The Bells were a good, respectable people.

John Bell was a farmer who had carved out a good life for himself and his family on a big spread in Adams, Robertson County, Tennessee, a quiet rural community where everyone knew everyone else and life moved slowly with the seasons. He had a wife, **Lucy**, who was well known in the community as a warm and deeply religious woman. They had a number of children. They had a farm, a working farm. They were good people, normal people, by all accounts of people who knew them.

In 1817 something not ordinary and not decent came to their farm.

—

It started small, as these things seem to always do.

Weird knocking sounds in the walls and doors at night. Chained dragged along the floor. Stones at the house. The family told themselves that it was animals, the house settling, the wind finding gaps in the wood. They told themselves there is an explanation.

And then it got in there.

The sounds came into the bedrooms. The children said something had pulled their bedclothes off during the night. Then there were the physical attacks, hair pulled, faces slapped by an invisible hand, children waking up crying with red marks on their skin. John Bell himself began to suffer, a strange twitching of the face that grew worse with time, trouble swallowing, a sensation he described as if something were seizing his jaw and slapping him in the dark.

Then, for some reason, Lucy Bell was never hurt. Whatever was in that house almost seemed to like her.

—

The presence was given a voice.

At first it was a faint whistling, then a weak murmuring and finally one night it was a full human voice – one that could carry on conversations, quote scripture, sing hymns and answer questions with uncanny accuracy about things it should not have known. Neighbors who came to see it left pale and shaken. Word spread around Robertson County and beyond.

**General Andrew Jackson** — who hadn’t yet become president — is said to have visited the Bell farm and experienced the haunting himself. And it was said that on his way to the property the wheels of his wagon would not turn unless some member of the party addressed them. It is said that Jackson had a very nasty night in the Bell house and left next morning a good deal shaken, telling people that he would rather face the whole British army than spend another night there.

But no one can say for sure if that story is wholly true. But it was reported and believed and it was spread.”

—

The voice was asked what it was, and gave different answers at different times. It sometimes said it was the spirit of a Native American whose burial ground had been disturbed. Sometimes it claimed to be the witch of a neighbor named **Kate Batts** a woman who John Bell had been in a legal dispute with over land. That explanation gave the presence its most enduring name – Kate, or The Bell Witch. And the name stuck. It never went away.

What the presence never concealed was its feelings about **John Bell.**

It especially tormented him, mercilessly, slapping him, choking him, screaming at him in the night, making celebratory sounds when he was in pain. The rest of the family had frightening things happen to them but John had something that felt personal, targeted and without mercy.

—

John Bell was found unconscious in his bed on the morning of **December 20, 1820**. Close by was a curious vial of dark liquid. The family summoned the doctor. Before the doctor arrived the voice filled the room and cheerfully said that it had given John a dose of something the night before and he would never get up again.

That was the day John Bell died.

His family discovered the vial and gave some of the liquid to the family cat. The cat died very soon.

At John Bell’s funeral, witnesses claimed they could hear the Bell Witch laughing and singing in the trees outside. No one has ever been able to answer with any certainty whether any of this is literally true. But it had been witnessed by many, recorded by people with no apparent reason to lie, and passed down through the community with such consistency that it was hard to dismiss outright.

—

With the death of John Bell the presence faded. It became quieter, less violent, sometimes disturbing the family but not with the intensity of the years before. **Lucy Bell** handled with care all the way through, as it always had been. By 1821 it had largely retreated.

It is said to have told the family it would return in seven years before leaving. Some of the members of the family stated that it did return briefly in 1828, appearing to John Bell’s son **John Jr.** and making various predictions about the future, and then disappearing again.

after that it was never heard from.

—

The Bell Witch haunting is the most documented and most consistently believed supernatural case in American history. It has never been satisfactorily explained to everyone. Skeptics cite psychological stress, mass hysteria and the possibility that someone inside or near the family was physically responsible for the attacks. Believers will note the large number of credible witnesses, the consistency of the accounts over the years and across different people, and the things that were reported that no simple human explanation fits comfortably.

There is only one person in American history who is believed to have been killed by a supernatural entity, John Bell. That claim has never been substantiated. And it has never been refuted.

—

The land that once held the Bell farm is still there in **Adams, Tenn. Visitors are able to walk through Bell Witch Cave on the property. The story has been handed down through the community for two hundred years, generation to generation, never fully explained, never let go of.

Some things find their place and stay.

Whatever it was that came to that farm in 1817, seems to be one of them.

—

*John Bell · Died December 20, 1820 · Adams, Tenn.*
*The Bell Witch Haunting · 1817-1821*
*Death cause unknown · Case unknown*