Bell Witch

John Bell's farm lay along the Red River in the north-west of Robertson County, Tennessee, on land that today falls within the town of Adams. There, in 1817, it began with a strange animal in the cornfield: the body of a dog and the head of a rabbit, in the description that settled into the story. Bell shot at it and the creature vanished. Soon afterwards came the knocking on the outer walls, the sound of rodents gnawing the wood of the bedsteads, the dragging of chains across the floor and the noise of someone swallowing and choking in the dark. The family kept it to themselves for almost a year before telling a neighbour, and from that moment the house filled with visitors who wanted to hear it for themselves. The phenomenon lasted until 1821 and returned, so tradition has it, in 1828.

What sets this case apart from any other poltergeist is that it learned to talk. The voice, high and female, called itself Kate and answered questions, argued about religion, repeated word for word sermons preached miles away and sang hymns. It also struck: slaps, pins, blankets torn off beds, hair pulled. It fastened above all on two people, John Bell and his daughter Betsy, whom it harried until she broke off her engagement to Joshua Gardner. The visit of General Andrew Jackson, always told as the star episode, is best kept at arm's length: it appears only in chapter eleven of Ingram's book, derives from a letter written in 1894, and leaves no trace whatever in Jackson's movements, which are well documented. It is a late addition to the story, not a testimony.

John Bell died on 20 December 1820, after a year of an affliction that stiffened his tongue and jaw and kept him from swallowing. On the morning he fell into a coma the family found in the cupboard a small vial of dark liquid nobody recognised; the voice, so the story goes, claimed the poisoning as its own and gloated over it throughout the funeral, singing tavern songs as the coffin was lowered. It is worth separating here what is narrated from what is established: the contents of the vial were never analysed, and the later identification with strychnine or some other toxin is a guess by the chroniclers, not a fact of the case. The phenomenon then took its leave for a while and announced it would return in seven years, in 1828, and so it is said to have done. The second promise, to reappear a hundred and seven years later in 1935, does not come from the original episode: Charles Bailey Bell put it forward in a book of 1934.

Almost everything told today comes from a single book: An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, which Martin Van Buren Ingram published in 1894, more than seventy years after the events. Its centrepiece is a manuscript of some ninety pages attributed to Richard Williams Bell, John's son, entitled Our Family Trouble and supposedly written around 1846; the original has never surfaced, so the chain of custody for the testimony rests entirely on Ingram. From there the case became an industry: the cave on the property is run as an attraction, the town of Adams celebrates the episode and cinema has recycled it several times. Its real interest lies elsewhere and needs no ghosts: it is the first American poltergeist with a voice that holds conversations, and the best available X-ray of how a rural southern community built, fed and handed down its own legend for a century.