The Bell Witch - Unpleasant Dreams 6

The Bell Witch haunting is one of the oldest American hauntings on record and it is the subject of this week’s unpleasant dream.

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Cassandra Harold is your host.

EM Hilker is our principal writer and researcher with additional writing by Cassandra Harold.

Jim Harold is our Executive Producer.

Unpleasant Dreams is a production of Jim Harold Media.

You can find EM Hilker’s original article HERE.

Sources & Further Reading:

1868 article in the Courier-Journal: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/7660018/the-courier-journal/

An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch by Martin Van Buren Ingram https://web.archive.org/web/20021022185219/http://bellwitch02.tripod.com/the_red_book.htm

Bell Witch Folklore Centre https://web.archive.org/web/20020924085754/http://bellwitch02.tripod.com/

Bell Witch Cave official site

http://www.bellwitchcave.com/

Pat Fitzhugh’s Bell Witch site

http://www.bellwitch.org/story.htm

The Bell Witch Poltergeist by Joe Nickell

https://skepticalinquirer.org/2014/01/the-bell-witch-poltergeist/

The Terrifying True Story of the Bell Witch

http://thesouthernweekend.com/bell-witch/

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

The Bell Witch haunting is one of the most famous American hauntings on record, not only for the extent of the hauntings but because it is credited as the only American haunting to result in the death of a living person.

John Bell Sr died 200 years ago, and much of the haunting occurred years prior to that.

To date, there are a half dozen movies based on the story with more having been influenced by it; there is a doom metal band called Bell Witch, and several songs by other musicians based on the tale. It has spawned other stories and even traveled in a slightly altered form to become folklore in Mississippi, where several Bell children settled in their adulthood.

The story itself is the story of the Bell family. In the very early years of the nineteenth century, John Bell Senior came to Robertson County, Tennessee with his wife, Lucy, and their young children. They settled along the Red River, near the modern town of Adams. Bell had been a barrel-maker in his youth, but had decided to turn to farming. He was quite successful in this, and by the time of his death, his farm would boast more than three hundred acres of land. He developed a good name for himself as well, and would eventually become an elder at the local church (though later he was excommunicated for unscrupulous business dealings). He had a good life along the Red River for well over a decade, he and his wife had nine children, and they were well-liked as a family.

The “family trouble”, as the Bells would one day call it, began late in 1817. In the earliest days of the haunting, a strange creature was spied around the Bell’s farmland by a number of people. A strange mixture of dog, sometimes two-headed, and rabbit. It was large and dark and utterly unsettling. The Bell family’s slave, Dean, saw this same creature, among other bizarre and supernatural sights, multiple times on his walks in the evening to visit his wife on a nearby farm. John Bell also reportedly saw the creature lurking around on occasion.

In early 1818, seemingly supernatural activity had started within the farmhouse. The children would report hearing the sounds of rats gnawing on their bedposts in the night, but upon examination neither rat nor bite mark could be found. After this came knocking sounds and the heavy rattle of chains being dragged across their wooden floors. Sounds that all the family could hear. In time, the children would be bitten at and scratched and pinched by the air itself. Their bedsheets would be yanked off their bed as night. Pillows snatched from under their sleeping heads and thrown to the floor. John Bell Sr woke one day to find his mouth paralyzed.

One of the most famous parts of this story, or perhaps infamous, is the treatment of the Bell’s daughter, Betsy. All sources seem to agree that she was an uncommonly beautiful girl, and perhaps this is why the increasingly violent manifestations, allegedly those of a witch, centered around her. She was pinched and scratched more and worse than the ot...