most wealthy, influential, and respected men in the area.
As the farm got bigger, as so often the case,
the family did too. The Bells had several more children,
including a daughter born in eighteen oh five named Elizabeth.
(05:08):
She was called Betsy, and she becomes central to this
whole haunting legend. After thirteen years in Red River, things
started to shift from the happy prosperity that the Bell
family had enjoyed up to that point. Initially, the first
thing that happened was that John Bell saw a weird animal.
He spotted a creature out in the cornfield that he
(05:29):
would later describe as having a dog's body and a
rabbit's head. He shot at it and he missed, and
one of his sons, Drew Bell, saw a massive bird
on a fence near the home. When he went to
get a gun to shoot at it, the bird, which
he thought was a turkey, revealed itself to be a
strange bird that he just couldn't identify. Betsy. At one point,
(05:54):
was walking in the woods with the younger children of
the family one evening when she saw what appeared to
be a little girl in green dress swinging in the trees.
That girl was not actually there. And then one of
their servants named Dean, claimed that he had seen a
black dog on his regular walks to visit who his wife,
who was also a slave and was owned by a
friend of the family named Alex Gunn, and this dog
(06:16):
would allegedly trot along in front of Dean while he
walked over to the gun home, and then the dog
would vanish just as they arrived there. The next strange
happening was a variety of tapping noises inside the family home,
and they couldn't figure out what the source of these
noises was. These noises had actually been going on for
some time, and at first they had been attributed to
(06:38):
much more ordinary things like the children being mischievous, but
it continued to get more frequent and louder. There was
a faint voice that the members allegedly started to hear.
It was too feeble for anyone to make out the
words or the songs, but they sounded like they were
coming from an elderly woman, and according to the Bell children,
(07:01):
their bedding began to be pulled off of them in
the night, and they also reported that animals, possibly rats,
could be heard chewing on their bed posts, but that
whenever the noises were investigated and someone lit a candle
or tried to look, nothing was actually there. Then they
started to report that they heard what sounded like dogs
fighting in the house, and then there were sounds of
(07:23):
chains on the floor, and then additional creepier noises were
also detailed in William Bell's account, including what sounded like
the smacking of lips and occasional gulping. Those are like
the sort of great details for me, Like that's such
a good creepy noise detail. Like if you were just
lying in bed and you heard what sounded like someone
(07:45):
gulping or smacking their lips near you, wouldn't that be
delightfully creepy? And at this point, the symptoms of their
haunting are kind of like a haunting Schmorgus board. It's
like we're just gonna have a buffet things happening, and
then we're gonna new strange things and then different strange things. Yeah,
and the next strange thing was that William recounted that
(08:08):
he felt as though someone had grabbed his hair in
the night and began to lift him off the bed
by his head with it. So this elderly woman's frail
voice we've been talking about that had been too faint
to make out not so much the case when speaking
to Betsy. This witch is said to have given some
(08:29):
very clear direction that Betsy should not marry her intended,
which was a boy named Joshua Gardner. And we were
gonna get back to that in a little bit, but
before we talk about how the family handled all of
this wacky stuff that was happening. Like Tracy said, it
is sort of the haunting Smorgasboard. We're gonna pause for
a word from one of our fantastic sponsors. So getting
(08:59):
back to the John Bell, the patriarch of the family,
started to have some medical issues during all of this,
and his condition gradually worsened. Initially, it was described as
quote a stiffness of tongue. So when he was having
an episode of this illness, he couldn't eat, and he
described it as feeling as though a stick was lodged
(09:20):
sideways in his mouth between his cheeks preventing him from eating,
so when he would try to eat, the food would
kind of fall right back out. At first, john was
encouraging the family to keep the strange happenings at the
farm and his mystery illness under wraps, but eventually he
disclosed what was going on to a neighbor and friend
named James Johnson. Johnson and his wife spent a night
(09:43):
at the Bell home at John Bell's request, and they
were hoping that they could maybe shed some light on
this situation and offer an outsider's perspective as to what's
going on. And after leading the family in prayer and
then retiring to bed, Johnson and his wife witnessed the
same Finni that the Bells had been experiencing, including hearing
(10:03):
all of the noises in racket, having their bed covers
pulled off of them as they slept, and mister Johnson
apparently had the presence of mind to try to speak
with the mysterious entity, and he determined that a it
was intelligent and b it would cease its actions when
spoken to, and then c that John Bell should no
(10:23):
longer keep this situation secret, but should seek the help
of the community. So a lot of people started going
to the Bell Home to visit and to investigate this spirit,
who at this point people were saying was called Kate,
And really all they were figuring out was that Kate
really hated John Bell and seemed like basically a gossipy,
busybody and not an actual problem. Her manifestations did start
(10:46):
to have become stronger, and it became clear that she
was speaking Bible verses and singing hymns. When asked who
she was and what she wanted, she replied, I am
a spirit. I was once very happy, but have been
disturbed later after she grew more adept at communicating. The
spirit apparently said that she had been buried nearby, but
(11:07):
that her grave had been disturbed, and that one of
her teeth was under the Bell Home and she was
looking for it. Yeah, there is a whole wack a
doodle story about an animal's head showing up and a
tooth falling out of it and into a crack in
the floor, but we don't know well. And this whole
thing we were talking about before the break, that was
(11:29):
like and then there were noises, and then there was singing,
and then there was levitation, and then there was someone
grabbing my hair. I'm like, none of these things are
really creepy to me. But then we get to this
part where she's like, and my tooth is under your house,
and I'm like, all right, come out out of the story.
Ghostly Dentistry is where Tracy draws the line. And this witch, though,
(11:51):
was devoted to John's wife Lucy, just like everyone else.
She loved Lucy, And as we said, she had come
to be known as Kate, and this consequently has associated
her with a neighbor of the Bells, a woman named
Kate Bats. And we're going to talk about Kate Bats
a little bit later in the episode, and there's even
the suggestion that she, this disembodied voice claimed herself to
(12:13):
be Kate Bats. But whatever her true origin, whether it
was Kate Bats or just a mystery person, she became
downright famous in the area, and for a time she
almost seems to have been seen as a good influence.
People were just afraid enough of her that they lived good,
honest lives. According to Ingram's writings, quote, everybody got good.
(12:38):
The wicked left off swearing, lying and whiskey drinking. The avaricious.
We're careful not to covet or lay hands on that
which belonged to their neighbors, lest Kate might tell on them.
No man allowed his right hand to do anything that
the left might be ashamed of, And the story of
what the spirit was troubled about, i e. That lost tooth,
(12:59):
among other things, did not stay consistent, though, so later
she told a visitor that she had once had a
great deal of wealth, but had buried it, and she
would only tell Betsy Bell the location of this buried treasure.
She later eventually told several men in the family as
well as close friends of the family, on the stipulation
that they give every dollar that was buried to Betsy.
(13:22):
And these men went out and they dug, and they
dug in the named spot, which was this very tricky area.
I think it was near a stream, but it was
like a there was a lot of heavy rock over it.
And they found nothing. And the spirit when they reported
back to the house that no, there's nothing in that spot,
the spirit allegedly laughed at them that night and taunted
(13:43):
them for being so easily duped. In eighteen eighteen, as
the stories of Kate were becoming a lot more well
known in the area, the church excommunicated John Bell. Sometimes
this is reported as being due to his association with
supernatural events, but there was a more mundane element to
the story. You're going to talk about it in a bit, yeah,
(14:05):
and I will give you a slight spoiler alert that,
for my money, the reason he was excommunicated is way
more troubling than any paranormal thing. There was also allegedly
a notable human visitor to the Bell farm in eighteen nineteen.
The claim is that Major General Andrew Jackson came to
(14:26):
stay and during the War of eighteen twelve, the three
eldest bell Sons had served under Jackson at the Battle
of New Orleans. Jackson had heard, according again to this
tale of the alleged haunting, and even made a joke
that the witch must be holding them up when the
horses he was that were part of his travel group
suddenly stopped as they approached the Bell farm, and according
(14:48):
to Ingram's accounts of the visit, this entourage that was
following Andrew Jackson was intending to spend a week there,
but they left after just one night. She went on
to spend different arns to subsequent visitors to the Bell
home claiming at one point to be the spirit of
a young girl and another to be the ghost of
a family friend's stepmother. Nothing was consistent, much like all
(15:11):
the earlier symptoms of the haunting, and it seems like
things were shifting away from jovial toying into being a
little more sinister. At one point, when family friend William
Porter was staying at the house, Kate claimed to want
to get in the bed with him, and he said
that the bedcovers slowly twisted into a human shape next
(15:34):
to him and sort of curled up next to him,
and thinking at that point that he had the witch captured,
Porter picked up all of those bedclothes and intended to
throw them in the fire, but they began to emit
a really foul smell and he dropped them on the floor.
In September of eighteen twenty, Lucy Bell had pleurisy, and
the spirit allegedly acted as a nursemaid, singing to her
(15:56):
and checking in on her and what's described as a
very loving way. According to William's account, Kate even brought
hazelnuts and grapes to the sick woman, and the manifestations
then had shifted from irritating we said, they kind of
ratcheted up and were less jovial, but then they became
(16:17):
downright chilling. So Betsy Bell began experiencing attacks that harkened
back to the descriptions of spirit torture from the Salem
witch trials that had happened more than one hundred years
prior to the events on the Bell farm. She described
the sensation of feeling like she was being pricked with
pins and as though she was being slapped by a disembodied,
(16:39):
non corporeal hand, and her friends actually said that they
witnessed welts appearing on her face and saw at times
even her shoes being forcibly pulled off of her body.
The attacks on Betsy slowly subsided, but as they did,
John Bell's health really deteriorated. He started having spells that
lasted a day or two, during what his tongue would
(17:01):
once again seem to stiffen and his face would go
into spasms. Once these spells had passed, he seemed to
be in fine health and he went about his life,
but the incidents became more frequent and longer and more
severe over time. Additionally, John Bell was tormented in a
more assaulted way he started to experience this feeling of
(17:21):
being slapped in much the same way that Betsy had described,
as well as also having his shoes jerked off his
feet repeatedly as he attempted to walk in the fields.
On the morning of December nineteenth, eighteen twenty, John Bell
could not be roused from sleep. A vial was found
near his body that contained a dark liquid, and according
to William's story, the family sent for a doctor from
(17:45):
Port Royal, and the spirit could be heard saying that
the family patriarch would never rise from his bed again.
This part's really hard for me, So if you're an
animal person, maybe don't listen for the next twenty seconds.
Contents of that mystery vial were tested by giving it
to a cat, and that cat, of course, quickly died.
(18:06):
The remaining bits of liquid were thrown in the fire
and then produced a blue flame. John Bell died on
December twentieth, and the witch is said to have sung
joyously throughout his burial there on the farm. After John's death,
the spirit is said to have largely stopped in her activities,
although she lingered into eighteen twenty one before she told
Lucy that she would go but return another seven years later.
(18:30):
Of course, she stayed true to that in Ingram's book
and appeared at the farm again in eighteen twenty eight.
So when she reappeared, she started doing the same sorts
of things as she had been doing early on in
eighteen seventeen, tapping around the house pulling covers off of beds.
But this only went on for two weeks and then
(18:51):
Kate once again vanished. So at that point William, his
brother Joel, and their mother Lucy were the only people
still living in the house, and they had all agreed
to it nor the spirit and not engage with it.
And apparently that worked, as she left the Bell family
seemingly for good. And now that we've given some of
the highlights of the Bell Witch's time in Tennessee, as
(19:11):
based on William Bell's alleged recollection, we will talk about
things from a more critical perspective. Before we do that,
we're going to take a brief word from a sponsor.
(19:33):
There are a lot of theories about the reality of
the Bell Witch and what was actually going on at
this farm if it was a ruse. One of the
theories is that someone wanted to break up the relationship
between Betsy Bell and her fiancee, Joshua Gardner, and if
that had been the motivation, the ruse was in fact successful.
Betsy was frightened enough by the witch's admonitions against her
(19:55):
marriage to Gardner that she broke up with him in
eighteen twenty one. One of the can Temprairie explanations, and
one that we alluded to in the intro to the episode,
was that two of the Bell boys had learned ventriloquism
when they had traveled to New Orleans on trading trips,
and then they had taught Betsy the skill, and the
three of them got together to basically lonch to make hopes.
(20:16):
But there were some times during these events of the
alleged haunting when one or the other of the Bell
boys was away from the family home, and then there
were also times when all three of them were present
in plain sight when the noises in the witch's voice
were heard. And Betsy was, by all accounts a lovely
girl and very bright as well, who was admired by
(20:37):
virtually all of the young men in the area, and
there have been theories that a romantic rival may have
been behind the hauntings. And while the issues began when
she was only twelve. By the time she had been
moved to break up with her longtime sweetheart Joshua, she
was sixteen. One of the more likely suspects in the
whole suitor theory is a man named Richard Powell. Richard
(20:59):
had been the Belchi children's teacher, but as Betsy grew
toward adulthood, he seemed to take a romantic interest in her,
and he was also a close friend of the family.
And one of the things that makes Powell look so
suspicious is that while he did not apparently tell his
friends in the area he was married, his wife Esther,
was almost twenty years older than he was, and she
(21:22):
died of unspecified causes the same year that Betsy finally
broke off her engagement to Joshua Gardner. And I just
want to note that while this is mentioned in several
texts with a citation of the records of Robertson County, Tennessee,
I found this little bit of information too late in
the game to actually get eyes on those records for confirmation,
(21:43):
but it does show up in multiple different accounts. Richard
Powell started to openly pursue Betsy after her ties to
Gardner were severed, and he and Betsy were married in
eighteen twenty four. Richard died seventeen years later, and Betsy
remained a widow for the rest of her life her
death in eighteen ninety. So, yeah, some people think that
(22:04):
that sort of chain of events points circumstantially to Richard
Powell having orchestrated the whole thing. And remember that thing
about John Bell being excommunicated from the church. It did
not have to do with anything paranormal. It actually had
to do with some shady lending practices and some usury
in relation to the sale of slaves. So John Bell
(22:26):
was basically making some shady business deals and the church
did not like that, so that is why he was excommunicated.
It did not have anything to do with demonic possession.
Another incongruity from the Ingram Book, which is the primary
source that most other Belwich authors draw from, is that
visit from Andrew Jackson. There's never been anything to document
(22:46):
Jackson making this trip. And Andrew Jackson never wrote about
it in his personal diaries. One would think that such
a novel experience would merit at least a line or
two in a diary. Yeah, and As for Kate Bats,
it's kind of a world of no While there have
been a vast array of rumors about her, including that
(23:08):
she and John Bell had a bad business dealing that
led her to curse him. In another that she was
in fact pregnant by John Bell, and that he killed her.
She actually died decades after John Bell, so she could
not have been vengeance haunting him, and he definitely did
not kill her. It does appear, at least in the
Angrim account, that Kate Bats was kind of an outsider
(23:29):
in the community and was viewed with some suspicion. She
was loud and brash, which for a woman in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century basically meant scary rumors
of witchcraft had been attached to her at various points
in time, but more because it seems like she was
peculiar and not because of any actual malicious behavior, So
it seems like she was really more of a convenient
(23:50):
figure for the people making up this story to pin
on her, rather than somebody that actually was a ghost.
And there was even in that first acout the link
between the two suggesting that Kate Bats was somehow manifesting
the various events through witchcraft. But apparently even when the
Bell Witch was being perceived as a good thing, Kate
(24:11):
Bats was incensed to be associated with it, so that
idea really doesn't hold much water. And she was also
we should point out Lucy Bell's niece. She was related
to the Bells. Her father was actually Lucy Bell's brother.
And there's also no record of this business deal gone
bad between her and John Bell that instigated this ill
(24:33):
will and there's no real motive for her to go
to so much trouble to pester this family. On top
of all these facts that don't really add up, there's
the matter of the Angram Book and its truthfulness. Ingram,
a newspaperman, was writing it two generations removed from the
actual events. We always talk about how unreliable even fresh
eyewitness accounts can be, so even if he did have
(24:55):
a manuscript that really was written by William Bell, that
manuscript would have been written according to Ingram's own introduction
in the eighteen forties, twenty years after the then adolescent
William had experienced the so called Bell Witch events. So
it's number one a book. Ingram was writing much later
after William Bell had allegedly written it down twenty years
(25:18):
after it had purportedly happened. And there's also the possibility
that Ingram assembled this tale as a deceptive fiction to
capitalize on its sensational nature. There are just enough verifiable
details about the family that it might convince readers, while
the supernatural elements of it are entirely unverifiable. None of
(25:40):
it really passes muster as a true historical account of
this alleged haunting. And then, I mean, this reminds me
of when we were talking about Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid.
One of the things that seems the most telling about
how this whole account is that Ingram was incredibly insistent
about how it was completely indisputable. Yeah, here is a
(26:02):
passage that we're going to read that's particularly unrelenting in
how no one with any integrity could possibly ever doubt it.
Knowing the character of the men and women who testify
to these things, no one can disbelieve them or believe
that they would have willfully misrepresented the facts. Nor can
it be reasonably said that so many reputable witnesses had
(26:25):
fallen into an abnormal state of mind and were so
easily deceived in all of their rigid investigations. A man
may be arraigned for trial on the charge of murder,
the court and jury knowing nothing about the facts and circumstances,
but they are bound by both physical and moral law
to believe and find the man guilty on the testimony
(26:45):
of reputable witnesses detailing the facts and circumstances, and yet
may form no opinion or idea as to the state
of mind or cause that prompted the prisoner to commit
the murder. So it is in this instance the testimony
is convincing of the truth of the wonderful phenomena at
John Bell's, but the motive or cause is beyond our comprehension,
(27:07):
and to this extent the fact must be accepted. It
really happened, y'all. You're horrible if you doubt it. Of course, today,
the Bell Witch is a moneymaker. People love a good
haunting story, so it gets told and retold, and the
details shift and changed, just like gooey ectoplasm. Aside from
(27:31):
the dates associated with things like births and deaths, writings
about the Bell Witch often are really different in their details.
I remember somebody telling me a story about the Bell Witch.
I think when I was in college that had basically
a completely different cast of characters. Yeah, there was even
a book written recently by a clairvoyant that dispelled the
(27:53):
long standing myth that the family was cursed, and this
instead indicated that the land that they had moved to
intended was the source of this curse. Not only has
this story been used as an ingredient in numerous films,
but also a variety of quote documentary examinations of the paranormal.
For a small fee, you can tour the bell Witch Cave,
which is on the property and as allegedly haunted, possibly
(28:17):
by Kate herself, So if you're hankering to try to
meet her, you can. It's probably what you're gonna see
as a cave. Yeah, Yeah, it's one of those things
there you'll have people talk about like all of the
various components of it and how you know the blue flame.
One of the things that's a little more science based
(28:39):
is that when they threw that liquid from that vial
into the fire and it burned blue, that that could
be an indication of arsenic so that perhaps someone had
been systematically poisoning John Bell, But again it's unclear who
might have been doing that, although apparently he was kind
of a weasel in some business dealings, so we don't know,
(29:00):
but it definitely doesn't when you really start to look
at the facts of things. All of the elements that
get sensationalized is super spooky don't really hold up to scrutiny.
So that's the scoop on the bell which thanks so
(29:20):
much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like
to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the
show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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