America’s Oldest ‘X-File’
Perhaps no one story of the paranormal in Tennessee has ever
gained so much attention as the following story. No one has
been able to explain the middle Tennessee phenomena, but it
has been a subject of discussion for more than 150 years in
America. It recently was pushed into the national spotlight
again with this past summer’s blockbuster film "The
Blair Witch Project". During the numerous media interviews
that followed with the film’s personnel, the famous Tennessee
"ghost story" was held up as somewhat of an inspiration
for the film. The Blair Witch Project is a fictional account
of a group of people who encountered unusual phenomena that
led to the deaths of those investigating it. The Tennessee story,
however, is regarded by experts and natives alike as being in
the official realm of the "unexplained" and is the
only time in recorded history that a poltergeist is actually
credited with murder.
John Bell was born in Halifax County, N.C. in 1750. As a youth,
he was apprenticed as a barrel maker, but soon grew tired of
the craft and turned his efforts to learning how to farm. It
was a trade the young Scotsman excelled at and he quickly began
making a decent living at it. He married Lucy Williams sometime
around 1792. She was from a good family, who had vast land holdings
in North Carolina and John Bell made good use of the property.
The Bells went on to become prosperous off of the North Carolina
land and had five children.
In 1804, for no known reason, the 54-year-old John Bell quickly
pulled up stakes and moved his family over the Appalachian Mountains
and into Tennessee. The family settled on a 1,000 acre farm
in present-day Robertson County. The land was situated seven
miles east of Port Royal on the Red River and Bell thought with
a little work the family could repeat their success in the Tennessee
region. He and his sons quickly went to work on the property
building a one-and-a-half story log cabin for the family as
well as cabins for his slaves and the outbuildings common to
a farm of that era.
The property where they settled was regarded as an ancient,
almost sacred, land by the Native America tribes in the region,
but, with its high bluffs and flat fertile plain, it was ideally
suited for tobacco farming. Transporting crops to markets was
not a problem as the Red River in those days also served as
a major waterway in North Middle Tennessee. A farmer with some
knowledge of river boating could produce his crops and contract
with one of the flatboat operators to sell the goods at market
down river.
For 12 years, the Bell family did just that – working hard
and farming the property. It was also during this time Bell’s
son, John, Jr. answered the Governor’s call to arms and
enlisted in the Tennessee Militia, where he fought with General
Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. Like most Tennessee boys
in those days, he was a crack shot and remained loyal to the
future president in the darkest days of the Creek War –
quickly earning the respect of General Jackson.
When he returned from New Orleans, John, Jr. and his brother
Drewry used the knowledge they had gained during the military
campaigns. They decided to cut out the middleman and built their
own flatboat and rafted down the Red River to New Orleans where
they sold the produce for a healthy profit and returned to the
family farm.
The land seemed to never fail the Bell family and they grew
rich from the crops it produced. In fact, John Bell fathered
three more children and the family became leading members in
the Adams Station community. They belonged to the Red River
Primitive Baptist Church where John Bell served as an Elder
and were highly regarded by the townspeople. All that is except
one – a local lady by the name of Kate Batts. Bell had
been accused of dishonesty in a slave deal with her husband,
who was a local planter named Benjamin. The Batts brought charges
against him at the church to remove him from his position. The
church cleared him of the charge, but the Robertson County Circuit
Court found him guilty – forcing the church to rethink
their decision and expel John Bell from the Church. The pastor,
a kindly gentleman by the name of Rev. Sugg Fort, stood by the
Bell family in the face of the charges and supported them against
the loud and wild accusations from Kate Batts.
Kate Batts was known in the region as a person not of sound
mind. She often threw "fits of spirits" in the church
and at revivals causing many of the parishioners embarrassment
and aggravating the preacher. The congregation tolerated it,
but felt that Kate Batts was a little too full of herself and
capable of anything, including resorting to conjuring or witchcraft
to get even with Bell. Her husband soon passed away and Kate
Batts retreated into a world of her own. It wasn’t long
before strange things began happening on the Bell farm.
A year and a half after his son’s trip to New Orleans,
John Bell was walking in his field, when he saw a stray animal
that resembled a dog. Thinking it was there to cause mischief
or tamper with his livestock, he took aim and fired at the dog,
but, when the smoke cleared, the dog was nowhere to be found.
Around the same time, Drewry and his sister Betsy were walking
in the orchard and saw a strange woman walking next to them.
When Betsy tried to speak to her, however, the woman simply
vanished.
That same night strange sounds began to echo throughout the
Bell home. There was knocking on doors and windows, sounds like
a strange flapping of wings could be heard on the roof, scratching
noises, and the sounds of animals viciously fighting.
The noises continued night after night, but constant and vigilant
investigations by the Bells turned up nothing that could be
causing the disturbance. The family constantly moved furniture
around and searched the rooms where the noises were heard. The
strange activities continued to worsen for the Bells. Bed sheets
would slide from the bed, the family would hear smacking lips,
gulping sounds, and scratchings on the bedposts. The noises
would continue until around 2 or 3 a.m. and only resume the
next night after the family retired to their beds.
At first, John Bell thought the strange noises could be fallout
from the great earthquake that happened in 1812. The region
did indeed shake like it never had before and many superstitious
Tennessee settlers saw it as retribution from an angry God trying
to cleanse the land of sinfulness. Because of the moral implications
that ruled the days, Bell kept the strange occurrences at his
home from his neighbors so as not to encourage accusations of
insanity or, even worse, witchcraft on his family. The noises
at the house, however, continued to worsen and Bell tried every
thing to find out where they originated. The noises and poltergeist
activity seemed to center around his 12-year-old daughter and
many thought young Betsey Bell could be responsible for the
activities.
Discreet inquiries around the community showed John Bell’s
family was the only one experiencing the strange occurrences
and so he was forced to dismiss any land-settling theories.
The strange happenings, however, were beginning to wear on the
family. Bell started developing extreme nervous conditions such
as facial ticks and difficulty in chewing. The local doctor
tried one thing after another, but failed in his administrations
to cure him. While in a reflective moment with long-time friend
James Johnson, Bell finally broke down and asked for help. Bell
invited Johnson and his wife to spend a night with them and
witness the phenomena for themselves. As might have been expected,
it was immediately assumed the poltergeist was an evil spirit
and only religious activities would remove it from the Bell
home.
After dinner that night, Johnson read from the Bible and offered
up a long and eloquent prayer asking for the Bell’s deliverance
from the evil that claimed their home. The actions of Johnson,
however, only seemed to agitate the spirit. The entity introduced
itself to Johnson by a heavy pounding that seemed to rock the
house and the bed sheets were ripped from the bed where Johnson
and his wife were trying to sleep. Johnson cried out demanding
the spirit identify itself, but to no avail. Every time he properly
fixed the sheets on the bed, they would be ripped from his hands.
The next morning he managed with great difficulty to talk John
Bell into allowing a small group of people to join him in trying
to find an answer to the strange phenomena. For weeks, a small
crowd met in the Bell home praying and investigating the activities.
It was during this time, the haunting began taking a new turn
that petrified everyone with fear. The spirit suddenly spoke
and used its new-found voice to begin taunting the family even
more. At first, the only thing it would do was repeat the very
prayer Johnson had prayed that first night in the Bell home.
From the first time it spoke, locals said the spirit never shut
its mouth again. The spirit’s gender it supposedly revealed
was female and she soon expressed an undeniable and unexplainable
hatred for John Bell. Although questioned repeatedly, it would
never say why and she took every opportunity to torment him.
The group continued to ask the spirit to identify itself, but
all they got from it was a variety of riddle-like answers. According
to Charles Bailey Bell, who later wrote of the incident, the
spirit once said in one of her tirades that she was buried in
a nearby grave that was disturbed and her remains scattered.
The spirit said her tooth was lost in the house and she was
looking for it. At first, John Bell supposedly couldn’t
remember the incident, but it wasn’t uncommon in those
days for early farmers to unknowingly plow up ancient burial
sites.
After hearing what the spirit said, Bell suddenly remembered
an incident that occurred before the strange activities began.
A young neighbor boy named Corban Hall had been seen playing
with a jawbone that was obviously human. While playing with
it, he had tossed it against a wall and a tooth was knocked
loose that rolled under the floors. John Bell witnessed the
act and was immediately angered by his casual attitude with
the human remains. He scolded the boy and made him return the
jaw to where he had found it. Thinking it could be the key to
the entire puzzle of the strange spirit, Bell tore up the floor
in his house searching for the missing tooth, but never found
it. Word of the Bell’s "witch", as it was now
being called, soon spread throughout the community and Bell
found his home overrun with neighbors and strangers wanting
to spend the night and experience the spirit for themselves.
Bell was always a gracious host as those days often required
of people. He never turned anyone away from his home and refused
any payment for his hospitality. The constant house guests,
however, began to wear on his finances.
The spirit started turning itself into a town gossip and becoming
very unpopular. She would inform all who were present in the
Bell home who was sleeping with who, what parishioner came home
drunk, and who fell asleep during sermons. Knowledge of the
Bell’s spirit existence soon escaped Adams Station and
spread across Robertson County and the State of Tennessee.
When Andrew Jackson heard that his old friend John Bell, Jr.’s
family was having to contend with an evil entity in their home,
he decided to personally travel to Bell’s Farm and investigate
it himself. The General’s reports said the party arrived
in the vicinity of the home in late afternoon in a covered wagon
pulled by four horses. While still a few hundred yards away
from the home, one of Jackson’s party made a couple of
slighting remarks about the so-called "witch".
The horses suddenly stopped and, try as they could, the horses
could not budge the wagon – even coming close to tearing
the tongue from the wagon. Jackson became frustrated and reportedly
said:
"It’s the damned witch!", and as, suddenly as
it stopped, the wagon started rolling again. Upon arriving,
Jackson met with his old soldier and John Bell, Sr. The hours
drifted by and seemed to indicate that nothing would happen.
Once again one of Jackson’s party, who called himself a
"witch-tamer" became impatient and demanded the witch
show herself so he could shoot her with a special bullet. The
man suddenly grabbed his face as unseen hands started slapping
him and pulling at his nose. The man screamed and ran towards
the door as the voice of the witch taunted him. Jackson began
laughing and told John Bell he had never seen anything as humorous
as what he had just witnessed. The General’s face soon
turned grim when the spirit’s voice then spoke to him.
"There is another fraud in your party general," it
said, "I will get him tomorrow night. It’s late. Go
to bed."
The general was reportedly intrigued by the spirit’s offer,
but Jackson’s men had seen enough and consistently refused
Bell’s offer to sleep in the house – preferring the
safety of their tents. Jackson himself was suddenly overcome
with an uncomfortable feeling and didn’t want to wait for
another night. By noon the next day the entire party was 12
miles away in Springfield. In fact, the entire incident would
cause Jackson to say in conversation:
"I would rather face the entire British Army once more
than deal with the Bell Witch ever again."
The activities of the witch began moving away from the house
and started affecting those in the Adams Station community,
but the witch’s voice was heard most often in the area
of the Bell’s property where a bluff overlooked the Red
River. A cave is located in the center of the bluff overlooking
the river and, because of its constant 56 degree temperature,
local residents often stored food in it. The limestone cavern
was locally referred to as the Bell Witch Cave because her voices
were said to be heard there. The spirit was regarded by locals
as generally benevolent and she was once credited with pulling
a boy to safety, who had become stuck in one of its small opening.
The Bell Witch’s playful streak suddenly ended and she
turned her animosity back on an elderly John Bell. Every time
his name would be mentioned in conversation to the witch, she
would unleash a tirade of curses, swearing, and name calling.
Throughout it all, the Bell family constantly tried to find
ways to expel the spirit from their home and did everything
suggested to them. While word of her existence continued to
spread far and wide in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the southeast,
her popularity did nothing to ease the torment of John Bell.
In Oct. 1820, John Bell and his son were on their way to the
hog barn when the elder Bell’s shoe was suddenly ripped
from his foot. His son put it back on his father’s foot
and tied it with a double knot, but, within a few yards, the
other shoe was ripped from his foot. It was replaced as well,
but a few more yards saw both suddenly fly off his feet and
an invisible hand rocked him to his heels when it slapped hard
across his face. The stunned Bell staggered back to a log where
he sat down and his facial ticks started going wild as demonic
shrieks filled the air around them.
"Son," John Bell said with tears in his eyes, "it
won’t be long before you won’t have a father. This
horrible thing is killing me by slow torture. I don’t think
I have much longer to live."
Sure enough, John Bell was soon bed-ridden – finding it
harder and harder to recover from the witch’s assaults.
On December 19, 1820 John, Jr. and Drewry discovered their father
unconscious on the floor. They moved him to his bed and called
the local doctor. When the physician arrived, he couldn’t
find any of the medicines he had prescribed to Bell and saw
only a small brown bottle with a liquid in it he couldn’t
identify. No one else knew what it was, but when a sample of
it was run across the lips of a cat to measure it’s reaction
to it. The cat immediately began convulsing violently and John’s
son fearfully threw it into the fire.
The witch’s voice roared with laughter as she took credit
for the mysterious bottle.
"He will never get up again," she yelled gleefully.
"I gave him a dose from the vial. Now, he will die !"
All day long John Bell laid in a coma, while the witch laughed
hysterically and taunted the dying man. The next morning Robertson
County Planter John Bell died. The attending physician could
do nothing else but list John Bell’s cause of death as
poisoning and the murderer as being the spirit that haunted
him home. Upon the last breath of John Bell, the witch loudly
announced to those at his deathbed she would attend the funeral.
It was enough to make the funeral of John Bell the largest ever
seen in Robertson County. Many came to pay their respects to
the Bell family, but others packed the ceremony to see what
the witch would do. The crowd wasn’t disappointed. The
Bell Witch constantly interrupted the services. While mourners
prayed over the newly filled grave of John Bell, the witch loudly
gave a one-voiced concert of bawdy drinking songs.
With John Bell dead and buried, the witch’s visits suddenly
diminished and she seemed to release her possession of the Bell
home. Although she was said to have made her presence known
throughout the community in the Winter of 1821, the spirit began
to fade in intensity. The story of the Bell Witch never faded.
In fact, it continued to spread not only across America, but
throughout the world and attracted paranormal investigators
to the region year after year. Although many have tried to explain
it away with one excuse or another through the years, the witnesses
to the unexplained incidences at the Bell home were too many
to dismiss and so the Bell Witch of Tennessee slipped into the
pages of history as America’s oldest unexplained phenomena.
The Bell family continued to deal with the situation until their
later years and remained tight-lipped about the occurrences.
Through the years, the Bell Witch of Tennessee became affectionately
known as "Kate". The log home where John Bell and
his family lived during those years was allowed to fall into
disrepair and finally razed around the turn of the century.
The Bell Witch possession was something the family never discussed
– even though the story was reported in newspapers across
the nation. In fact, when Bell descendent Charles Bailey Bell
published a book on the witch in 1934, he was immediately disowned
by the family and never spoke to them again.
Andrew Jackson wasn’t the only prominent Tennessean to
have dealings with Bell Witch or mention found in his private
papers. The wife of James K. Polk was related to John Bell’s
family and she had her own stories to tell about the spirit.
The Bell property eventually passed out of the family and was
owned by a variety of people. One of the owners found a cache
of bones on the property and had stored a lot of them in the
smokehouse. A dog owned by one of the current owners of the
Bell Witch Cave alerted them to the presence of bones in the
smokehouse. The family contacted state archaeologists, who removed
the remains from the property and turned them over to local
Native American representatives for re internment. The bones
were later dated to being more 2,000 years old.
The present owner doesn’t take the Bell Witch stories lightly
and says there are still strange occurrences at the farm in
Adams and that she would never personally venture into the property’s
cave by herself. It is, however, open for tours from May through
October to those interested in Tennessee’s best known ghost
story. The parking lot sits next to a large sinkhole where part
of the cave is apparently collapsing. It is one of 1,500 such
limestone caverns that can be found in Robertson County. Because
of the steep bluff, they have widened the path to allow easier
access to visitors.
You don’t have to look hard to find material on the subject
or limit your search to just Robertson County. The unexplained
phenomena was written about across the nation and thousands
have tried to study it over the years to determine the validity
of the story or discover what kind of deep dark secret John
Bell was hiding that could have brought such torment upon his
family.
The best readable books on the subject are The Bell Witch: A
Mysterious Spirit written by Charles Baily Bell in 1934, The
Bell Witch Of Middle Tennessee by Harriet Parks Miller in 1930,
and The Infamous Bell Witch of Tennessee written by Charles
Edwin Price in 1994. Pat Fitzhugh just released a new book on
the subject entitled : "The Bell Witch Haunting".
It should be avialable through local book stores or online at
the address http://www.bellwitch.org/thebell.htm. Fitzhugh’s
Internet site is also a good source of information on the subject.
The Bell Witch Cave is located northeast of Nashville off of
Highway 41 on Bell Chapel Road in Adams. There are signs marking
the way. During the season it is open seven days a week from
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and a small admission is charged.
On my first "professional" visit to the cave as a
reporter in 1995 for a Knoxville television station, I spotted
a Tennessee Historical Marker on the road back to the Interstate.
Thinking it was a small piece of Tennessee trivia that might
fit or add some much needed context to what I thought was a
questionable story; I asked the videographer to stop and get
a picture of it. We were grateful that we did. The state marker
didn’t commemorate a famous man or woman or note a long
forgotten battle in Robertson County. The Tennessee Historical
Marker erected on that spot of the highway was, in fact, a detailed
plaque telling the story of the "Bell Witch" of Tennessee.
It is the only historical marker in the Tennessee Commission’s
history to commemorate a paranormal event that still remains
unexplained to this day.
