Little Sister Death

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.

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.

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 Batts’ 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 the spirit 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 the spirit 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 with 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 cessation 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 Ingram’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.

The rest is a matter of legal documents: marriages, probated wills, death certificates. After Betsy’s husband died in 1848, she moved to Panola County, Mississippi. Lucy died in 1837, and the old log house was subsequently dismantled: no one would have it, and none of the Bells wanted to move back and live there.

But the story was too outrageous to die. In the 1850s, the Saturday Evening Post ran a story on the Bell Witch, postulating that Betsy was a ventriloquist and had faked the whole thing. Betsy sued for libel and won, settling for an undisclosed amount of money. Most of the family, as well as young Gardner, had scattered out of Adams County. It was as if everyone wanted some distance between himself and the growing legend.

In 1894, M. V. Ingram, after years of unsuccessful attempts, acquired the diary of Richard Bell and incorporated it into his Authenticated History. This account of the haunting was anathema to the remaining Bells as well as to their offspring, who considered the Family Trouble a shameful episode and their personal business. They were angry all over again in 1934 when Charles Bailey Bell published his own book, which included a recounting of his conversations with his great-aunt Betsy.

There are tales about bad luck following the Bells, about a family curse, but the history of any family is a history of death and misfortune.

Everyone who went looking for a solution found one, so there are ultimately more answers than questions and more culprits than victims.

1) It was a hoax perpetrated by Betsy Bell for reasons unknown, possibly a prank. She acquired the art of ventriloquism and put it to use.

2) It was a hoax perpetrated by one Richard Powell, who wanted to get rid of Joshua Gardner and John Bell and marry into the well-to-do Bell family.

3) It’s true as told, and in the world as we know it there is no explanation.

4) Something happened, a poltergeist perhaps, but it’s been grossly distorted by time and retelling.

5) It was black magic. Kate Batts was a witch, and this was her revenge on Bell.

6) Something happened. It’s tied to a secret concerning Betsy Bell and her father, and the whole haunting is rooted in abnormal psychology.

7) The Bell farm is located on an ancient source of power, sacred to the Indians and whatever race came before them. Spirits have always been there, and they sometimes draw on energy wherever they can find it. According to theories about poltergeists, an unhappy household filled with adolescents would provide an almost inexhaustible supply of energy. (It might be worth pointing out that the spirit’s powers waned as Betsy passed from adolescence to womanhood.)

The first possibility seems least likely if any weight can be attached to newspaper accounts and sworn testimony. Hundreds of people apparently witnessed her. They all can’t be lying. As for the second, it’s hard to imagine how he did it, even if only a fraction of the accounts are true. Also, motivation seems questionable, and if you can sustain a practical joke for four years, naiveté must have run deep in Robertson County.

The last two reasons are more interesting. Nandor Fodor was a psychiatrist who investigated and wrote about poltergeists. In the 1930s and ‘40s he postulated that Betsy was sexually assaulted by her father when she was a child. She repressed the memory, but this repression erupted at the onset of puberty in violence against her father. Fodor points out that the witch came down hardest on Betsy and the elder Bell, implying at once that Betsy had feelings of revenge and guilt: Bell had to die, and to punish herself Betsy had to give up the man—Joshua Gardner—she loved.

But this theory isn’t based on much, and Freudian psychology isn’t the gospel it once was. It’s about as easy to believe in malevolent spirits as it is disrupted psyches slamming things around and poisoning folks. It also seems to me a little tacky to accuse even a dead man of child molestation if you don’t have the goods to back it up.

Colin Wilson is a British philosopher and an investigator of the paranormal. Poltergeists are pretty much his specialty, and he started out believing the conventional theory about adolescent energy. But he came to think that teenage energy running amok didn’t cover everything. He theorized that spirits that haunt places of power can utilize the frustrated energy of adolescents. Excess energy, violence, and unhappiness seem to provide a breeding ground for poltergeists and, Wilson says, spirits can come upon this energy and use it the way a child might kick around a football that he finds lying in a vacant lot.

In the end it seems you can twist the story to any frame of reference, hold it to the light, and turn it until it reflects whatever you want to see.

After the destruction of the Bell home, folks came to believe that the witch had taken up residence in a nearby cave, now called the Bell Witch Cave. The path to it is well traveled. It has been worn down by writers, reporters, television crews, parapsychologists, skeptics, true believers, and throngs of the merely curious. The path winds steeply down the face of an almost vertical bluff. The present owner of this section of the old Bell farm is Chris Kirby, and she’s carrying a heavy-duty flashlight and leading the way. Underfoot is crushed stone, and the earth is terraced with landscape timbers to prevent the trail from eroding into the Red River, which is flowing far beneath us.

Past the guardrail you can see the river where the Bell sons used to flatboat produce down to the Cumberland and on to Mississippi and New Orleans. You can see the bench-like area of rock and brush that lies between the riverbank and the point where the bluff rises sheerly out of the bottomland. This is perhaps the only part of the Bell geography that remains virtually unchanged since 1817.

Betsy Bell, dubbed Queen of the Haunted Dell when she became the focus of the mystery, used to come here with Joshua Gardner and other young people on lazy Sunday afternoons after the services at Red River Baptist Church. They’d fish in the river and picnic by the waterfall in the shade of the same huge oaks and beeches that are here now. At some point the young folks would separate into couples and go their own ways. Looking into the trees you can almost see them; your imagination can transform the sound of the waterfall into soft laughter.

“People sometimes have problems photographing the entrance to the cave,” she says. “Sometimes there’s a mist that blocks the front of it, or maybe things that look like faces or orbs of light turn up in the pictures. Things that weren’t there. Sometimes cameras just fail.”

“People kept breaking in, and it’s dangerous further back,” Chris says, fitting a key into the padlock. “That’s why you had to sign a waiver. Kids keep trying to slip in here with their girlfriends to scare them.”

If fear is an aphrodisiac and if a tenth of the things told about the cave are true, then this is the ultimate horror movie.

Inside the cave the first thing you notice is the temperature. It’s a constant fifty-six degrees, and the Bell family, among others, used to store perishables here. The second thing you notice is how impressively cave-like it is. This is no two-bit roadside attraction, no world’s largest ball of twine, but a real cave, three stories laid one atop the other like a primitive high-rise, connected by crawl holes that wind upward through the first-floor ceiling.

“A kid got stuck in one back in the 1800s,” Chris says, shining the light into a jagged ascending tunnel. “He was really stuck, he couldn’t get out, and all at once a voice said, Here, I’ll get you out, and the witch jerked him out. He was scared to tell his folks about it, but that night the witch told his mama, You better put a harness on that boy so you can keep up with him”

Chris is fascinated by the Bell Witch story, and it’s a fascination that predates her ownership of this cave. She’s read all the books, and she says she’s heard and seen a couple of things herself.

In the first large chamber there’s a crypt perhaps a foot and a half wide by four and a half feet long, a child’s crypt, chiseled out of rock. Large, flat rocks were shaped to fit vertically around the edges, and the body of a young Indian girl had been laid inside. More flat rocks for a lid, the hole covered over with a cairn of stone until a few years ago, when the cave’s previous owner accidentally found it. The archaeologist who examined the bones said they were between two and three hundred years old.

If you can imagine someone laboriously chipping away at the rock and placing in the body, then it’s not hard to see how private and personal this was, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing you should be paying five dollars to see.

In the next chamber Chris shows us where she saw a strange haze shifting in one corner. Farther back, five hundred feet or so into the bluff, the cave narrows until it’s inaccessible. She shines the light. It’s almost absorbed into the wet dark walls as the tunnel veers crookedly out of sight. You’d have to be a spelunker to crawl back in there.

“That’s where I heard the scream coming from,” Chris says. “Not any kind of animal, but a woman screaming. That’s what that Tennessean camera crew heard, too.”

We fall silent and listen, but all you can hear is the gurgling of underground water. If you listen intently enough, it becomes voices, a man and a woman in conversation, a cyclic rising and falling in which you can hear timbre and cadence but not the words, and in the end it’s just moving water.

Outside in the hot sunlight you’re jerked into another century. Inside it was easy to feel that all these events were layered together and happening simultaneously: the haunting, a wall smoked black by Native American fires, the crypt of bones, the laughter of young lovers exploring the cave. Outside it’s just Adams, Tennessee, circa 2000, and a vague nostalgia for a place and time you’ve never been and can never go.

Chris is locking up the cave. “Some people might talk to you,” she says. “But a lot of people won’t talk about it at all. After that Blair Witch movie came out, this place was sort of overrun with reporters and writers. But some people around here don’t think it’s anything to joke about. Some of them have seen things and heard things and feel the whole business should just be left alone.”

“I don’t really know what to think,” Tim Henson tells me. “I know something happened, but I’ve never really seen anything myself. I’ve talked to a lot of people who say they have. A friend of mine was fishing down in front of the cave and swears he saw a figure, a human figure, that just disappeared. And people say they see lights around that property. But I’m particular about finding an explanation for things I see and hear. And so far I’ve always been able to find an explanation that satisfies me.”

Henson’s the superintendent of the water department in Adams, but he’s also the town’s unofficial historian, a walking encyclopedia on the Bell family and their troubles, who can quote courthouse records and church rolls from the nineteenth century without having to look them up. He’s the man that people come looking for when they’re doing a book or a documentary about the Bell Witch. Most recently, he spent some time being interviewed for the Learning Channel. Henson comes across as a shrewd and intelligent man, and his take on the legend makes as much sense as any other I’ve heard

“It doesn’t matter to me if it’s true or not,” he says. “I guess something happened. There’s about forty books now about it, and you don’t write forty books about nothing. There’s been three in the last year or so, and just the other day a fellow gave me a piece on the witch from an old 1968 Playboy. But I keep an open mind on all that. What I’m interested in is the story and the history, the Bells themselves and the way they interacted with their neighbors. There was a bunch of students down at Mississippi State University who tried to prove it was all a hoax, that Joshua Gardner hoaxed the whole county just to marry Betsy. But it’s hard to say.”

“Oh yes. Some do. And they figure it’s not too smart to make fun of it or to get into it too deep. There was a couple here, a descendant of John Bell and one from Joshua Gardner. They fell in love and courted all their lives, but they were afraid to marry because of the Bell Witch.”

When I was kid I read an issue of Life magazine about the seven greatest American ghost stories, and that was the first time I heard of the Bell Witch. Later my uncle, who was a great storyteller and had read the early books, fleshed out the tale. I found the books and read them myself, and for my money it’s the quintessential ghost story. I figured that someday I’d go to Robertson County and see the Bell farm, which seemed to me an almost mythic place existing only in its own strange fairytale geography.

It was years before I made my first visit, more years still before I made my second.

The first I made with my uncle, whom I held in great esteem. I was beginning to read Steinbeck and Algren, and he seemed to be one of their characters come to life. He was sort of a restless-footed hard drinker, hard traveler, barroom brawler. Plus he had a tattoo on his bicep: a dagger with a drop of blood at its tip, a scroll wound round the blade that read DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. He had lied about his age to get into World War II, then crouched seasick and heartsick in the prow of a landing craft while the beaches at Normandy swam toward him like something out of a bad dream. He fought yard by yard across France and was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a hero, and he had the medals to prove it, though he didn’t think they amounted to much.

After the war he bummed around the country, working where he could and riding freight trains, sleeping sometimes in places you don’t normally want to associate with sleeping: jails, boxcars, graveyards. He was an honest and an honorable man, but he’d been down the road and back. He was what they used to call “a man with the bark on.”

By the time we rode out to the Bell farm, a lot of time had passed, and he had settled down, quit drinking, and become a respectable family man.

At the time the cave was private property (it still is, but it’s set up as a tourist attraction), and we weren’t allowed to see it, let alone go inside. So we talked to a few locals, went looking for the graveyard and whatever remnants of Bell’s old log home might remain. The graveyard is in a cedar grove a mile or so off US 41, and it’s not easy to find. But it’s been found time and again by vandals, who stole Bell’s original tombstone and even dug up some of the graves. All that remains of the house are a few of the stones it used to stand on.

It was dark before we found our way out of the woods, and though we were trying to maintain a degree of detached curiosity, it was undeniable that this was an eerie place.

A few months later my uncle and his wife turned up at my house in the middle of the night with a strange tale. He looked nervous and haggard, far from the cool and collected man I was accustomed to. Something had jarred him, and he didn’t take long getting around to it.

Life had gone on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What thing?”

“That Bell Witch, or whatever it is. We keep hearing things, seeing things. It’s about to drive us crazy.”

“We’ve heard voices. People mumbling, but you can’t hear what they’re saying. A hell of a racket that sounded like you’d dropped a chest of drawers from the ceiling and smashed it on the floor. You go look and there’s nothing there. The other night I looked out the kitchen window and saw this ball of blue light just rise up from the ground and move ofF into the woods.”

“We want you to sleep in that bedroom where we hear that stuff,” he said. “If you hear something, at least we’ll know we’re not going crazy.”

There was no way I wanted to do that. But by now I was trying to get down the road and back myself, and I had a reputation to maintain. I was also hoping this would turn out to be his idea of a practical joke.

I couldn’t sleep, and I kept a light on. At about three in the morning I was reading an old copy of Reader’s Digest when I heard a chuckle, a soft, malicious chuckle of just a few seconds’ duration. It seemed to come from no particular point in the room.

I thought it was a joke. I jerked open the bedroom door. There was no one there. I went through the house. Everyone was asleep.

What did I hear? I don’t know. Did I really hear it at all? I don’t know that, either, and I wouldn’t argue it either way. It doesn’t seem to matter. You hear what you believe you hear.

My uncle lives in West Tennessee near a town named after Joshua Gardner’s brother, and I called him the other night.

“Did you really hear all that stuff in that house, or were you just pulling my leg?” I asked him.

“We heard things right up until we sold the place and moved,” he said. “It sort of died down, but every now and then we’d hear something. You’ll notice nobody lives too long in that house. It’s changed hands several times since we sold it.”

I told him I had been back to Robertson County and that I was writing an article about the Bell Witch.

I don’t know if there’s any truth in all this business. Because almost two hundred years have passed since the original haunting supposedly occurred, I don’t suppose anyone else will know. But I do know that the world is a strange and wondrous place. There are mysteries on every side if you care to look. I also know that I don’t know nearly as much now as I thought I did at twenty-five. If I stacked the things I know next to the ones I don’t, I wouldn’t have a very tall stack.

Every question is multiple choice, and truth depends on your frame of reference. It sometimes seems an act of hubris to even form a conjecture.

I’d leave that stuff alone, I heard time after time from one source or another, and it might be worth remembering that the Bell Witch saved her strongest malice for scoffers and debunkers. It might be wise to keep one’s disbelief to oneself.

On the other hand, she was clairvoyant. So it might be best not to think about that stuff at all.

Steven Gillis, publisher of Dzanc Books, wishes to acknowledge the many people who have helped make this book possible. Little Sister Death was found among William Gay’s literary archive after his death. A team of William’s friends, including J. M. White, Shelia Kennedy, Susan McDonald, Lamont Ingalls, and Paul Nitsche, compiled and transcribed William’s remaining works from his handwritten notebooks and a typescript found among his papers. Little Sister Death, the first of several planned posthumous releases, was then passed to Guy Intoci and Michelle Dotter at Dzanc Books. The original papers can be found at the Sewanee University Library Special Collections.