October 29, 2025 • 15 mins
A legend in Tennessee tells of the real-life Bell family, who were haunted back in 1817 by a ghost witch - arguably the worst kind of either of those things.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. It's Josh and
Chuck here in our scary October rolls on. It's rolling
along with the short stuff on the bell Witch.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right rolling along the Red River of Tennessee, because
that's where the Belwitch is now Adams, Tennessee. But that's
where the Belwich story finds its roots, about an hour
north of Nashville. And that was a family, the Bells,
that moved from North Carolina in eighteen oh six to
Tennessee and did pretty well. They were landowners, they were
very respected, they had a pretty good life. And about
(00:37):
nine uh years after they moved there, they started to
get haunted by a angry ghost witch.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah. And before we get too much deeper into I
want to shout out a historian named Pat fits You
who runs Bellwitch dot org and wrote the book The
Belwitch Colon the Full Account Legends of America Victoria Kleine
Peter at the Tennessee State Museum.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Okay, got it, Rocky top baby.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
So the haunting of the Bell family began in eighteen
seventeen when John Bell, the patriarch of the family sometimes
called Old Jack Bell. Just remember this is eighteen seventeen
in Tennessee. Yeah, he was in his fields. He was
a huge planter in the area and he was in
one of his fields at one point and he noticed
(01:24):
a big animal sitting in his field. So he looked
at it a little closer, and he found that it
was quite disturbing. This large animal had the body of
a dog but the head of a rabbit.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
John Bell was like, did I eat mushrooms this morning?
He's like, no, I didn't. And he said, well, I'm
going to shoot at this because I'm a homesteader in
Tennessee in eighteen seventeen. And when he did, the animal
either vanished or scurried off to the nearby woods, depending
on who's telling the story, but either way, John Bell
let it be.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah. So that's dad's first incident. There would also be
successive incidents with kids. Dewy his son, and Betsy his daughter.
Dewree saw and if you're wondering how that's spelled, it's
d E w r Y. I've never seen that name before,
but I think I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I I'm glad that you love it. I think I
misspelled it. I think it might be Drury because I
also saw him referred to as Drew before.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I like Dowy.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I like more too, so we're gonna rename Drury Bell.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah. So Dewrey was haunted by a giant bird, supposedly
a bird that he had never seen before. It was
sitting on a fence post, so of course he shot
at it as well, but it disappeared into thin air.
And then daughter Betsy maybe the most frightening thing, although
the dog rabbit's pretty frightening. Yeah, but also so is
a little girl in a green dress hanging from a tree,
(02:46):
and I assume that means by a rope and not
just by her hands.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I could not get any further uh information about that.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Okay, I mean, if it was haunting, it had to
be like that girl's hand there as a child or
writer and came back.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yes, So these appearances seem to portend all of the
haunting that followed haunting by the ghost of a witch.
Don't forget that's the worst kind. Yeah, because I think
the same night after John Bell saw the rabbit dog
or the dog rabbit, I guess, depending on your perspective. Yeah,
the family was awakened by beating noises on the outside
(03:25):
of the walls of their home like it was being
pounded on. And that was just the first night. These
things continued night after night after night. Sometimes they would
be pounding really hard, sometimes kind of light, but either way,
Bell and his sons, he had several sons. They would
get out of bed and try to catch the person
who was pounding on their house. This is basically like
eighteen seventeen Ding Dong ditch, I guess. But they never
(03:48):
found a trace of anybody.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, and the hauntings or the sounds continued. Rather, the
children know were haunted by the sounds of what they
thought was rats chewing on their bedposts at night, which
was probably just rats to the other.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Bed post to night. But you gotta toss that one in.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
You gotta toss that in because it's scary. The hauntings
would turn physical. Sometimes the sheets were pulled off of
the kids while they slept. Young Betsy was ghost slapped,
apparently hard enough to leave welts and bruises. She was
ghost pinched, she was ghost hair pulled, and it became
pretty clear that Betsy and old Jack the dad, were
(04:28):
the main targets in this family.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yes, and we'll see why in a few but I
think probably what makes the whole thing the most disturbing
is that the witch began to talk. It's one thing
for poultry guys activity. Poultry guys don't talk. Everybody ask
your parents. The witch started speaking, the witch ghost, and
at first it was faint. They were just barely whispered.
(04:51):
You couldn't really make out what the ghost was saying.
But over time the voice grew louder, clearer, and would
sometimes hold conversations, like entire conversations with the Bell family
and their home, so much so that John Junior was
known to debate the witch voice. Sure, I don't know
over what nuclear energy maybe, and whether it was safe
(05:13):
or not. Probably, But he later wrote the conversations down
that he had with the Bell witch and he published
it I think self published in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
That's right. And if you think maybe just this family
had some weird mold in their house, it was driving
them all to the brinks of sanity, not true, because
you know, unfortunately it was eighteen seventeen and they had
enslaved people on their land, and they also had similar experiences,
the most famous of which was an enslaved man there
named Dean, who encountered the witch multiple times in the
(05:46):
form of a two headed dog man with o sensibly dogheads.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
I saw a drawing of it of this Dean being
met by a two headed dog, and it actually kind
of missed the mark because it looked like it was
hopping up to like play with them. Well maybe it
was because in this picture the drawing, Dean is holding
a ball, but it's not supposed to be like a
ball that the two headed dog wants to him to
toss for it. It was a witch ball that Dean's
(06:12):
wife made, and that's a real thing. A witch ball
is a blown glass spear, usually kind of colorful, and
depending on where you're using this or who you ask,
it's either used to trap witches reward off witches. And
Dean's wife made it for him, I think after the
first time he saw the bell witch to protect himself.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, and he was like, you know, a no, tradition
says it's got to be a ball, but these this
two headed dog just wants to get that ball. Can
we go with something else?
Speaker 1 (06:42):
She's like, sure, how about a witch's dick?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Right exactly? Shall we take a break, all right, We'll
come back and finish up with the Bell Witch right
after this, all right, So where we left off, there
(07:22):
were two headed dogs wanting to play with that witch ball.
Betsy's getting ghost pinched, Dad is getting haunted, the whole
family's getting haunted. And it became pretty clear that Betsy
was getting haunted because this belwitch did not like the
fact that she was engaged to a guy named Joshua
Gardner local kid, and she tried to keep this wedding
(07:42):
on but eventually would break it off in eighteen twenty
one and marry an old guy so old. How old
was he? He was so old that she ended up
nursing the man for eleven years before he eventually died.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, Betsy fell on hardships of her own after she
moved out of her father's house. She had eight children,
and four of them.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
In that eleven years with the old sick guy.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
I don't know if it was during or before. I
don't know how long they were married before he fell ill.
I don't know. But yes, they had eight children for sure,
but only four made it to adulthood sadly, so, Betsy
had her own troubles because of the Joshua Gardner thing.
But John Bell, the Witch saved the worst for him.
(08:29):
Like she was verbally abusive to him, she was physically
abusive to him. Shortly after she appeared, John Bell was
afflicted by some unknown illness and just kept getting worse
and worse over the next few years. As the haunting
war on, he would have seizures sometimes Chuck, and as
he came out of the Caesars seizures, the Bell Witch
would slap him around.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Man.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
She was really mean and ruthless toward John Bell. She
hated John Bell.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Can you imagine that that? Like he comes out of
a seizure and she's like, hey, what do you think
of this?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Smack smacks, man, I've been waiting for you to come
out of it. O.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
He sadly passed on in December eighteen twenty. He believed
that the Witch had poisoned him, and apparently the Witch
confirmed this, and the day before he died said, it's
useless for you to try and relieve Old Jack. I've
got him this time. He will never get up from
that bed again. I put it there and gave Old
Jack a big dose of it last night while he
(09:24):
was asleep, which fixed him.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Nice. There's a nice little preview of our Halloween episode.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Oh, I hope. So the neighbors found out about the
stuff too.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Right, Yeah, so he swore his family, John Belswar's family
to secrecy. This is just kind of not the thing
that you wanted your fellow townsfolk in eighteen seventeen Tennessee
to know about. But it just became such a big
deal that it spread and got out, and so some
of the townsfolk tried to catch the witch. They tried
to one guy tried to shoot the witch to no vail. Right,
(09:59):
No one could do anything to asswage the Bell Witch.
They even came up with their own legends too. The
one that stood out to me the most was that
at one point, the Bell Witch recited two different sermons
verbatim that were being given delivered at two different churches
at that moment, miles away from one another. And I mean,
(10:20):
if that's not an eighteen seventeen Tennessee folk superstition, that
you'd just be like, damn when somebody told you that, Yeah,
I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, because that's literally impossible in that time to know
exactly what was being said in two different places at once.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
There's a lot there's a lot of holes in that
legend for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Thankfully, after John died, maybe taken care of by the
Bell Witch, the hauntings basically stopped. I don't think we
mentioned that at his funeral the witch even haunted him.
There was like singing, drinking songs and interrupting the wake
in the funeral. But much later, in eighteen forty nine,
the Saturday Evening Post would publish a story that people
(11:03):
basically said, it's like the first commercial publication of this story,
and it accused Betsy of being behind the whole thing,
and she threatened to sue unless they printed an apology
and a retraction, which they did so I guess they
did make that up, and Betsy just, you know, she
never wanted to talk about it, she aged, she never
spoke of the Bellwitch.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yes, so the Bellwich, I'm pretty sure even at the time,
but certainly shortly afterward. In Tennessee and the parts of Tennessee,
it was attributed to a local woman named Kate Bats.
And there's a couple different explanations for why Kate Bats
would care about the Bell family so much that she
would hound them beyond the grave. The first one takes
place entirely in Tennessee, because we didn't say but not
(11:46):
just Tennessee, but also North Carolina and Mississippi put some
claim on the Bell Witch even though it all happened
in Tennessee. But in the first explanation, John Bell, remember
we said he was one of the bigger planters. He
had a three hundred plus acre homes dead that he'd
built by acquiring land from neighbors. And there was one
land deal that he had with the brother in law
(12:07):
of Kate Bats, a man by the name of Benjamin,
and Bell is said to have taken advantage of Benjamin
on the deal, and that in her death Kate hounded
John Bell to the grave and revenge for this land deal.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Why would he do Benjamin Brant like that, I don't know,
such a fine actor.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
The other version, like you said, takes place also in
North Carolina, because they also do lay claim. And this
is that Bell well, seemingly he had sex with Kate
Bats and had an affair with Kate Bats and that
is why he left to go to Tennessee because he
had had this affair broke it off. Kate was really
(12:47):
sore at this, obviously, and threatened to tell everybody, including
the family, and so, as the legend goes, Bell tied
her up in a smokehouse and left her there to die,
and she haunted him there, and so they had to
pack up and leave the Tennessee and she was like, Oh, no,
I don't think you know how ghost witches work. We
can we can travel interstate Tennessee's and not that far away.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yep. The whole way. She just kept going, are we
there yet? So one of the things that makes the
story so unsettling, aside from all the details of it,
and if you really want to dive into it, check
out Pat Fitzhugh's website Bellewitch dot org. Like really has
a lot of exhaustive research on it. But one of
the things that makes it unsettling, like I was saying,
(13:29):
is that these people like really did live in North
Carolina and Tennessee at the time. This legend covers like, Yeah,
genealogists have found Kate Bats in Edgecombe County. They found
Kate Bats and Adams, Tennessee. Apparently Bats is still live
in Adams, Tennessee, and there's Bells as well. That the
Bell family graveyard has all these people's headstones from the
(13:50):
correct timeframe. So the idea that these people really did
live and that at the time they believed that this
was happening to the Bell family, as did the Bell family.
That that, I don't know. I think that makes it
even cooler. It's not like it's not like the the
the hitchhiker with the hook hand or something like that,
Like this actually happened.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, I mean this, I think throws it in there
with a category of like the Amiteville House and stuff
like that, of these supposed real hauntings that took place,
for sure, but you can still go there. It's like
a tourist destination. Apparently, the town of six hundred and
seventy four people. It's a pretty big boon for their economy,
you think, because they have rebuilt the house has gone,
(14:31):
but they really rebuilt a replica and it's in its place.
It must be so popular.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, you can tour it inside the replica of the house.
There's also a cave on John Bell's property that they
believe the Bell Witch lives in, and you can tour
that cave as well. I can't remember how much it was,
but it was reasonably priced. It's not going to break
you for a family of four and again, it's just
(14:57):
an hour north of Nashville. It looks quite quite neat.
They also offer lantern guided tours in the dark, so
if you're really feeling scary, maybe do that one.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, and if they don't have some sort of animatronic
rabbit dog, they're doing it wrong.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
That's right. The whole town's saving up for it. Don't
you worry. Tell them, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I think that means short stuff is out.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. It's Josh and
Chuck here in our scary October rolls on. It's rolling
along with the short stuff on the bell Witch.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right rolling along the Red River of Tennessee, because
that's where the Belwitch is now Adams, Tennessee. But that's
where the Belwich story finds its roots, about an hour
north of Nashville. And that was a family, the Bells,
that moved from North Carolina in eighteen oh six to
Tennessee and did pretty well. They were landowners, they were
very respected, they had a pretty good life. And about
(00:37):
nine uh years after they moved there, they started to
get haunted by a angry ghost witch.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yeah. And before we get too much deeper into I
want to shout out a historian named Pat fits You
who runs Bellwitch dot org and wrote the book The
Belwitch Colon the Full Account Legends of America Victoria Kleine
Peter at the Tennessee State Museum.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Okay, got it, Rocky top baby.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
So the haunting of the Bell family began in eighteen
seventeen when John Bell, the patriarch of the family sometimes
called Old Jack Bell. Just remember this is eighteen seventeen
in Tennessee. Yeah, he was in his fields. He was
a huge planter in the area and he was in
one of his fields at one point and he noticed
(01:24):
a big animal sitting in his field. So he looked
at it a little closer, and he found that it
was quite disturbing. This large animal had the body of
a dog but the head of a rabbit.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
John Bell was like, did I eat mushrooms this morning?
He's like, no, I didn't. And he said, well, I'm
going to shoot at this because I'm a homesteader in
Tennessee in eighteen seventeen. And when he did, the animal
either vanished or scurried off to the nearby woods, depending
on who's telling the story, but either way, John Bell
let it be.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah. So that's dad's first incident. There would also be
successive incidents with kids. Dewy his son, and Betsy his daughter.
Dewree saw and if you're wondering how that's spelled, it's
d E w r Y. I've never seen that name before,
but I think I love it.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
I I'm glad that you love it. I think I
misspelled it. I think it might be Drury because I
also saw him referred to as Drew before.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
I like Dowy.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I like more too, so we're gonna rename Drury Bell.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah. So Dewrey was haunted by a giant bird, supposedly
a bird that he had never seen before. It was
sitting on a fence post, so of course he shot
at it as well, but it disappeared into thin air.
And then daughter Betsy maybe the most frightening thing, although
the dog rabbit's pretty frightening. Yeah, but also so is
a little girl in a green dress hanging from a tree,
(02:46):
and I assume that means by a rope and not
just by her hands.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
I could not get any further uh information about that.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Okay, I mean, if it was haunting, it had to
be like that girl's hand there as a child or
writer and came back.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
Yes, So these appearances seem to portend all of the
haunting that followed haunting by the ghost of a witch.
Don't forget that's the worst kind. Yeah, because I think
the same night after John Bell saw the rabbit dog
or the dog rabbit, I guess, depending on your perspective. Yeah,
the family was awakened by beating noises on the outside
(03:25):
of the walls of their home like it was being
pounded on. And that was just the first night. These
things continued night after night after night. Sometimes they would
be pounding really hard, sometimes kind of light, but either way,
Bell and his sons, he had several sons. They would
get out of bed and try to catch the person
who was pounding on their house. This is basically like
eighteen seventeen Ding Dong ditch, I guess. But they never
(03:48):
found a trace of anybody.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, and the hauntings or the sounds continued. Rather, the
children know were haunted by the sounds of what they
thought was rats chewing on their bedposts at night, which
was probably just rats to the other.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Bed post to night. But you gotta toss that one in.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
You gotta toss that in because it's scary. The hauntings
would turn physical. Sometimes the sheets were pulled off of
the kids while they slept. Young Betsy was ghost slapped,
apparently hard enough to leave welts and bruises. She was
ghost pinched, she was ghost hair pulled, and it became
pretty clear that Betsy and old Jack the dad, were
(04:28):
the main targets in this family.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yes, and we'll see why in a few but I
think probably what makes the whole thing the most disturbing
is that the witch began to talk. It's one thing
for poultry guys activity. Poultry guys don't talk. Everybody ask
your parents. The witch started speaking, the witch ghost, and
at first it was faint. They were just barely whispered.
(04:51):
You couldn't really make out what the ghost was saying.
But over time the voice grew louder, clearer, and would
sometimes hold conversations, like entire conversations with the Bell family
and their home, so much so that John Junior was
known to debate the witch voice. Sure, I don't know
over what nuclear energy maybe, and whether it was safe
(05:13):
or not. Probably, But he later wrote the conversations down
that he had with the Bell witch and he published
it I think self published in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
That's right. And if you think maybe just this family
had some weird mold in their house, it was driving
them all to the brinks of sanity, not true, because
you know, unfortunately it was eighteen seventeen and they had
enslaved people on their land, and they also had similar experiences,
the most famous of which was an enslaved man there
named Dean, who encountered the witch multiple times in the
(05:46):
form of a two headed dog man with o sensibly dogheads.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
I saw a drawing of it of this Dean being
met by a two headed dog, and it actually kind
of missed the mark because it looked like it was
hopping up to like play with them. Well maybe it
was because in this picture the drawing, Dean is holding
a ball, but it's not supposed to be like a
ball that the two headed dog wants to him to
toss for it. It was a witch ball that Dean's
(06:12):
wife made, and that's a real thing. A witch ball
is a blown glass spear, usually kind of colorful, and
depending on where you're using this or who you ask,
it's either used to trap witches reward off witches. And
Dean's wife made it for him, I think after the
first time he saw the bell witch to protect himself.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, and he was like, you know, a no, tradition
says it's got to be a ball, but these this
two headed dog just wants to get that ball. Can
we go with something else?
Speaker 1 (06:42):
She's like, sure, how about a witch's dick?
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Right exactly? Shall we take a break, all right, We'll
come back and finish up with the Bell Witch right
after this, all right, So where we left off, there
(07:22):
were two headed dogs wanting to play with that witch ball.
Betsy's getting ghost pinched, Dad is getting haunted, the whole
family's getting haunted. And it became pretty clear that Betsy
was getting haunted because this belwitch did not like the
fact that she was engaged to a guy named Joshua
Gardner local kid, and she tried to keep this wedding
(07:42):
on but eventually would break it off in eighteen twenty
one and marry an old guy so old. How old
was he? He was so old that she ended up
nursing the man for eleven years before he eventually died.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, Betsy fell on hardships of her own after she
moved out of her father's house. She had eight children,
and four of them.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
In that eleven years with the old sick guy.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
I don't know if it was during or before. I
don't know how long they were married before he fell ill.
I don't know. But yes, they had eight children for sure,
but only four made it to adulthood sadly, so, Betsy
had her own troubles because of the Joshua Gardner thing.
But John Bell, the Witch saved the worst for him.
(08:29):
Like she was verbally abusive to him, she was physically
abusive to him. Shortly after she appeared, John Bell was
afflicted by some unknown illness and just kept getting worse
and worse over the next few years. As the haunting
war on, he would have seizures sometimes Chuck, and as
he came out of the Caesars seizures, the Bell Witch
would slap him around.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Man.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
She was really mean and ruthless toward John Bell. She
hated John Bell.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Can you imagine that that? Like he comes out of
a seizure and she's like, hey, what do you think
of this?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Smack smacks, man, I've been waiting for you to come
out of it. O.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
He sadly passed on in December eighteen twenty. He believed
that the Witch had poisoned him, and apparently the Witch
confirmed this, and the day before he died said, it's
useless for you to try and relieve Old Jack. I've
got him this time. He will never get up from
that bed again. I put it there and gave Old
Jack a big dose of it last night while he
(09:24):
was asleep, which fixed him.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Nice. There's a nice little preview of our Halloween episode.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Oh, I hope. So the neighbors found out about the
stuff too.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Right, Yeah, so he swore his family, John Belswar's family
to secrecy. This is just kind of not the thing
that you wanted your fellow townsfolk in eighteen seventeen Tennessee
to know about. But it just became such a big
deal that it spread and got out, and so some
of the townsfolk tried to catch the witch. They tried
to one guy tried to shoot the witch to no vail. Right,
(09:59):
No one could do anything to asswage the Bell Witch.
They even came up with their own legends too. The
one that stood out to me the most was that
at one point, the Bell Witch recited two different sermons
verbatim that were being given delivered at two different churches
at that moment, miles away from one another. And I mean,
(10:20):
if that's not an eighteen seventeen Tennessee folk superstition, that
you'd just be like, damn when somebody told you that, Yeah,
I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Yeah, because that's literally impossible in that time to know
exactly what was being said in two different places at once.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
There's a lot there's a lot of holes in that
legend for sure.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Thankfully, after John died, maybe taken care of by the
Bell Witch, the hauntings basically stopped. I don't think we
mentioned that at his funeral the witch even haunted him.
There was like singing, drinking songs and interrupting the wake
in the funeral. But much later, in eighteen forty nine,
the Saturday Evening Post would publish a story that people
(11:03):
basically said, it's like the first commercial publication of this story,
and it accused Betsy of being behind the whole thing,
and she threatened to sue unless they printed an apology
and a retraction, which they did so I guess they
did make that up, and Betsy just, you know, she
never wanted to talk about it, she aged, she never
spoke of the Bellwitch.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Yes, so the Bellwich, I'm pretty sure even at the time,
but certainly shortly afterward. In Tennessee and the parts of Tennessee,
it was attributed to a local woman named Kate Bats.
And there's a couple different explanations for why Kate Bats
would care about the Bell family so much that she
would hound them beyond the grave. The first one takes
place entirely in Tennessee, because we didn't say but not
(11:46):
just Tennessee, but also North Carolina and Mississippi put some
claim on the Bell Witch even though it all happened
in Tennessee. But in the first explanation, John Bell, remember
we said he was one of the bigger planters. He
had a three hundred plus acre homes dead that he'd
built by acquiring land from neighbors. And there was one
land deal that he had with the brother in law
(12:07):
of Kate Bats, a man by the name of Benjamin,
and Bell is said to have taken advantage of Benjamin
on the deal, and that in her death Kate hounded
John Bell to the grave and revenge for this land deal.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Why would he do Benjamin Brant like that, I don't know,
such a fine actor.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
The other version, like you said, takes place also in
North Carolina, because they also do lay claim. And this
is that Bell well, seemingly he had sex with Kate
Bats and had an affair with Kate Bats and that
is why he left to go to Tennessee because he
had had this affair broke it off. Kate was really
(12:47):
sore at this, obviously, and threatened to tell everybody, including
the family, and so, as the legend goes, Bell tied
her up in a smokehouse and left her there to die,
and she haunted him there, and so they had to
pack up and leave the Tennessee and she was like, Oh, no,
I don't think you know how ghost witches work. We
can we can travel interstate Tennessee's and not that far away.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Yep. The whole way. She just kept going, are we
there yet? So one of the things that makes the
story so unsettling, aside from all the details of it,
and if you really want to dive into it, check
out Pat Fitzhugh's website Bellewitch dot org. Like really has
a lot of exhaustive research on it. But one of
the things that makes it unsettling, like I was saying,
(13:29):
is that these people like really did live in North
Carolina and Tennessee at the time. This legend covers like, Yeah,
genealogists have found Kate Bats in Edgecombe County. They found
Kate Bats and Adams, Tennessee. Apparently Bats is still live
in Adams, Tennessee, and there's Bells as well. That the
Bell family graveyard has all these people's headstones from the
(13:50):
correct timeframe. So the idea that these people really did
live and that at the time they believed that this
was happening to the Bell family, as did the Bell family.
That that, I don't know. I think that makes it
even cooler. It's not like it's not like the the
the hitchhiker with the hook hand or something like that,
Like this actually happened.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Yeah, I mean this, I think throws it in there
with a category of like the Amiteville House and stuff
like that, of these supposed real hauntings that took place,
for sure, but you can still go there. It's like
a tourist destination. Apparently, the town of six hundred and
seventy four people. It's a pretty big boon for their economy,
you think, because they have rebuilt the house has gone,
(14:31):
but they really rebuilt a replica and it's in its place.
It must be so popular.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, you can tour it inside the replica of the house.
There's also a cave on John Bell's property that they
believe the Bell Witch lives in, and you can tour
that cave as well. I can't remember how much it was,
but it was reasonably priced. It's not going to break
you for a family of four and again, it's just
(14:57):
an hour north of Nashville. It looks quite quite neat.
They also offer lantern guided tours in the dark, so
if you're really feeling scary, maybe do that one.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, and if they don't have some sort of animatronic
rabbit dog, they're doing it wrong.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
That's right. The whole town's saving up for it. Don't
you worry. Tell them, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
I think that means short stuff is out.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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