SYMHC Classics: Bell Witch

This 2016 episode covers a haunting story from the early 1800s. 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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 0:34Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  Attention Chicken Nugget fans. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old Chicken Nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. These new Chicken Nuggets are their tastiest, crispiest, juiciest nuggets ever. And because better Chicken Nuggets deserve better sauces, they've reinvented several of their sauces, and they created a brand new one. The new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. Don't wait around. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets today.

• 2:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Happy Saturday. It is October. Today's classic is one where we kick things off being very excited about it being October, and that is The Bell Witch.

• 2:22Holly Frey?

  Oh, I love this story. And it originally came out on October 5, 2016. Enjoy.

• 2:30Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:41Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:44Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:46Holly Frey?

  Tracy.

• 2:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  What?

• 2:49Holly Frey?

  Is that time of year again?

• 2:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  Is that time, uh, autumn?

• 2:53Holly Frey?

  It's the best time of year, not just autumn, but Halloweeny time. Uh, so as we get into October, for any of our new listeners that might not know, we can talk about some fun spooks and haunts and scary stories. Uh, we can 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.

• 3:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  We make a special point. Uh,

• 3:15Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's a special enough point that for, for long time listeners, last year, when literally the first two podcasts in October were not Halloween, some people got real mad.

• 3:26Holly Frey?

  And 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 information 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, uh, we are going to indulge in the fall 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, uh, is a book that was written in 1894 by Martin Van Buren Ingram, and it's entitled, "An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch." But that book was written

• 4:08Holly Frey?

  more than 75 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 deal and, and promised that he would tell the true story. By the way, that manuscript that he claimed to have used, there's no evidence of it ever existing. 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,

• 4:52Holly Frey?

  possibly 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.

• 5:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's one of those things that once he lays it all out there, like, the rebuttal is sort of, no.

• 5:14Holly Frey?

  Right. So first, we're going to talk about the story as it is laid out in that book, and then we will talk about it from a more skeptical perspective.

• 5:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  The story all starts with the family patriarch, John Bell, who was born in Halifax County, North Carolina, in 1750. He apprenticed as a cooper for a while, but eventually decided to become a farmer. At the age of 32, he got married to Lucy Williams, who was 20 years younger than he was.

• 5:41Holly Frey?

  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.

• 5:55Holly Frey?

  The couple had their first child, a son named Jesse, eight years later. So at that point, Lucy would have been 20 in 1790. And the Bells initially did really well with their farm in Edgcombe County, North Carolina. And they also had three more sons over the course of several years.

• 6:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Starting in 1801, though, they started to have issues with their crops. And eventually, they decided to leave that farm in North Carolina and move west, as so many of their friends and acquaintances had already done. So in 1804, 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 Red River, Tennessee. This is near the area that's now known as Adams, Tennessee, which is not far from Nashville.

• 6:43Holly Frey?

  And the Bells were welcomed into the community, where John bought a home and some property that included both barns 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 land holdings, and he became one of the most wealthy, influential, and respected men in the area.

• 7:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  As the farm got bigger, as is so often the case, the family did too. The Bells had several more children, including a daughter born in 1805 named Elizabeth. She was called Betsy, and she becomes central to this whole haunting legend.

• 7:23Holly Frey?

  After 13 years in Red River, things started to shift from the happy prosperity that the Bell family had enjoyed up to that point.

• 7:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 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.

• 8:02Holly Frey?

  Betsy, at one point, was walking in the woods with the younger children of the family one evening, 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 his 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 to the Gunn home, and then the dog would vanish just as they arrived there.

• 8:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  The next strange 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 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.

• 9:09Holly Frey?

  And according to the Bell children, their bedding began to be pulled off of them in the night. And they also reported that animals, possibly rats, could be heard chewing on their bedposts, but that whenever the noises were investigated and someone lit a candle or tried to look, nothing was actually there.

• 9:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 additional creepier noises were also detailed in William Bell's account, including what sounded like the smacking of lips and occasional gulping.

• 9:44Holly Frey?

  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 be delightfully creepy?

• 9:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  And at this point, the symptoms of their haunting are kind of like a haunting smorgasbord. It's like, we're just gonna have a buffet of strange things happening, and then we're gonna have new strange things, and then different strange things.

• 10:13Holly Frey?

  Yeah, and the next strange thing was that William recounted that he felt as though someone had grabbed his hair in the night and began to lift him off the bed by his head with it.

• 10:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  So this elderly woman's frail voice we've been talking about that had been too faint to make out, not so much the case when speaking to Betsy. This witch is said to have given some very clear direction that 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.

• 10:47Holly Frey?

  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 smorgasbord, we're gonna pause for a word from one of our fantastic sponsors.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 11:34Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hey, everybody. It's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fans' experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 12:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  Through what Alan's whole crew designed, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 12:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.

• 12:18Speaker 05

  To actually see the whole stadium light up and data's flowing is a beautiful thing.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  What the fans' experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 12:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love. Connecting changes everything. AT&T. So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home. Let's say you're worried about package theft. The ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app. There are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra

• 13:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Cameras or motion sensors. Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 13:39Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each

• 14:23Holly Frey?

  other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:40Holly Frey?

  So getting back to the Bells, 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 mouth between his cheeks, preventing him from eating. So when he would try to eat, the food would kind of fall right back out.

• 15:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 15:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  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.

• 15:35Holly Frey?

  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 and racket, having their bed covers pulled off of them as they slept. 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 B, it would cease its actions when spoken to, and then C, that John Bell should no longer keep this situation secret, but should seek the help of the community.

• 16:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 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 that one of her teeth was under the Bell home, and she was looking for it.

• 16:56Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there is a whole whack-a-doodle story about an animal's head showing up and a tooth falling out of it and into a crack in the floor.

• 17:07Holly Frey?

  But we don't know.

• 17:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Well, and this whole thing we were talking about before the break, that was like, "And then there were noises, and then 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, I'm out." Out of the story.

• 17:28Holly Frey?

  Ghostly dentistry is where Tracy draws the line. And this witch, though, was devoted 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 Batts. And we're going to talk about Kate Batts a little bit later in the episode. And there's even the suggestion that she, this disembodied voice, claimed herself to be Kate Batts. But whatever her true origin, whether it was Kate Batts 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.

• 18:11Holly Frey?

  People were just afraid enough of her that they lived good, honest lives.

• 18:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  According to Ingram's writings, quote, "Everybody got good. The wicked left off swearing, 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."

• 18:34Holly Frey?

  And the story of what the spirit was troubled about, i.e. that that lost tooth, among other things, 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 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.

• 19:16Holly Frey?

  And the spirit, 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 them for being so easily duped.

• 19:27Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1818, as the stories of Kate were becoming a lot more well-known in the area, the church excommunicated John Bell. Sometimes this is reported as being due to his association with supernatural events. But there was a more mundane element to the story, which we're going to talk about in a bit.

• 19:46Holly Frey?

  Yeah, 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.

• 19:57Holly Frey?

  There was also allegedly a notable human visitor to the Bell Farm in 1819. Claim is that Major General Andrew Jackson came to stay. And during the War of 1812, 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 witch must be holding them up when the horses that were part of his travel group suddenly stopped as they approached the Bell Farm. 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.

• 20:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 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.

• 21:04Holly Frey?

  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 covers slowly twisted into a 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.

• 21:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  In September of 1820, Lucy Bell had pleurisy, and the spirit allegedly acted as a nursemaid, singing to her and checking in on her in what's described as a very loving way. According to William's account, Kate even brought hazelnuts and grapes to the sick woman.

• 21:50Holly Frey?

  And the manifestations then had shifted from irritating. We said they kind of ratcheted up and were 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 100 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 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.

• 22:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  The attacks on Betsy slowly subsided, but as they did, John Bell's health really deteriorated. He started having spells that lasted a day 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.

• 22:57Holly Frey?

  Additionally, John Bell was tormented in a more assaultive way. He started to experience this feeling of being slapped in much the same way that Betsy had described, as well as also having his shoes jerked off of his feet repeatedly as he attempted to walk in the fields.

• 23:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  On the morning of December 19th, 1820, 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, 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.

• 23:35Holly Frey?

  This part's really hard for me, so if you're an animal person, maybe don't listen for the next 20 seconds. The remaining contents of that mystery vial were tested by giving it to a cat, and that cat, of course, quickly died. The remaining bits of liquid were thrown in the fire and then produced a blue flame. John Bell died on December 20th, and the witch is said to have sung joyously throughout his burial there on the farm.

• 23:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  After John's death, the spirit is said to have largely stopped in her activities, although she lingered into 1821 before she told Lucy that she would go but return another seven years later. Of course, she stayed true to that in Ingram's book and appeared at the farm again in 1828.

• 24:19Holly Frey?

  So when she reappeared, she started doing the same sorts of things as she had been doing early on in 1817, tapping around the house, pulling covers off of beds. But this only went on for two weeks, and then Kate once again vanished. So at that point, William, 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.

• 24:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  And now that we've given some of the highlights of the Bell Witch's time in Tennessee as 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.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat with flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment. Get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 25:39Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community. Forward, featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions. Each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

• 26:23Holly Frey?

  Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

• 27:08Speaker 07

  That last year, finishing that record was the hardest experience of my life, regardless of how everyone else buys into this. I believe in this, and I'm gonna push.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 27:23Speaker 08

  You know, a song is a story, and the verse is setting the scene. And for me, at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience, whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her, or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 27:41Speaker 06

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:00Holly Frey?

  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 marriage to Gardner that she broke up with him in 1821.

• 28:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 launch a big hoax. But there were some times during these events of the alleged haunting when one or the other of the Bell 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.

• 28:58Holly Frey?

  And Betsy was, by all accounts, a lovely girl, and very bright as well, who was admired by virtually all of 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 12, by the time she had been moved to break up with her longtime sweetheart Joshua, she was 16.

• 29:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  One of the more likely suspects in the whole suitor theory is a man named Richard Powell. Richard had been the Bell 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.

• 29:35Holly Frey?

  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 20 years older than he was, and she died of unspecified causes the same year that Betsy finally broke off her engagement to Joshua Gardner. And 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 for confirmation, but it does show up in multiple different accounts.

• 30:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Richard Powell started to openly pursue Betsy after her ties to Gardner were severed, and he and Betsy were married in 1824. Richard died 17 years later, and Betsy remained a widow for the rest of her life until her death in 1890.

• 30:30Holly Frey?

  So yeah, some people think that that sort of chain of events points circumstantially to Richard Powell having orchestrated the whole thing. 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 some usury in relation to the sale of slaves. So John Bell was basically making some shady business deals, and the church did not like that. So that is why he was excommunicated. It did not have anything to do with demonic possession.

• 31:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 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.

• 31:26Holly Frey?

  Yeah. And as for Kate Batts, it's kind of a world of no. While there have been a vast array of rumors about her, including that she and John Bell had a bad business 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.

• 31:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  It does appear, at least in the Ingram account, that Kate Batts was kind of an outsider in the community and was viewed with some suspicion. She was loud and brash, which for a woman in the late 18th and early 19th century basically meant 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 story to pin on her, rather than somebody that actually was a ghost.

• 32:25Holly Frey?

  And there was, even in that first account, the link between the two suggesting that Kate Batts was somehow manifesting the various events through witchcraft. But apparently, even when the Bell Witch was being perceived as a good thing, Kate Batts was incensed to be associated with it. So that idea really doesn't hold much water. 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 her to go to so much trouble to pester this family.

• 33:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 have a manuscript that really was written by William Bell, that manuscript would have been written, according to Ingram's own introduction, in the 1840s, 20 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 20 years after it had purportedly happened.

• 33:48Holly Frey?

  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 of it really passes muster as a true historical account of this alleged haunting.

• 34:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then, I mean, this reminds me of when we were talking about Anne Bonny and Mary Reed. One of the things that seems the most telling about how this whole account is that Ingram was incredibly insistent about how it was completely indisputable.

• 34:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Here is a passage that we're going to read that's particularly unrelenting in how no one with any integrity could possibly ever doubt it.

• 34:39Holly Frey?

  Knowing the character of the men and women who testified 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 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 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.

• 35:24Holly Frey?

  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, the facts must be accepted.

• 35:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  It really happened, y'all.

• 35:42Holly Frey?

  You're horrible if you doubt it.

• 35:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Of course, today, the Bell Witch is a moneymaker. People love a good haunting story, so it gets told and retold, and the details shift and change, just like gooey ectoplasm. Aside from the dates associated with things like births and deaths, writings about the Bell Witch often are really different in their details. I remember somebody telling me a story about the Bell Witch, I think when I was in college, that had basically a completely different cast of characters.

• 36:15Holly Frey?

  Yeah, there was even a book written recently by a clairvoyant that dispelled the longstanding myth that the family was cursed, and this instead indicated that the land that they had moved to in Tennessee was the source of this curse.

• 36:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  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 Witch Cave, which is on the property, and is allegedly haunted, possibly by Kate herself, so if you're hankering to try to meet her, you can.

• 36:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's probably what you're gonna see is a cave.

• 36:53Holly Frey?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, it's one of those things there. You'll have people talk about like all of the various components of it and how, you know, the blue flame. One of the things that's a little more science based is 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 weasel in some business dealings. So we don't know. Uh, but it definitely doesn't, when you really start to look at the, the facts of things, all of the, the elements that get sensationalized as

• 37:36Holly Frey?

  super spooky, don't really hold up to scrutiny. So that's the scoop on the Bell Witch.

• 37:47Holly Frey?

  Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected]. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 38:09Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters. So

• 38:52Holly Frey?

  they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend.

• 39:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  Who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 39:13Speaker 09

  This is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or a Corolla Sedan with the latest features and tech. Or test drive a spacious Grand Highlander or adventure-ready RAV4. And with so many hybrid models available, you can enjoy longer trips without all the stops. While Toyota's legendary resale value means you could get more at trade-in, get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for deals and details. Toyota, let's go places.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment. A Lincoln Original Series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.