Time Done Been Won't Be No More (13 page)

–An authenticated history of the night the bell witch followed us home –

HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED OR MAYBE HAPPENED OR IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE HAPPENED:

Adams, Tennessee, is in Robertson County, five miles from the Kentucky line. In 1804, when John Bell moved his wife and six children and slaves to a thousand-acre farm he'd bought on the Red River, Adams was a virtual wilderness. Skirmishes with Indian war parties up from the south were less than twenty years in the past. The Indians didn't live here, but it was sacred ground to them and had been for thousands of years since the time of the Mound Builders. It was also theirs by right of treaty. As was often the case, the treaty had clauses and fine print and footnotes, and the land was soon settled by prosperous white landholders, most of them from North Carolina.

John Bell was prosperous, too, but he seems to have had a clouded past. There were rumors of his being involved in the death of his former overseer. By all accounts he was a close man in a business deal as well, and it wasn't long before he found himself in Robertson County civil court accused of usury in a slave trade with a woman named Kate Batts.

These things about Bell, by the way, are not folklore or hearsay: They're a matter of public record, but they are not mentioned in the early books about the Bell Witch, which paint John Bell as a sort of stoic martyr.

Because of his legal trouble, Bell was excommunicated from the Baptist Church, and in a small community where almost every social function is tied in one way or another to the church, this was a big deal. Living in such a close-knit community of God-fearing folk, Bell must have felt like a pariah.

Then things got worse.

In 1817 John Bell saw an animal in his cornfield. It looked like a black dog but not exactly. When he fired his rifle, it vanished. Not long after, Betsy, Bell's thirteen-year-old daughter, was picking flowers and saw a girl dressed in green swinging by her arms from the branches of a tree. The girl in green vanished.

There were noises in the house. Something gnawing on the bedposts, rats maybe, the sound of something enormous and winged flying against the attic ceiling, the sound of chained dogs fighting. Lights flitted about the yard. Covers were yanked from folks trying to sleep. Hair was pulled, jaws slapped. Betsy seemed to catch the worst of it.

This went on almost every night for a year before Bell confided in anyone outside the family. According to M.V. Ingram's
An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch
, published in 1894 and based on an account written by one of Bell's sons, things had come to such a sorry pass, nerves were frayed, nobody was sleeping that Bell had to have help and opinions. Two preachers were consulted, James Johnson and Sugg Fort.

Bell was a stern and autocratic man who had been able to keep the news of the disturbances confined within his family. But as soon as he confided in others, the cat, or whatever the hell manner of beast it was, was out of the bag and gone.

The self-styled investigators soon determined that there was an intelligence behind the phenomenon. It would respond to knocks and answer questions: one knock for yes, two knocks for no.

Odd as this may be, it did not set a precedent. A similar case had taken place in Maine in 1800. It happened again in Surrency, Georgia, and again in 1848 in Hydesville, New York, to a family named Fox. The Foxes were more amenable to this sort of thing, and within months they were holding séances and playing the ectoplasm circuit, giving birth to the great Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century.

The witch, they had begun to call it this almost by default; no noun seemed adequate thrived under all the attention she was getting. At night the yard would be full of wagons and buggies, the house full of folks putting the manifestations to the test. Apparently Bell turned no one away: He was hoping somebody could figure out all of this and put it to rest. So word spread, and the witch became a source of entertainment. Recreation was in short supply in Robertson County in 1817, and this was better than a pie supper, a church social, a cornhusking as long as you could go home when the show was over and leave it where it was.

The Bell family couldn't do this. The witch seemed to have moved in to stay. Then she developed a voice. First a sibilant whisper, than a strangled sort of gurgle. Eventually she began to sing gospel songs and to speak. From contemporary accounts (and there are a lot of them), the voice was very odd-sounding: Metallic and somehow mechanical, it did not sound much like a human voice at all. From today's perspective it seems the witnesses were trying to describe a computer-generated voice, perhaps like the one in your telephone that asks you to punch a number for more information.

And information was what they wanted.
What are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?
they asked her.

There was no shortage of answers. In fact, she appeared a little perplexed herself. Pressed for the truth, she seemed not to know what she was, and as parapsychologists have discovered, if spirits exist, they're terrible liars.

I am a spirit that has always been and will always be
, she told them.
I am everywhere and nowhere
. Or she was the spirit of an Indian whose bones they'd disturbed. Or she was the spirit of a man who had buried an enormous amount of money on the Bell farm and wanted them to find it. Finally she said:
I am no more or less than Kate Batt's witch, and I am here to torture and kill old John Bell
.

The Bell family came to refer to this four-year period as Our Family Trouble, and during that time there was a seemingly endless stream of folks arriving and departing. A few years before he became president, Andrew Jackson even considered it an adventure worthy of his reputation. He came with an entourage and wagons and tents and provisions, planning to stay a couple of weeks. But the spirit took offense to a professed witch killer they had brought along and ended up pulling his hair and humiliating him with slaps.

After two days the group unceremoniously packed up and left.

Many came intent on proving that the whole thing was a hoax. People had noticed that Betsy went into a trance before the entertainment commenced. The family thought of these as fainting spells, and it was only
after
Betsy came out of these trances that the spirit would speak. Some folks felt that she was drawing some sort of energy from her. Others decided that Betsy was a ventriloquist and that the whole thing was an elaborate put-on. But according to a contemporary account, a man once grasped Betsy and held a palm tightly across her mouth, and the voice went on unchanged and undeterred.

The entertainment apparently varied from the gospel to the x-rated and all points in between. The witch was a malicious gossip, and she delighted in relating the sexual doings of the crowd. Betsy was by now engaged to Joshua Gardner, and she was fond of taunting Betsy with knowledge of indelicate matters that should have been private. The witch had a scatological sense of humor, and the house was often filled with the odors of vomit and excrement. If one can suspend disbelief long enough to picture it, the scene must have been like a rustic talk show, reality TV and an Early American motif and a disembodied host dealing in dirty linen and guilty secrets.

The witch had two stated purposes: to kill John Bell and to break up Betsy's impending marriage to Joshua Gardner. Bell died in 1820, a year before the cession of the haunting. There is controversy about what he died from, but, predictably, the witch took credit, claiming that she had poisoned him. At his death, she filled the house with celebratory laughter and bawdy songs. According to Ingrams's 1894 book, she sang
Row Me up Some Brandy-o
at Bell's funeral.

Her energies seemed much dissipated by Bell's demise. Though a shadow of her formerly robust self, she still had the strength to prevent Betsy's marriage. To quote from the diary
Our Family Trouble
by John Bell's son Richard.

Yet this vile, heinous, unknown devil, torturer of human flesh, that preyed upon the fears of people like a ravenous vulture, spared her not, but chose her as a shining mark for an exhibition of its wicked stratagem and devilish tortures. And never did it cease to practice upon her fears, insult her modesty, stick pins in her body, pinching and bruising her flesh, slapping her cheeks, disheveling and tangling her hair, tormenting her in many ways until she surrendered that most cherished hope which animates every young heart.

The witch left in 1821, saying that she would return in seven years. According to John Bell Jr., she did reappear but only to him and only briefly. No one was interested in her anymore. She was yesterday's news, and the Bell family was weary beyond measure of the whole affair. Slighted, the voice promised (or threatened, perhaps) to return in 107 years.

By now the Bell children had largely dispersed into homes of their own on the original property. Betsy married her former schoolteacher and remained in Adams. Her mother, Lucy, stayed behind to live, by herself, in the old farmhouse. John Jr. lived in his own home across from her.