Short Stuff: The Bell Witch

A legend in Tennessee tells of the real-life Bell family, who were haunted back in 1817 by a ghost witch - arguably the worst kind of either of those things. 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

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:09Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. It's Josh and Chuck here, and our scary October rolls on. It's rolling along with the short stuff on the Bell Witch.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  That's right, rolling along the Red River of Tennessee, because that's where the Bell Witch is now, Adams, Tennessee. But that's where the Bell Witch story finds its roots, about an hour north of Nashville. And there was a family, the Bells, that moved from North Carolina in 1806 to Tennessee and did pretty well. They were landowners. They were very respected. They had a pretty good life. And about nine-ish years after they moved there, they started to get haunted by a angry ghost witch.

• 1:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And before we get too much deeper into it, I want to shout out a historian named Pat Fitzhugh, who runs bellwitch.org and wrote the book, The Bell Witch: The Full Account, Legends of America, Victoria Klein Peter at the Tennessee State Museum. Okay?

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Got it. Rocky Top, baby.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  So, the haunting of the Bell family began in 1817 when John Bell, the patriarch of the family, sometimes called Old Jack Bell, because remember this is 1817 in Tennessee.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21Josh Clark?

  He was in his fields. He was a huge planter in the area. And he was in one of his fields at one point, and he noticed a big animal sitting in his field. So he looked at it a little closer, and he found that it was quite disturbing. This large animal had the body of a dog, but the head of a rabbit.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Okay. Red flag?

• 2:42Josh Clark?

  John Bell was like, "Did I eat mushrooms this morning?" He's like, "No, I didn't." And he said, "Well, I'm gonna shoot at this because I'm a homesteader in Tennessee in 1817." And when he did, the animal either vanished or scurried off to the nearby woods, depending on who's telling the story. But either way, John Bell let it be.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's Dad's first incident. There would also be successive incidents with kids. Dewry, his son, and Betsy, his daughter, Dewry saw a, and if you're wondering how that's spelled, it's D-E-W-R-Y. I've never seen that name before, but I think I love it.

• 3:17Josh Clark?

  I, I'm glad that you love it. I think I misspelled it. I think it might be Drewry, because I also saw him referred to as Drew before.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  I like Dewry.

• 3:27Josh Clark?

  I like Dewry more, too. So we're gonna rename Drewry Bell.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Dewry was haunted by a giant bird, supposedly a bird that he had never seen before. It was sitting on a fence post, so of course, he shot at it as well. But it disappeared into thin air. And then daughter Betsy, maybe the most frightening thing, although the dog rabbit's pretty frightening.

• 3:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  But also, so is a little girl in a green dress hanging from a tree. And I assume that means by a rope and not just by her hands.

• 3:57Josh Clark?

  I could not get any further. Information about that.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Okay, I mean, if it was haunting, it had to be like that girl was hanged there as a child and or whatever and came back.

• 4:07Josh Clark?

  Yes. So these appearances seem to portend all of the haunting that followed. Haunting by the ghost of a witch, don't forget, that's the worst kind.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:19Josh Clark?

  Because I think the same night after John Bell saw the rabbit dog, or the dog rabbit, I guess, depending on your perspective.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:27Josh Clark?

  The family was awakened by beating noises on the outside of the walls of their home, like it was being pounded on. And that was just the first night. These things continued night after night after night. Sometimes they would be pounding really hard, sometimes kind of light. But either way, Bell and his sons, he had several sons, they would get out of bed and try to catch the person who was pounding on their their house. This is basically like 1817 Ding Dong Ditch, I guess. But they never found a trace of anybody.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the hauntings, or the sounds continued, rather. The children were haunted by the sounds of what they thought was rats chewing on their bedposts at night, which was probably just rats chewing on their bedposts at night.

• 5:09Josh Clark?

  Right. But you got to toss that one in.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  You got to toss that in because it is scary. The hauntings would turn physical. Sometimes the sheets were pulled off of the kids while they slept. Young Betsy was ghost slapped, apparently hard enough to leave welts and bruises. She was ghost pinched. She was ghost hair pulled. And it became pretty clear that Betsy and old Jack, the dad, were the the main targets in this family.

• 5:35Josh Clark?

  Yes, and we'll see why in a few. But I think probably what makes the whole thing the most disturbing is that the witch began to talk. It's one thing for poltergeist activity. Poltergeist don't talk, everybody. Ask your parents. The witch started speaking, the witch ghost. And at first, it was faint. They were just barely whispered. You couldn't really make out what the the ghost was saying. But over time, the voice grew louder, clearer, and would sometimes hold conversations, like entire conversations with the Bell family in their home. So much so that John Jr. was known to debate the witch voice.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 6:13Josh Clark?

  I don't know over what.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Nuclear energy?

• 6:16Josh Clark?

  Maybe, and whether it was safe or not.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 6:19Josh Clark?

  But he later wrote the conversations down that he had with the Bell Witch and he published it, I think self-published in 1934.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  That's right. And if you think maybe just this family had some weird mold in their house that was driving them all to the brinks of sanity, not true, because, you know, unfortunately, this is 1817 and they had enslaved people on their land. And they also had similar experiences, the most famous of which was an enslaved man there named Dean, who encountered the witch multiple times in the form of a two-headed dog.

• 6:53Josh Clark?

  Man.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  With ostensibly dog heads.

• 6:56Josh Clark?

  I saw a drawing of it, of this, Dean being met by a two-headed dog. And it actually kind of missed the mark because it looked like it was hopping up to like play with them.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Well, maybe it was.

• 7:06Josh Clark?

  Because in this, in this picture, the drawing, Dean is holding a ball, but it's not supposed to be like a ball that the two-headed dog wants to, him to toss for. It was a witch ball that Dean's wife made. And that's a real thing. A witch ball is a blown glass sphere, usually kind of colorful. And depending on where you're using this or who you ask, it's either used to trap witches or ward off witches. And Dean's wife made it for him, I think after the first time he saw the Bell Witch, to protect himself.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he was like, you know, I know tradition says it's got to be a ball, but these, this two-headed dog just wants to get that ball. Can we go with something else?

• 7:48Josh Clark?

  She's like, sure. How about a witch stick?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. Shall we take a break? All right, we'll come back and finish up with the Bell Witch right after this.

• 8:12Josh Clark?

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• 9:51Speaker 03

  All right, so where we left off, there were two headed dogs wanting to play with that witch ball. Betsy's getting ghost pinched. Dad is getting haunted. The whole family's getting haunted. And it became pretty clear that Betsy was getting haunted because this bell witch did not like the fact that she was engaged to a guy named Joshua Gardner, a local kid. And she tried to keep this wedding on, but eventually would break it off in 1821 and marry an old guy, so old. How old was he? He was so old that she ended up nursing the man for 11 years before he eventually died.

• 10:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Betsy fell on hardships of her own. Even after she moved out of her father's house, she had eight children and four of them.

• 10:37Speaker 03

  In that 11 years with the old sick guy?

• 10:40Josh Clark?

  I don't know if it was during or before. I don't know how long they were married before he fell ill. I don't know, but yes, they had eight children for sure, but only four made it to adulthood sadly. So Betsy had her own troubles because of the Joshua Gardner thing. But John Bell, the witch saved the worst for him. Like she was verbally abusive to him. She was physically abusive to him. Shortly after she appeared, John Bell was afflicted by some unknown illness. And it just kept getting worse and worse over the next few years as the haunting wore on. He would have seizures sometimes Chuck, and as he came out of the seizures, the Bell Witch would slap him around. She was really mean and ruthless toward John Bell.

• 11:25Josh Clark?

  She hated John Bell.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Can you imagine that? That like he comes out of a seizure and she's like, hey, what do you think of this? Smack, smack, smack.

• 11:32Josh Clark?

  I've been waiting for you to come out of it.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Oh, he sadly passed on in December 1820. He believed that the witch had poisoned him and apparently the witch confirmed this. And the day before he died said, it's useless for you to try and relieve old Jack. I've got him this time. He will never get up from that bed again. I put it there and gave old Jack a big dose of it. Last night while he was asleep, which fixed him.

• 11:58Josh Clark?

  Nice. There's a nice little preview of our Halloween episode.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I hope so. The neighbors found out about this stuff too, right?

• 12:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so he swore his family, John Bell swore his family to secrecy. This is just kind of not the thing that you wanted your fellow townsfolk in 1817 Tennessee to know about. But it just became such a big deal that it spread and got out. And so some of the townsfolk tried to catch the witch. They tried to, one guy tried to shoot the witch. To no avail, right? They, no one could do anything to assuage the Bell Witch. They even came up with their own legends too. The one that stood out to me the most was that at one point, the Bell Witch recited two different sermons, verbatim, that were being given, delivered at two different churches at that moment, miles away from one another.

• 12:52Josh Clark?

  And I mean, if that's not an 1817 Tennessee folk superstition that you'd just be like, damn, when somebody told you that?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:00Josh Clark?

  I don't know what is.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, because that's literally impossible. In that time to know exactly what was being said in two different places at once.

• 13:09Josh Clark?

  There's a lot, there's a lot of holes in that legend, for sure.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Thankfully, after John died, maybe taken care of by the, the Bell Witch, the hauntings basically stopped. I don't think we mentioned that at his funeral, the witch even haunted him there, was like singing, drinking songs and interrupting the wake in the funeral. But much later, in 1849, the Saturday Evening Post would publish a story that people basically said is like the first commercial publication of this story.

• 13:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  And it accused Betsy of being behind the whole thing. And she threatened to sue unless they printed an apology and a retraction, which they did. So I guess they did make that up.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  And Betsy just, you know, she never wanted to talk about it. As she aged, she never spoke of the Bell Witch.

• 13:55Josh Clark?

  Yes. So the Bell Witch, I'm pretty sure even at the time, but certainly shortly afterward, in Tennessee, in the parts of Tennessee, it was attributed to a local woman named Kate Batts. And there's a couple of different explanations for why Kate Batts would care about the Bell family so much that she would hound them beyond the grave. The first one takes place entirely in Tennessee, because we didn't say, but not just Tennessee, but also North Carolina and Mississippi put some claim on the Bell Witch, even though it all happened in Tennessee. But in the first explanation, John Bell, remember, we said he was one of the bigger planters, he had a 300-plus acre homestead that he built by acquiring land from neighbors. And there was one land deal that he had with the brother-in-law

• 14:39Josh Clark?

  of Kate Batts, a man by the name of Benjamin, and Bell is said to have taken advantage of Benjamin on the deal, and that in her death, Kate hounded John Bell to the grave in revenge for this land deal.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Why would he do Benjamin Bratt like that?

• 14:54Josh Clark?

  I don't know.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Such a fine actor.

• 14:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  The other version, like you said, takes place also in North Carolina, because they also do lay claim. And this is that Bell, well, seemingly, he, he had sex with Kate Batts and had an affair with Kate Batts. And that is why he, he'd left to go to Tennessee, because he had had this affair, broke it off. Kate was really sore at this, obviously, and threatened to tell everybody, including the family. And so, as the legend goes, Bell tied her up in a smokehouse and left her there to die, and she- Haunted him there, and so they had to pack up and leave to Tennessee. And she was like, oh, no, I don't think you know how ghost witches work. We can, we can travel interstate. Tennessee's not that far away.

• 15:39Josh Clark?

  Yep. The whole way, she just kept going, are we there yet? Are we there yet?

• 15:45Josh Clark?

  So one of the things that makes this story so unsettling, aside from all the details of it, and if you really want to dive into it, check out Pat Fitzhugh's website, bellwitch.org, like really has a lot of exhaustive research on it. But one of the things that, that makes it unsettling, like I was saying, is that these people like really did live in North Carolina and Tennessee at the time this legend covers. Like genealogists have found Kate Batts in Edgecombe County. They found Kate Batts in Adams, Tennessee. Apparently Batts's still live in Adams, Tennessee. And there's Bells as well. The Bell family graveyard has all these people's headstones from the correct timeframe. So the idea that these people really did live and that at the time, they believed that

• 16:29Josh Clark?

  this was happening to the Bell family, as did the Bell family, that, that, I don't know, I think that makes it even cooler. It's not like, it's not like the, the hitchhiker with the hook hand or something like that. Like this actually happened.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, this, this, I think throws it in there with the category of like the Amityville House and stuff like that, of this supposed real hauntings that took place.

• 16:51Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  But you can still go there. It's like a tourist destination. Apparently the town of 674 people, it's, it's a pretty big boon for their economy.

• 17:01Josh Clark?

  You'd think so.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  They have rebuilt, the house is gone, but they rebuilt a replica in its, in its place. It must be so popular.

• 17:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you can tour it inside the replica of the house. There's also a cave on John Bell's property that they believe the Bell Witch lives in. And you can tour that cave as well. I can't remember how much it was, but it was reasonably priced. It's not going to break you for a family of four.

• 17:29Josh Clark?

  And again, it's just an hour north of Nashville. It looks quite, quite neat. They also offer lantern guided tours in the dark. So if you're really feeling scary, maybe do that one.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And if they don't have some sort of animatronic rabbit dog, they're doing it wrong.

• 17:45Josh Clark?

  That's right. The whole town's saving up for it. Don't you worry. Tell them, Chuck.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  I think that means short stuff is out.

• 17:57Speaker 05

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• 18:12Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.