October 5, 2016 • 42 mins
In the early 1800s, a family in Tennessee allegedly experienced what seemed to be a haunting on their family farm. 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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. We have one more live show coming up
this fall. On Thursday, October six, we will be talking
about the Reynolds pamphlet at Hudson Mercantile in New York City.
This is an all ages show, but we are talking
about Alexander Hamilton's story at Affair, so judge your own
family's ages accordingly. If you'd like to get tickets, you
(00:20):
can go to New York Comic Con dot com, Slash
Events Slash n y c C Dash Presents. You do
not need a New York Comic Con badge to attend
this show. It is open to the public. I am
Scott and I'm Ben and we're from Car Stuff. We're
the podcast that covers everything that flutes, flies, swimsboard drives, adventures, thrills, chills, literally, planes,
(00:44):
trains and automobiles. That's right. And you can find all
of our episodes on Google Play, Spotify, iTunes, and really
anywhere else you get your podcast. Welcome to stuph you
missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:06):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm
Tracy Wilson. Tracy, what is that time of year? Again?
Is that time Autumn, it's the best time of year,
not just Autumn, but Halloween any time. So as we
get into October, for any of our new listeners that
might not know, we can talk about some fun spooks
(01:28):
and haunts and scary stories. We can't talk about them
year round, there's no law against it, but we like
to to get some extra spooky stuff going on here
as we get into the Halloween season. Makes a special point. Uh. Yeah,
it's a special enough point that for for long time
listeners last year when literally the first two podcasts in
October we're not Halloween, some people got real mad. And
(01:51):
today's topic is one that we often get requests for. Uh.
And it's a little bit tricky, as many stories along
these lines can be, because a lot of the infra
nation is not just apocryphal, it is flat out made up. Um.
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
(02:13):
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 eight four by Martin van
Buren Ingram, and it's entitled and Authenticated History of the
Famous Bell Witch. But that book was written more than
(02:33):
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 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 to make this
(02:56):
deal and and promised that he would tell the true story.
By the way that that manuscript that he claimed to
have used, there's no evidence of it ever existing. Uh.
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
(03:17):
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
whole thing really happened. It's one of the things that
once he lays it all out there, like the rebuttal
is sort of nah. Right. So first, we're going to
(03:40):
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 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
(04:00):
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 was like, oh, this can't be right, and
then I kept looking at other sources and it kept
lining up. Uh. The couple had their first child, a
(04:22):
son named Jesse, eight years later, so at that point
Lucy would have been twenty in sevente and the Bells
initially did really well with their farm in Edgecomb County,
North Carolina, and they also had three more sons over
the course of several years, starting in eighteen o one
theo they started to have issues with their crops, and
eventually they decided to leave that farm in North Carolina
(04:43):
and moved west, as so many of their friends and
acquaintances had already done so. In eighteen o 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 Chloe's eight children, made their
way to at River, Tennessee. This is near the area
that's now known as Adams, Tennessee, which is not far
(05:06):
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, 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
(05:27):
and he became one of the most wealthy, influential, and
respected men in the area. As the farm got bigger,
as it is so often the case, the family did too.
The Bells had several more children, including a daughter born
in eighteen oh five named Elizabeth. She was called Betsy,
and she becomes central to this whole haunting legend. After
(05:48):
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 would later describe
as having a dog's body and a rabbit's head. He
(06:09):
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, was walking in the
woods with the younger children of the family one evening
(06:31):
when she saw what appeared to be a little girl
in a 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 whose wife, who was
also a slave and was owned by a friend of
the family named Alex Gunn, and this dog would allegedly
trot along in front of Dean while he walked over
(06:54):
to the gun home, and then the dog would vanish
just as they arrived there. The next strain ch 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
much more ordinary things like the children being mischievous, but
(07:17):
it continued to get more frequent and louder, and 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,
their betting began to be pulled off of them in
(07:38):
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
chains on the floor and then it snal. Creepier noises
(08:01):
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 gulping or smacking their lips near you, wouldn't that
(08:22):
be delightfully creepy? And at this point, the the symptoms
of their haunting are kind of like a haunting shamorgas board.
It's like we're just gonna have a buffet things happening,
and then we're gonna have new strange things and then
different strange things. Yeah. And the next strange thing was
that William recounted that he felt as though someone had
(08:44):
grabbed his hair in the night and began to lift
him off the bed by his head with it. So
this this elderly woman's frail voice we've been talking about
that have been too uh faint to make out, not
so much the case when speaking to Betsy, this which
is said to have given some very clear direction that
(09:04):
Betsy should not marry her intended which was a boy
named Joshua Gardner. And we're 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 smorgas Board.
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data dot com slash history. So getting back to the Bell's,
(11:06):
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 sideways in his
(11:27):
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.
(11:47):
Johnson and his wife spent a night 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 phenomena that the
Bells had been experiencing, including hearing all of the noises
(12:10):
and racket having their bed covers pulled off of them
as they slept. Uh and Mr Johnson apparently had the
presence of mind to try to speak with the mysterious entity,
and he determined that a it was intelligent and be
it would cease its actions when spoken to, and then
see that John Bell should no longer keep this situation secret,
(12:31):
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 to become stronger, and
(12:53):
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 that her grave had been disturbed, and
(13:15):
that one of her teeth was under the Bell Home
and she was looking for it. Yeah, there's a whole
whackadoodle story about uh an animal's head showing up in
a tooth, falling out of it and into a crack
in the floor. Um, but we don't know well. And
this whole thing we were talking about before the break
that was like and then there were noises, and then
(13:36):
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 dedistry is where Crazy
draws the line. Uh. And this which though was devoted
(13:58):
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 be Kate Bats. But
(14:22):
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. The wicked left off swearing,
(14:45):
lying and whiskey drinking. The avaricious were 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 that lost tooth, among other things,
(15:06):
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. And these men
(15:29):
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 uh. 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
(15:49):
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 so times.
This is reported as being due to his association with
supernatural events, but there was a more mundane element to
the story we're going to talk about in a bit. Yeah,
(16:10):
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. Uh. There was also
allegedly a notable human visitor to the Bell farm in
eighteen nineteen. Claim is that Major General Andrew Jackson came
(16:31):
to 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 which must be holding them up when
the horses he was that were part of his his
travel group suddenly stopped as they approached the Bell farm,
(16:53):
and according 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 yarns 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
(17:17):
like all 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 bed cover slowly twisted into a
(17:39):
human shape next 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 alledly acted as
(18:00):
a nursemaid, singing to her 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 uh then had shifted from irritating.
We said, they kind of ratchet it up and we're
(18:21):
less jovial. But then they became downright chilling. So Betsy
Bell began experiencing attacks that hearkened back to the descriptions
of spirit torture from the Salem witch trials that had
happened more than a 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
(18:41):
she was being slapped by a disembodied, 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
(19:04):
or two, during which his tongue would 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
(19:25):
started to experience this feeling of being slapped in much
the same way that Betsy had described, as well as
also having his shirt shoes jerked off his feet repeatedly
as he attempted to walk in the fields. On the
morning of December nineteen 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,
(19:49):
the family sent for a doctor from 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, uh,
maybe don't listen for the next twenty seconds. The remaining
contents of that mystery vial were tested by giving it
to a cat, and that cat, of course, quickly died.
(20:12):
The remaining bits of liquid were thrown in the fire
and then produced a blue flame. John Bell died on
December twenty, 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.
(20:35):
Of course, she stayed true to that in uh Ingram's
book and appeared at the farm again in 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. Uh.
But this only went on for two weeks and then
(20:57):
Kate once again vanished. So at that point William, him
his brother Joel, and their mother Lucy were the only
people still living in the house, and they had all
agreed to ignore 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 Witches time in Tennessee as
(21:17):
based on William Bell's alleged recollection, we will talk about
things from a more critical perspective. Before we do that,
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(23:12):
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 fiance, 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
(23:33):
marriage to Gardner that she broke up with him. In
One of the contemporary 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 want to make hopes. But there
(23:55):
were some times during these events of the alleged haunting
when one or the other of the 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 and the witch's voice were heard. And
Betsy was, by all accounts a lovely girl and very
bright as well, who was admired by virtually all of
(24:16):
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 had been the Bell
(24:38):
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 died of unspecified
(25:02):
causes the same year that Betsy finally broke off her
engagement to Joshua Gardener. And uh, 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 first confirmation,
(25:22):
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
eight four. Richard died seventeen years later, and Betsy remained
a widow for the rest of her life until her
death in eighteen nine. So yes, some people think that
(25:42):
that sort of chain of events points circumstantially to Richard
Powell having orchestrated the whole thing. Uh. 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 usually
in relation to the sale of slaves. So John Bell
(26:04):
was basically making some shady business deals and the 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 bell Witch authors draw from,
is that visit from Andrew Jackson. There's never been anything
to document Jackson making this trip. And Andrew Jackson never
(26:28):
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 Batt's, it's kind of a world of no uh.
While there have been a vast array of rumors about her,
including that she and John Bell had a bad business
(26:49):
dealing that led her to curse him, and 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 Angram account that Kate Batts was kind
of an outsider in the community and was viewed with
(27:09):
some suspicion. She was loud and brash, which for a
woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century basically
met 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 figure for the people making up this
(27:30):
story to pin on her rather than somebody that actually
was a ghost. And there was even in that first
account the link between the two suggesting that Kate Bat's
was somehow manifesting the various events through witchcraft. But apparently
even when the Bell witch was being perceived as a
good thing, Kate Bat's was incensed to be associated with it,
(27:53):
So that idea really doesn't hold much water. Uh. 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 will, And there's no real motive for
(28:13):
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 Ingram Book and its truthfulness. Ingram,
a newspaper man, 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
(28:34):
have 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 like number one, a book Ingram was writing
much later after William Bell had allegedly written it down,
(28:56):
twenty years 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
(29:18):
of 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 and Bonnie and
Mary read uh. One of the things that seems the
most telling about how this this whole account is that
Ingram was incredibly insistent about how it was completely indisputable.
(29:40):
Here is a passage that we're going to read. It'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
(30:02):
many reputable witnesses had 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 of reputable witnesses detailing the
(30:26):
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, and to this extent,
(30:47):
the facts must be accepted. It really happened, y'all. You're
horrible if you doubt it. Of course, today the Bell
which is a moneymaker. People love a good haunting story,
so it gets told and retold, and the details shift
and change, just like who we actoplasm Aside from the
(31:09):
dates associated with things like births and deaths, writings about
the Bell which often are really different in their details.
I remember somebody telling me a story about the Bell,
which I think when I was in college, that had
basically a completely different cast of characters. There, yeah, there.
There was even a book written recently by a clairvoyant
(31:31):
that dispelled the longstanding myth that the family was cursed
uh and this instead indicated that the land that they
had moved to in Tennessee 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 Which Cave, which is on the property
(31:52):
and as allegedly haunted, possibly 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
(32:12):
how you know the blue flame. One of the things
that's a little more science based is uh that when
they threw that 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
(32:35):
weasel in some business dealings, so we don't know. But
it definitely doesn't when you really start to look at
the facts of things, all of the elements that get
sence sensationalized as super spooky don't really hold up to scrutiny.
So that's the scoop on the Bell. Which do you
also have some listener mail? I do have listener mail,
(32:57):
and this isn't so much male. It is a series
of weeets about our recent episode from Salt Like Comic Con,
where we talked about historical fiction. Uh, it was a
discussion about some sexist things. It was kind of inaccurate,
which was troubling to both Tracy and we're both troubled
(33:19):
and frustrated. Yeah, so I'm just going to read them
all as one long narrative because it's multiple tweets. I
don't want to like out this person. I don't want
them to get dog piled on. But their perception was
very incorrect, so they say, hey, missed in history. Listening
to the Salt Like Comic Con podcast, couldn't avoid noticing
the gender split on attitude toward research on that stage.
(33:42):
It seems equal parts astonishing and predictable that the women said, yeah,
I do tons of work to make sure everything's right
because I take it so seriously, and the men said, no,
I just kind of wing it on Wikipedia. Also, I
tried to avoid needing to do it. And my favorite,
I make my wife do that. I'm sure she goes uncredited.
Men are allowed to be so much more casual in
their approach to their craft. The level level of privilege
(34:04):
it takes is staggering. The one author who said he
likes your podcast because it deals with figures and moments
he wouldn't otherwise. Research made me yell at my phone. Really,
a male author wouldn't seek out forgotten and predominantly woman
centric history, Gas, I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you. I
wonder how his characters break down across the gender spectrum. Anyway,
I'm sure you can't respond for the sake of being politic,
(34:25):
but please know we heard and noticed that, and I'd
love to have been able to see your polite poker
faces along with the podcast. Keep up the good work.
There's so much to unpack here, Holly, Oh my goodness
you have. Oh that's could not be a more accurate,
a less accurate characterization of what was actually taking place,
So Pama. First of all, there were actually two different
male writers on the panel. One, Brian McClellan, described himself
(34:49):
as more of a Wikipedia researcher, where he would like
he was writing historically inspired fantasy, and so what he
would do is like quick checks of historical bits to
kind of inform that, and then also reading a lot
of history that would that would sort of make its
way ultimately into his books without maybe directly intending it,
(35:11):
he sort of discover historical parallels. The other person, Brian Young,
it's constantly surrounded by history books and primary sources, including
reading a bunch of World War One era and newspapers
and their ads for his work. So the characterization that
the woman on the panel was really detail oriented and
the men were not is not really reflective of the
(35:31):
actual panel, correct. And I think it's one of those
things that when this came up and Tracy and I
were discussing it, I kind of feel like there's there's
no way to win. If it had been split the
other way and it were a woman that said, oh,
I'm I just write epic fantasy and I don't do
hard history and I sometimes use Wikipedia to check things,
(35:56):
the response would be, oh, she's lazy and stupid. Women
can't do history right. Like, there's no way to win.
And Brian was very clear at the front, like he said,
this comes with the caveat that I don't I'm casually
using history right, And that was really one of the
reasons you and I were both really excited to have
him on the panel to talk about the many different
(36:17):
ways that history makes its way into books, that it's
not just a historical novel about the you know, the
Gallipoli campaign, Like, that's not the only type of historical
fiction that there is, correct, there is definitely gender bias
to talk about in that. Uh, Like women feel like
they have to be twice as prepared because they're they're
(36:40):
going to be under a higher level of scrutiny. And
that's valid. Um, but like, that's that's not really what
was in play in that part of the discussion in
the podcast. Also, Uh, Brian McClellan does think his wife
and the acknowledgments of his books, Yeah, yeah, And he
was pretty clear on the panel that part of the
(37:01):
reason that he will occasionally turn to her to look
things up is because she loves digging into that stuff,
whereas to him, he would rather just keep writing very quickly.
He doesn't like to stop and do research in the middle.
And it seems like a very good relationship for them. Um.
As far as Brian Young saying we brought up things
he would never find a research, it's not because he's
(37:22):
not doing research. No one person can hit all of
the things. And that comment was also not about women, Like,
I feel like that was a piece that reinforced this
idea that our podcast is mostly about women, when in
reality it seems that way to people, but the numbers
never reflect a mostly about women focus, like and then
(37:45):
the examples that he cited of episodes that he listened
to over and over while writing books were not even
our episodes that were about women. So that was a
little frustrating to me and hurt my heart a little
bit because Brian is a longtime friend of this show.
He was in our first live show that was about
the children's Illustrated History of presidential assassination. Knowing him personally, like,
(38:05):
he is definitely an ally and somebody who takes constructive
steps to make the world better and to be actively
anti sexist and anti actively anti racist. So to hear
somebody take that out of context from what he said
in the panel was really frustrating. Yeah, yeah, I mean
(38:27):
you said it more eloquently than I probably would put together.
I said many times both on the show and at
our live shows, Brian is like a brother to me,
so and I know him to be one of the
best humans. As Tracy said, he takes such steps in
such care to make the world a better place that
it was like, man, Yeah, and the last thing that
I definitely wanted to take a moment to say was
(38:51):
that there was no polite eye rolling and maintaining of
a poker face during our historical fiction podcast at Salt
Lake Comic Con. We were I was so grateful to
all of those authors, and I thought they were all
amazing well. And if any of them had said something
that we felt like we should challenge, we would have
challenged it and not sat there and politely rolled our eyes.
(39:12):
And in fact, in the Q and A session, there
was that moment where where a panelist said something that
that was not quite in line with with factual stuff, uh,
and and we noted that and like, so please don't
think that if somebody says something that needs to be
talked about, we're just gonna politely not and roll our
eyes and not bring it up, because that's not really
(39:33):
how we work as a show. We're also not going
to drag our panelists who have agreed to be on
our panel out of the goodness of their hearts, over
the coals in front of people, like that would be rude.
But if somebody says something that we have questions about
our thoughts about her, like, oh, actually, I kind of
wonder if that really holds up, you know, if that
(39:53):
is biased in some way that that's probably a thing
we would say. Yeah, I hope other people did not
have that same uh complete disparity of what went down
yea from their perception of it well. And one of
the reasons that I wanted to talk about it on
the show was that it was not a series of
tweets that all came directly to us. It started with
(40:15):
a public call out of us. It started with like,
you know, our Twitter handle in the middle of the
tweet so that others would see it rather than just
coming directly to us. So it's like it was a
public statement about our panel and not a private correspondence
to us about it. Correct, So that is the scoop.
(40:37):
I hope we we have dispelled any any misconceptions about
how that all went and like, yeah, there's definitely gender
biased to talk about. But having three people on the panel,
one of whom is a man who does like a
cursory level of research and the other is a woman
who does intense research because of the different, vastly different
(40:58):
types of fiction they are writing, does not mean that's
not a data set, right, especially when the third person
on the panel is another man who does a lot
of detailed historical research in his work. Yeah, so that's
the scoop on that. Uh. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at history Podcast
(41:19):
at how stale works dot com. We are across all
social media as at miss in History, including Twitter, were
at mystic History. We're at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History. We're on Instagram as at mist in History.
We are on Pinterest as mist in History. We're on
tumbler as mist in History. Basically, missed in History is
going to get you there. If you would like to
(41:40):
do a little bit of research just for fun, you
can go to our parents site, how stuff works dot com.
Type in almost anything you can think of in the
search bar, and you're going to churn up a lot
of results about some interesting articles, probably some quizzes. There's
lots of content there to explore. You can also visit
us at missed in History dot com, or you will
find show notes for every episode that Tracy and I
have worked done, as well as an archive of every
(42:01):
episode of the show ever of all time. So we
encourage you to come and visit us at how stuff
works dot com and missed in History dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works? Dot com, m
Hey, everybody. We have one more live show coming up
this fall. On Thursday, October six, we will be talking
about the Reynolds pamphlet at Hudson Mercantile in New York City.
This is an all ages show, but we are talking
about Alexander Hamilton's story at Affair, so judge your own
family's ages accordingly. If you'd like to get tickets, you
(00:20):
can go to New York Comic Con dot com, Slash
Events Slash n y c C Dash Presents. You do
not need a New York Comic Con badge to attend
this show. It is open to the public. I am
Scott and I'm Ben and we're from Car Stuff. We're
the podcast that covers everything that flutes, flies, swimsboard drives, adventures, thrills, chills, literally, planes,
(00:44):
trains and automobiles. That's right. And you can find all
of our episodes on Google Play, Spotify, iTunes, and really
anywhere else you get your podcast. Welcome to stuph you
missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:06):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frying and I'm
Tracy Wilson. Tracy, what is that time of year? Again?
Is that time Autumn, it's the best time of year,
not just Autumn, but Halloween any time. So as we
get into October, for any of our new listeners that
might not know, we can talk about some fun spooks
(01:28):
and haunts and scary stories. We can't talk about them
year round, there's no law against it, but we like
to to get some extra spooky stuff going on here
as we get into the Halloween season. Makes a special point. Uh. Yeah,
it's a special enough point that for for long time
listeners last year when literally the first two podcasts in
October we're not Halloween, some people got real mad. And
(01:51):
today's topic is one that we often get requests for. Uh.
And it's a little bit tricky, as many stories along
these lines can be, because a lot of the infra
nation is not just apocryphal, it is flat out made up. Um.
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
(02:13):
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 eight four by Martin van
Buren Ingram, and it's entitled and Authenticated History of the
Famous Bell Witch. But that book was written more than
(02:33):
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 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 to make this
(02:56):
deal and and promised that he would tell the true story.
By the way that that manuscript that he claimed to
have used, there's no evidence of it ever existing. Uh.
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
(03:17):
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
whole thing really happened. It's one of the things that
once he lays it all out there, like the rebuttal
is sort of nah. Right. So first, we're going to
(03:40):
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 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
(04:00):
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 was like, oh, this can't be right, and
then I kept looking at other sources and it kept
lining up. Uh. The couple had their first child, a
(04:22):
son named Jesse, eight years later, so at that point
Lucy would have been twenty in sevente and the Bells
initially did really well with their farm in Edgecomb County,
North Carolina, and they also had three more sons over
the course of several years, starting in eighteen o one
theo they started to have issues with their crops, and
eventually they decided to leave that farm in North Carolina
(04:43):
and moved west, as so many of their friends and
acquaintances had already done so. In eighteen o 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 Chloe's eight children, made their
way to at River, Tennessee. This is near the area
that's now known as Adams, Tennessee, which is not far
(05:06):
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, 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
(05:27):
and he became one of the most wealthy, influential, and
respected men in the area. As the farm got bigger,
as it is so often the case, the family did too.
The Bells had several more children, including a daughter born
in eighteen oh five named Elizabeth. She was called Betsy,
and she becomes central to this whole haunting legend. After
(05:48):
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 would later describe
as having a dog's body and a rabbit's head. He
(06:09):
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, was walking in the
woods with the younger children of the family one evening
(06:31):
when she saw what appeared to be a little girl
in a 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 whose wife, who was
also a slave and was owned by a friend of
the family named Alex Gunn, and this dog would allegedly
trot along in front of Dean while he walked over
(06:54):
to the gun home, and then the dog would vanish
just as they arrived there. The next strain ch 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
much more ordinary things like the children being mischievous, but
(07:17):
it continued to get more frequent and louder, and 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,
their betting began to be pulled off of them in
(07:38):
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
chains on the floor and then it snal. Creepier noises
(08:01):
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 gulping or smacking their lips near you, wouldn't that
(08:22):
be delightfully creepy? And at this point, the the symptoms
of their haunting are kind of like a haunting shamorgas board.
It's like we're just gonna have a buffet things happening,
and then we're gonna have new strange things and then
different strange things. Yeah. And the next strange thing was
that William recounted that he felt as though someone had
(08:44):
grabbed his hair in the night and began to lift
him off the bed by his head with it. So
this this elderly woman's frail voice we've been talking about
that have been too uh faint to make out, not
so much the case when speaking to Betsy, this which
is said to have given some very clear direction that
(09:04):
Betsy should not marry her intended which was a boy
named Joshua Gardner. And we're 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 smorgas Board.
We're gonna pause for a word from one of our
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data dot com slash history. That is www dot periscope
data dot com slash history. So getting back to the Bell's,
(11:06):
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 sideways in his
(11:27):
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.
(11:47):
Johnson and his wife spent a night 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 phenomena that the
Bells had been experiencing, including hearing all of the noises
(12:10):
and racket having their bed covers pulled off of them
as they slept. Uh and Mr Johnson apparently had the
presence of mind to try to speak with the mysterious entity,
and he determined that a it was intelligent and be
it would cease its actions when spoken to, and then
see that John Bell should no longer keep this situation secret,
(12:31):
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 to become stronger, and
(12:53):
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 that her grave had been disturbed, and
(13:15):
that one of her teeth was under the Bell Home
and she was looking for it. Yeah, there's a whole
whackadoodle story about uh an animal's head showing up in
a tooth, falling out of it and into a crack
in the floor. Um, but we don't know well. And
this whole thing we were talking about before the break
that was like and then there were noises, and then
(13:36):
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 dedistry is where Crazy
draws the line. Uh. And this which though was devoted
(13:58):
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 be Kate Bats. But
(14:22):
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. The wicked left off swearing,
(14:45):
lying and whiskey drinking. The avaricious were 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 that lost tooth, among other things,
(15:06):
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. And these men
(15:29):
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 uh. 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
(15:49):
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 so times.
This is reported as being due to his association with
supernatural events, but there was a more mundane element to
the story we're going to talk about in a bit. Yeah,
(16:10):
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. Uh. There was also
allegedly a notable human visitor to the Bell farm in
eighteen nineteen. Claim is that Major General Andrew Jackson came
(16:31):
to 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 which must be holding them up when
the horses he was that were part of his his
travel group suddenly stopped as they approached the Bell farm,
(16:53):
and according 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 yarns 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
(17:17):
like all 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 bed cover slowly twisted into a
(17:39):
human shape next 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 alledly acted as
(18:00):
a nursemaid, singing to her 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 uh then had shifted from irritating.
We said, they kind of ratchet it up and we're
(18:21):
less jovial. But then they became downright chilling. So Betsy
Bell began experiencing attacks that hearkened back to the descriptions
of spirit torture from the Salem witch trials that had
happened more than a 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
(18:41):
she was being slapped by a disembodied, 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
(19:04):
or two, during which his tongue would 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
(19:25):
started to experience this feeling of being slapped in much
the same way that Betsy had described, as well as
also having his shirt shoes jerked off his feet repeatedly
as he attempted to walk in the fields. On the
morning of December nineteen 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,
(19:49):
the family sent for a doctor from 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, uh,
maybe don't listen for the next twenty seconds. The remaining
contents of that mystery vial were tested by giving it
to a cat, and that cat, of course, quickly died.
(20:12):
The remaining bits of liquid were thrown in the fire
and then produced a blue flame. John Bell died on
December twenty, 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.
(20:35):
Of course, she stayed true to that in uh Ingram's
book and appeared at the farm again in 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. Uh.
But this only went on for two weeks and then
(20:57):
Kate once again vanished. So at that point William, him
his brother Joel, and their mother Lucy were the only
people still living in the house, and they had all
agreed to ignore 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 Witches time in Tennessee as
(21:17):
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.
That sponsor is square Space. Holly and I have both
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(21:39):
remember last time we talked about it, I had said
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(23:12):
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 fiance, 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
(23:33):
marriage to Gardner that she broke up with him. In
One of the contemporary 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 want to make hopes. But there
(23:55):
were some times during these events of the alleged haunting
when one or the other of the 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 and the witch's voice were heard. And
Betsy was, by all accounts a lovely girl and very
bright as well, who was admired by virtually all of
(24:16):
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 had been the Bell
(24:38):
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 died of unspecified
(25:02):
causes the same year that Betsy finally broke off her
engagement to Joshua Gardener. And uh, 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 first confirmation,
(25:22):
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
eight four. Richard died seventeen years later, and Betsy remained
a widow for the rest of her life until her
death in eighteen nine. So yes, some people think that
(25:42):
that sort of chain of events points circumstantially to Richard
Powell having orchestrated the whole thing. Uh. 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 usually
in relation to the sale of slaves. So John Bell
(26:04):
was basically making some shady business deals and the 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 bell Witch authors draw from,
is that visit from Andrew Jackson. There's never been anything
to document Jackson making this trip. And Andrew Jackson never
(26:28):
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 Batt's, it's kind of a world of no uh.
While there have been a vast array of rumors about her,
including that she and John Bell had a bad business
(26:49):
dealing that led her to curse him, and 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 Angram account that Kate Batts was kind
of an outsider in the community and was viewed with
(27:09):
some suspicion. She was loud and brash, which for a
woman in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century basically
met 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 figure for the people making up this
(27:30):
story to pin on her rather than somebody that actually
was a ghost. And there was even in that first
account the link between the two suggesting that Kate Bat's
was somehow manifesting the various events through witchcraft. But apparently
even when the Bell witch was being perceived as a
good thing, Kate Bat's was incensed to be associated with it,
(27:53):
So that idea really doesn't hold much water. Uh. 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 will, And there's no real motive for
(28:13):
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 Ingram Book and its truthfulness. Ingram,
a newspaper man, 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
(28:34):
have 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 like number one, a book Ingram was writing
much later after William Bell had allegedly written it down,
(28:56):
twenty years 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
(29:18):
of 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 and Bonnie and
Mary read uh. One of the things that seems the
most telling about how this this whole account is that
Ingram was incredibly insistent about how it was completely indisputable.
(29:40):
Here is a passage that we're going to read. It'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
(30:02):
many reputable witnesses had 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 of reputable witnesses detailing the
(30:26):
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, and to this extent,
(30:47):
the facts must be accepted. It really happened, y'all. You're
horrible if you doubt it. Of course, today the Bell
which is a moneymaker. People love a good haunting story,
so it gets told and retold, and the details shift
and change, just like who we actoplasm Aside from the
(31:09):
dates associated with things like births and deaths, writings about
the Bell which often are really different in their details.
I remember somebody telling me a story about the Bell,
which I think when I was in college, that had
basically a completely different cast of characters. There, yeah, there.
There was even a book written recently by a clairvoyant
(31:31):
that dispelled the longstanding myth that the family was cursed
uh and this instead indicated that the land that they
had moved to in Tennessee 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 Which Cave, which is on the property
(31:52):
and as allegedly haunted, possibly 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
(32:12):
how you know the blue flame. One of the things
that's a little more science based is uh that when
they threw that 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
(32:35):
weasel in some business dealings, so we don't know. But
it definitely doesn't when you really start to look at
the facts of things, all of the elements that get
sence sensationalized as super spooky don't really hold up to scrutiny.
So that's the scoop on the Bell. Which do you
also have some listener mail? I do have listener mail,
(32:57):
and this isn't so much male. It is a series
of weeets about our recent episode from Salt Like Comic Con,
where we talked about historical fiction. Uh, it was a
discussion about some sexist things. It was kind of inaccurate,
which was troubling to both Tracy and we're both troubled
(33:19):
and frustrated. Yeah, so I'm just going to read them
all as one long narrative because it's multiple tweets. I
don't want to like out this person. I don't want
them to get dog piled on. But their perception was
very incorrect, so they say, hey, missed in history. Listening
to the Salt Like Comic Con podcast, couldn't avoid noticing
the gender split on attitude toward research on that stage.
(33:42):
It seems equal parts astonishing and predictable that the women said, yeah,
I do tons of work to make sure everything's right
because I take it so seriously, and the men said, no,
I just kind of wing it on Wikipedia. Also, I
tried to avoid needing to do it. And my favorite,
I make my wife do that. I'm sure she goes uncredited.
Men are allowed to be so much more casual in
their approach to their craft. The level level of privilege
(34:04):
it takes is staggering. The one author who said he
likes your podcast because it deals with figures and moments
he wouldn't otherwise. Research made me yell at my phone. Really,
a male author wouldn't seek out forgotten and predominantly woman
centric history, Gas, I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you. I
wonder how his characters break down across the gender spectrum. Anyway,
I'm sure you can't respond for the sake of being politic,
(34:25):
but please know we heard and noticed that, and I'd
love to have been able to see your polite poker
faces along with the podcast. Keep up the good work.
There's so much to unpack here, Holly, Oh my goodness
you have. Oh that's could not be a more accurate,
a less accurate characterization of what was actually taking place,
So Pama. First of all, there were actually two different
male writers on the panel. One, Brian McClellan, described himself
(34:49):
as more of a Wikipedia researcher, where he would like
he was writing historically inspired fantasy, and so what he
would do is like quick checks of historical bits to
kind of inform that, and then also reading a lot
of history that would that would sort of make its
way ultimately into his books without maybe directly intending it,
(35:11):
he sort of discover historical parallels. The other person, Brian Young,
it's constantly surrounded by history books and primary sources, including
reading a bunch of World War One era and newspapers
and their ads for his work. So the characterization that
the woman on the panel was really detail oriented and
the men were not is not really reflective of the
(35:31):
actual panel, correct. And I think it's one of those
things that when this came up and Tracy and I
were discussing it, I kind of feel like there's there's
no way to win. If it had been split the
other way and it were a woman that said, oh,
I'm I just write epic fantasy and I don't do
hard history and I sometimes use Wikipedia to check things,
(35:56):
the response would be, oh, she's lazy and stupid. Women
can't do history right. Like, there's no way to win.
And Brian was very clear at the front, like he said,
this comes with the caveat that I don't I'm casually
using history right, And that was really one of the
reasons you and I were both really excited to have
him on the panel to talk about the many different
(36:17):
ways that history makes its way into books, that it's
not just a historical novel about the you know, the
Gallipoli campaign, Like, that's not the only type of historical
fiction that there is, correct, there is definitely gender bias
to talk about in that. Uh, Like women feel like
they have to be twice as prepared because they're they're
(36:40):
going to be under a higher level of scrutiny. And
that's valid. Um, but like, that's that's not really what
was in play in that part of the discussion in
the podcast. Also, Uh, Brian McClellan does think his wife
and the acknowledgments of his books, Yeah, yeah, And he
was pretty clear on the panel that part of the
(37:01):
reason that he will occasionally turn to her to look
things up is because she loves digging into that stuff,
whereas to him, he would rather just keep writing very quickly.
He doesn't like to stop and do research in the middle.
And it seems like a very good relationship for them. Um.
As far as Brian Young saying we brought up things
he would never find a research, it's not because he's
(37:22):
not doing research. No one person can hit all of
the things. And that comment was also not about women, Like,
I feel like that was a piece that reinforced this
idea that our podcast is mostly about women, when in
reality it seems that way to people, but the numbers
never reflect a mostly about women focus, like and then
(37:45):
the examples that he cited of episodes that he listened
to over and over while writing books were not even
our episodes that were about women. So that was a
little frustrating to me and hurt my heart a little
bit because Brian is a longtime friend of this show.
He was in our first live show that was about
the children's Illustrated History of presidential assassination. Knowing him personally, like,
(38:05):
he is definitely an ally and somebody who takes constructive
steps to make the world better and to be actively
anti sexist and anti actively anti racist. So to hear
somebody take that out of context from what he said
in the panel was really frustrating. Yeah, yeah, I mean
(38:27):
you said it more eloquently than I probably would put together.
I said many times both on the show and at
our live shows, Brian is like a brother to me,
so and I know him to be one of the
best humans. As Tracy said, he takes such steps in
such care to make the world a better place that
it was like, man, Yeah, and the last thing that
I definitely wanted to take a moment to say was
(38:51):
that there was no polite eye rolling and maintaining of
a poker face during our historical fiction podcast at Salt
Lake Comic Con. We were I was so grateful to
all of those authors, and I thought they were all
amazing well. And if any of them had said something
that we felt like we should challenge, we would have
challenged it and not sat there and politely rolled our eyes.
(39:12):
And in fact, in the Q and A session, there
was that moment where where a panelist said something that
that was not quite in line with with factual stuff, uh,
and and we noted that and like, so please don't
think that if somebody says something that needs to be
talked about, we're just gonna politely not and roll our
eyes and not bring it up, because that's not really
(39:33):
how we work as a show. We're also not going
to drag our panelists who have agreed to be on
our panel out of the goodness of their hearts, over
the coals in front of people, like that would be rude.
But if somebody says something that we have questions about
our thoughts about her, like, oh, actually, I kind of
wonder if that really holds up, you know, if that
(39:53):
is biased in some way that that's probably a thing
we would say. Yeah, I hope other people did not
have that same uh complete disparity of what went down
yea from their perception of it well. And one of
the reasons that I wanted to talk about it on
the show was that it was not a series of
tweets that all came directly to us. It started with
(40:15):
a public call out of us. It started with like,
you know, our Twitter handle in the middle of the
tweet so that others would see it rather than just
coming directly to us. So it's like it was a
public statement about our panel and not a private correspondence
to us about it. Correct, So that is the scoop.
(40:37):
I hope we we have dispelled any any misconceptions about
how that all went and like, yeah, there's definitely gender
biased to talk about. But having three people on the panel,
one of whom is a man who does like a
cursory level of research and the other is a woman
who does intense research because of the different, vastly different
(40:58):
types of fiction they are writing, does not mean that's
not a data set, right, especially when the third person
on the panel is another man who does a lot
of detailed historical research in his work. Yeah, so that's
the scoop on that. Uh. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at history Podcast
(41:19):
at how stale works dot com. We are across all
social media as at miss in History, including Twitter, were
at mystic History. We're at Facebook dot com slash missed
in History. We're on Instagram as at mist in History.
We are on Pinterest as mist in History. We're on
tumbler as mist in History. Basically, missed in History is
going to get you there. If you would like to
(41:40):
do a little bit of research just for fun, you
can go to our parents site, how stuff works dot com.
Type in almost anything you can think of in the
search bar, and you're going to churn up a lot
of results about some interesting articles, probably some quizzes. There's
lots of content there to explore. You can also visit
us at missed in History dot com, or you will
find show notes for every episode that Tracy and I
have worked done, as well as an archive of every
(42:01):
episode of the show ever of all time. So we
encourage you to come and visit us at how stuff
works dot com and missed in History dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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