An American Haunting: in search of Tennessee’s Bell Witch.
If there’s one piece of supernatural lore that everyone in the US has heard of, then it’s probably Tennessee’s celebrated ‘Bell Witch’, but its main legacy is a fictional one. ROGER CLARKE goes in search of the dark roots and cinematic descendents of this
The first really extensive account of the Bell Witch was published in 1894. It’s sometimes known as ‘The Red Book’. The full title will give you some flavour of
the thing: The Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, The Wonder of the 19th Century and Unexplained Phenomenon of the Christian Era: The Mysterious Talking Goblin that Terrorized the West End of Robertson County, Tennessee, Tormenting John Bell to his Death; the story of Betsy Bell, her lover and the haunting sphinx.
It was put together by newspaperman Martin Van Buren Ingram who claimed the bulk of his book was based on a private diary written by a member of the Bell family, who was very young when the events took place. This diary, it is said, was written in 1846 – the year the Liberty Bell broke in Pennsylvania. The original diary has never been produced. Its existence is doubtful. Ingram claimed the Saturday Evening
Post had published a lengthy account of the case in 1849, but many have researched it and found the article is simply not there.
Though recent archival discoveries have added weight to the evidence that something did indeed happen at Adams Station, the Bell Witch was designated an entirely folkloric construction as far back as the 1930s, when it was discussed in The Journal
of American Folklore (Hudson and
Many believers were on the look-out for the supernatural
McCarter, 1934).
Recent textual studies have shown that the supposed diary of Richard Williams Bell is almost certainly a fabrication by Ingram, 1 but unfortunately many of his new and fabricated details are now imbedded into the accepted narrative of the story. Even the tale’s contemporary local curator Pat Fitzhugh has doubts about a further source, believing that the John Bell Jr account published by grandson Charles Bailey Bell in 1934 – the last of the great revelations on the case – is also a hoax.
There’s another poltergeist case that Ingram mentions in his book, which is clearly a further source for his invention – the Epworth poltergeist of England. This case took place in 1716 in the county of Lincolnshire in the household of a clergyman; amongst his sons was a man with a great destiny, John Wesley. Wesley, though he did not experience the poltergeist himself, being away at school at the time, went on to found the Methodist Church. Again, there was the presence of supernatural animals – identified as possibly a badger or a rabbit. Again, the agent seemed to be one of the girls, and there was the sense of a godly family under siege of terrifying noises and effects, which responded, amongst other things, to family evening prayers; a detail that could have come straight from the Bell Witch, who repeated sermons, hymns and prayers. Early followers of Methodism were struck by their founder’s strong belief in ghosts and for a while many believers were on the look-out for the supernatural – initiating the set of circumstances
leading to the Cock Lane ghost of 1762 (see FT150:30-33, 334:36-41).
All Ingrams would have needed to concoct the Red Book was some literature on John Wesley and an edition of Joseph Glanvill’s
Saducismus Triumphatus (see FT357:44-50), a book much admired by America’s own witch-hunter Cotton Mather. There are two cases in this book which seem to inform the Bell Witch narrative – the Devil of Macon and the Drummer of Tedworth, the latter personally investigated by Glanvill. The detail about the Bell Witch’s slave-girl Phyllis being seized and paralysed by an invisible force, legs locked behind her head, is more or less what happened to Glanvill’s horse when he went to investigate the Drummer of Tedworth – he came down one morning to find it paralysed with its foot rammed into its mouth. At Tedworth, too, there were bangings outside of the building and lights moving round in the vicinity, the patriarch being eaten out of house and home by gawping visitors. At Tedworth there is a single stark and telling vocalisation – the sound of someone shouting “A Witch, A
Witch!”. Was this the hazelnut that grew into the Bell Witch tree?
There is a mysterious animal-spirit seen in a bedroom. At Tedworth, a boy in the household is physically hurt by a spiritpropelled knife, much as Betsy is injured by invisible hands. An open penknife is mentioned in the Nashville Archive Document, as is another detail from Tedworth which has strayed into Tennessee, a visitation noise that begins on the roof of the haunted building. Blankets are pulled from sleeping children in both stories.
The vocalisations, which are so peculiar to the Bell Witch story, are rare but not without precedent in the literature. The poltergeist that appeared in the home of Huguenot minister Francois Perrault in Macon in 1612 (see FT357:44-50) pulled blankets off the beds, and then it started to talk, with a whistling noise initially, much like the Bell Witch. It began to sing a simple tune of five notes. It recounted malicious stories and outright lies – #Fakenews. Like the Bell Witch, the Macon Devil sang popular and also religious songs. These ‘auditions’ lasted for two months. Huge stones were thrown around the house, mysteriously causing no harm. It seemed to have a fondness for the servant girl, imitating her broad patois and apporting wood when she needed to make a fire. It attacked a friend of the servant girl in her bed, viciously.
There are other similarities to some other cases. A girl being dragged by the hair? It happened to farmer’s daughter Christina in Cologne, Germany, in 1260. Inexplicable scratchings from around a bedstead belonging to young girls at night? A poltergeist stopping a carriage or cart connected to the haunted family? Both of those happened in the Lamb Inn in England, 1761, before, it seems, the Bell Witch stopped the coach of General Jackson as it approached the Bell house.
DEADLY SPIRITS
The role of faith and especially Wesleyanism has not been much remarked upon in this story, but it seems to me a central feature. Shaker folks are attacked by the Bell Witch in one late account as they ride by on the main road – the Shakers, it’s often forgotten, are the godfathers and mothers of modern spiritualism.
Perhaps this detail is not as random as one might think. Red River Baptist Church stands at the confluence of the Red River and Sulphur Fork Creek in Port Royal. Two things happened in 1817 which I consider apposite to the case. The first was that two young members of the Bell household – Esther and Jesse – got married, which would have changed the entire atmosphere of the home. The second was that in July 1817 Reuben Ross, an elder, preached3 an Arminian sermon at the funeral of Miss Eliza Norfleet. It went completely against the idea of Primitive Baptist Faith practised at the church till that point. So to be clear on this – there was a schism in the Baptist church that Bell attended just months before his meeting with the witch. This new form of worship was inspired by John Wesley. Could it be that under the new evangelical thrall of Wesleyanism, the Bells consciously or unconsciously replicated the situation of John Wesley’s childhood?
There’s actually a colonial American version of the Bell Witch. Before his involvement with the Salem trials both Cotton Mather and his father Increase Mather remarked on a case that is, unlike the Bell Witch, far better witnessed and detailed, despite taking place over 120 years earlier. Lithobolia, or the Stone-throwing devil is a 7,000-word pamphlet from 1698, a first-hand account of a poltergeist attack that lasted three months on the East Coast of America. Increase Mather had already mentioned the haunting in his 1684 book Illustrious
Providences, but this was from a reliable firsthand witness.
In 1682, the household of George Walton was subjected to a thunderous and frightening stone-throwing assault after a land dispute with a crone-like neighbour. A spirit creature was observed. Despite taking shelter in the most defendable part of the building, as clapboard splintered and windows smashed, the stones seemed somehow to follow them all inside, as if they were coming through the fabric of the building, hitting two children quite badly on their legs. Author of the pamphlet Richard Chamberlain, a lawyer employed by the British colonial government, and thus an excellent witness all things considered, noticed the stones were hot, as if snatched from a fire.
More stones came down the chimney and knocked over candlesticks in the room. These “lapidary salutations” carried on for three months, following Walton into woodlands, into fields during a hay harvest, and even out to sea, where one day rowing in a canoe he was struck hard on the head by three rock missiles propelled across the open water. They broke his skull, and he never really recovered.
Walton blamed the ‘Great Island Devil’ on a dispute with a local woman over land rights; Hannah Jones was, it was said, a
witch. According to Chamberlain’s account, Walton’s annexing of a piece of land incurred her wrath and the doom-laden promise that he would “never quietly injoy [sic] that piece of Ground”. Like the Bell Witch, The Great Island Devil commences with the glimpse of a ‘familiar’ (a demon associated with a witch, or maybe even the witch herself in shape-shifting form), though in this case the devil-creature was a cat.
This attempt to harm Walton really reads like an attempt to kill him. This particular idea – that ghosts can murder you – later became associated with the Bell Witch case and seems something specific to American folklore. 4 It doesn’t come out of European ghost-belief so much as witchcraft belief, shunted into the realm of ghosts.
THE KINGDOM OF SHADOWS
Before I wrote a book about ghosts I worked for many years in the darkness of the cinema, viewing films for a living. The spectral aspect of viewing films never failed to strike me. It is the world of dreams and memories. Early cinema is rooted in death and hauntings: for a very brief few months, during 1896, the X-ray vied with the moving image for entertainment purposes in London’s Regent Street, which resulted in a number of skeleton films, and headless films, since trickery and spookery and shocks in the dark are a natural fit with the motion picture. The earliest cinemas were highly dangerous and the nitrate film-stock used is these days classified as an explosive material; the brilliant silvery light of the show was tempted to lance across the auditorium and burn everyone to cinders, as it did once in Paris in May, 1897 (126 dead). Maxim Gorky, in a famous review of Lumiere’s process written in July 1896, was much taken with the ghostliness of film, that the people shown walking and toiling would one day be dead, and yet they would persist in the “kingdom of shadows”. Cinema was, he noted “not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre”.
For many years writing three columns weekly for The Independent, I’d recognise source material in ghost movies that my fellow critics might not notice. The eerie, rippling linen sheets fanned by an evil entity in Paranormal Activity? A detail cribbed directly from the Sauchie poltergeist (Scotland, 1983). The raw steak crawling across the kitchen surface in
Poltergeist? “Some sausages took a journey round the room” – The Giddings poltergeist (Milwaukee, 1874).
Sometimes the details of movies were directly lifted from the Bell Witch case. There’s Mama (2013), magicking fresh cherries out of thin air for the children to feed on. The moment where the father in
The Witch (2015) walks down his lines of ruined corn in his perilous fragment of patented land seems to echo John Bell’s first encounter with his nemesis.
The main influence of this Tennessee story is on cinema. It’s to the Bell Witch you may look for the Indian Burial Ground trope, so beloved by Stephen King, so pushed by Hans Holzer over the whole Amityville debacle, which was really just Bell Witch 1.5. It’s pretty much the source of the ‘Magical Negro’ trope as well. 5 You could make a case for Bell Witch pioneering the narrative of the ‘Home Invasion’, long before the Hollywood Western came up with the Apache raid on pioneer homesteads. It’s really just the same thing, Native Americans either with guns or in spirit, or with magical help, taking back what is rightfully theirs, or at the very least revealing a shamanic
Sometimes the details of movies are lifted directly from the Bell Witch case
understanding of landscape and where you should not build houses. You don’t churn butter at the gateway to the other world: you leave your dead there.
The idea of surveillance, supernatural and intrusive, which so marks the Bell Witch narrative, has segued nicely into the supernatural utilisation of technology of Ringu (2000) – both in Japan and the original low-budget Paranormal Activity (2007). Bell Witch is there for the eruption of the graveyard in Poltergeist (1986), and for that matter, the visit of Revd. Kane in Poltergeist II (1986). Found-footage pioneer
The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Blair Witch (2016) are also fellow travellers straight from Adams Station, a fact acknowledged by the filmmakers with the original film’s website supported by a spoof item that name-checked the Bell Witch. As a general folkloric concept, it even sneaks its way into a children’s animation Paranorman (2012), about a witch who is set to return to a small town. It’s even present, to a much lesser extent, in a lot of TV cable shows such as Grimm and Sleepy Hollow, which again involve elements of prophecy connected to supernatural foes, and a haunted bloodline.
The Bell Witch is why the spiteful and murderous ghost – very rare in ghost stories purporting to be real – is still the mainstay and supernatural gold-standard of Hollywood.
For the purposes of researching this article I sat down and re-watched the
best-known film adapted directly from the Bell Witch legend, An American Haunting (2005). It’s roundly disliked by Bell Witch aficionados as the main aspect of the haunt, the voices from nowhere, cinematically problematic and possibly quite farcical, is nowhere to be found.
An American Haunting with its “true events validated by the State of Tennessee as the only case in US history where a spirit has caused the death of a human being” suggests the only odd activity going on in the Bell household was a cover story for a father raping his daughter, an incest scenario first suggested by the great parapsychologist Nandor Fodor 6 and revisited recently by a Tennessee medium claiming to have been in touch with the spirit of Betsy Bell; she says John Bell was in fact poisoned by a slave (perhaps by Dean’s wife, who made him the charm) for not defending Betsy from the sexual attentions of one of her seven brothers. 7
There are two other intriguing minor theories about the Bell Witch that are worth repeating. The first concerns the character of the local schoolmaster, Richard Powell. To the question ‘ cui bono’ for the entire story of the Bell Witch, all signs point to the pedagogue Powell. He is our Southern Ichabod Crane. That the witch, at least in the later version, told Betsy not to marry Joshua, left her teacher free to marry his girl-bride. One report says he was the witch behind the whole business, and indeed, was seen with ‘Gallant Books’ or books of conjuration. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the male witch who conjured up the devils at Tedworth was actually transported to America in the days when criminals were sent to the colonies, after being tried in Salisbury. How many witches or poor souls condemned for an interest in the hermetic were sent on similar one-way journies by the British penal system? We shall never know. Powell was a mathematics teacher and it’s an interesting detail that the witch family have names such as ‘Mathematics’ and ‘Cycropracy’.
The second minor detail is that Ingram was a Mason and his whole story possibly runs along Masonic lines. The incident concerning the search for treasure under the great rock in the southwest part of the Bell estate involves digging a whole six feet square and “nearly as many feet deep”. The ‘Sacred Vault’ in Masonry is a cube, and the southwest corner of the lodge is where a Mason is ‘hoodwinked’ into Second or Fellow Craft degree. The day John Bell has his shoes pulled off is perhaps a reference to their ritual of ‘Discalceation’ 8 – though the handshaking detail with the witch seems to predate Ingram, who in 1909 was buried according to Masonic ritual. 9
A STORY OF SHAME
Perhaps I’ll never go to Adams. Perhaps reading about it is enough. There are at least 17 books on the subject of that braying,
profane voice of raw America. Written into its very weft and warp is a story of shame, not just for slavery. The reported attendance of General Jackson in one account has an unintended poignancy. As President Jackson, he enacted the brutal removal of the local Cherokee, under the Indian Removal Act of 28 May 1830, in order to steal their land, one of the most unpleasant acts of any presidency which the Native American descendants still regard as a form of genocide. 10
Let’s be clear about this – in the period before the Bell Witch, John Bell Snr was setting his slaves to clear virgin woodland, expanding his property from 220 acres to 330 acres. In one of the earliest communications with the witch, who had not yet learned to talk, she rapped out the number of miles to Port Royal when asked – seven of them.
Port Royal plays a pivotal role in the tragic modern history of the Native American. Port Royal – a once thriving town now reduced to a hamlet – is a sorry marker in the ‘Trail of Tears’ and is also where the doctor came from when John Bell was poisoned by the witch. Perhaps that same doctor, Dr Hopson, treated or didn’t treat the Cherokee as they died on their way to their new territories, and Port Royal has a kind of notional curse on it, or a race-memory of one – no wonder it has largely been put back to woodland, and is now a state park. 11 It has been – rare for this part of world – returned to nature and un-patented, as if only nature can remove the stain.
A similar situation happened in neighbouring Canada a few years later, when in 1829 a brief article in the Detroit
Gazette told of the ‘Baldoon Mystery’ (see “The Baldoon Mystery” by Christopher Laursen and Paul Cropper, FT315:30-39). It was a very similar rural-pioneer poltergeist attack on a log cabin, later written up by one of the family who witnessed it, Neil Macdonald, who was actually five at the time. Bullets and stones from the nearby river were thrown, wet and waterlogged, at the family, and later the cabin burned down after a catastrophic number of spontaneous fires. The same case is mentioned by Peter Jones in his History of the Ojebway Indians (1861), but he never actually named the McDonald family. From the perspective of the Ojibwe, the haunting was caused by ‘forest fairies’.
So what really was the Bell Witch, the actual thing itself? The field-beast, the taxonomical absurdity that bloodied a girl and killed a man and could fly so comprehendingly round the neighbourhood that it could mimic the call of a pig-herder and the summer hum of gathering bees, or sing like a bird beneath a window.
What are the culprits assembled? They run as follows.
It was: an unidentified spirit from North Carolina. A spiritual attack by relative Kate Batts. A family of devils. A poltergeist. A cover-story for Betsy Bell’s evident self-harm after being sexually assaulted by a family member. A tall tale pimped by a newspaperman, using Masonic images. A psychic eruption from working slaves. A Wesleyan foundation story. An endogenous entity or elemental connected with Cherokee burial practices. A chaotic installation of telluric energy released by the very unstable geology 12 of the area (something all poltergeist commentators know about).
Why is it always trotted out as a true story, when there is only a sliver of truth to it? The only reason most people consider it so is because they have repeatedly been told it is true, and this creates a series of apophenic prompts. It seems entirely plausible that there was some manner of inexplicable phenomena right at the beginning of the tale, but its main gift is a popular storytelling one, to cinema.
Where the Tarry Town Hessian rides on the salary of British aggression, Adams station is where the great American quilt is pulled from the hands of the dreaming populace. What strikes the non-American about the Bell Witch story is the dogged undertow of race, and how the landscape, though patented after clearance, suffers a double-implication from the African slaves who cleared it and the Native Americans who were cleared from it beforehand. Both the Bell Witch (1817–1821) and The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow (published in 1820) are constructs of the same era, and between them set out the whole landscape of subsequent American supernatural belief, which drinks deeply from cups of witchcraft, guilt, ownership and warfare. They both arrive in a sweet spot between belief systems, when susceptibility to witchcraft had largely faded and spiritualism had not yet arrived.
Hickory Haunts – both of them. ROGER CLARKE is is a former writer and film critic at the Independent and a regular contributor to Fortean Times. His book A Natural History of Ghosts is widely available from Penguin.