The Bell Witch Said He Would Never Get Up From That Bed Again

In Robertson County, in northern Tennessee in the United States, near what is now the town of Adams, a river called the Red River runs between woods and farmland. A family from North Carolina settled beside it, built a house, cleared their fields and lived there in peace for more than ten years.

One day in 1817, the farmer, John Bell, was walking through his own cornfield when he saw an animal sitting in the middle of it. He had never seen anything like it. It sat between the rows of corn and stared straight at him. He kept walking closer, step by step, and it never moved. It only watched him. He decided it was probably a dog, raised his gun and fired, and the animal turned and ran.

Nobody ever learned what it was. Looking back, the family would call it the first strange thing. From that day on, for four full years, their house never had another peaceful night.

The Girl in Green on the Oak Branch

Not long after, one evening, his younger daughter took the smaller children walking among the tall trees beside the house. High in a great oak, she said, she saw a little girl in a green dress, holding on to a branch and swinging slowly back and forth. She was a pretty little girl. No one knew whose child she could have been.

A servant on the farm said that every night, when he went to visit his wife, a large black dog stepped out at the same place on the road, trotted ahead of him, led him all the way to the cabin door, and then was gone. It happened every night.

At the time, nobody thought much of any of it. Then, that same year, someone began knocking on their door.

When the Candle Was Lit, the Noise Stopped

First it was the door. After dark, there would be knocking on it, one knock after another, and no one could ever find who was doing it. Then it was the walls. The knocking came from outside and moved around the house, and again there was no one there.

Then the sound came inside.

In the room where the boys slept, in the middle of the night, there was a noise like rats gnawing on the bedposts. Then it was like dogs fighting. Then it was like a chain being dragged across the floor.

When someone lit a candle and went to look, the noise stopped the moment the light came up, and the room was empty. And at that very moment, a scream came from the daughter’s room. She cried that she was being chased, and she was frightened nearly out of her life.

John Bell’s own body began to turn against him. His tongue would suddenly go stiff. He said it felt like a small stick of wood wedged crosswise in his mouth, pressing both cheeks outward from the inside. When he tried to eat, the invisible stick pushed the food back out, and while the spells lasted he could not swallow a bite.

He ordered his family to keep all of it secret and never say a word to anyone outside. They obeyed, and they endured it that way for more than a year. Perhaps they thought that if no one spoke of it, it would simply stop.

It did not stop. It grew worse, night after night. One of his sons later wrote those years down. One night, he wrote, the whole family had gone to bed early, and he had only just fallen asleep when he felt his hair begin to twist. Then came a sudden jerk that lifted him clean off the bed. “It felt like the top of my head had been taken off.” His younger brother screamed beside him, and at the same moment a scream came from his sister’s room. From that night on, every time she lay down, her hair was pulled, over and over. That night their parents barely slept at all.

After that, no bed in the house was safe. Quilts were torn off sleepers as fast as they could be pulled back up. Sometimes the sheets were drawn out from under them. Sometimes the pillows were yanked from beneath their heads. On the worst nights the whole house shook, as if a storm were beating against it.

The secret could not be kept any longer.

“I Am a Spirit”

Once word spread, more people came to the Bell house every day. Some came to help. Some came to see for themselves who was playing tricks.

They learned quickly. Anyone who grabbed the bedcovers and refused to let the noises drag them away, and anyone who had come specifically to expose the trickster, got slapped across the face. No one could see the hand that struck them, but everyone in the room heard the blow, like the open palm of a heavy hand, and the face of whoever was hit burned with the sting.

The visitors kept speaking into the empty rooms, demanding that the noises say what they wanted.

At first the answer was a low whistling, broken and faltering, as if someone were trying to talk through a whistle. After a while the whistling became a weak, trembling whisper. It was clearly speech, but the words could not be made out. Day by day the whisper grew stronger, until every word was clear.

Someone asked, “Who are you and what do you want?”

A very faint voice answered, and everyone present heard it:

“I am a spirit; I was once very happy but have been disturbed.”

From that day on, the voice stayed in that house. The voice recited prayers, argued Scripture, and spoke in the voices of neighbors, imitating them exactly. Toward the mistress of the house the voice was always gentle. Toward her husband the voice was another thing entirely.

One preacher talked with the voice for a long time, pressing again and again to learn who was speaking and why this house had been chosen. In the end the voice said that a preacher could not be lied to, and since he insisted on knowing, he would hear the truth: the voice was a witch, and had come to haunt Old Jack Bell, and as long as he lived, the torment would not stop.

The words quickly spread through the neighborhood. Men and women looked at one another aghast and said it was just what they had believed all along. After that, nobody nearby spoke of “the voice” anymore. When they talked about the Bells, they used one word: the witch. In time, the whole affair came to be known as the Bell Witch.

“Old Jack” was the witch’s name for John Bell. The witch had said plainly why she had come, so from that day on everyone in the house knew what she wanted. What no one knew was when that day would come.

“Please, Don’t Marry Him”

After him, the person the witch tormented most was his younger daughter.

The family would hear her scream without warning and cry out that pins were being driven into her body. They heard the crack of a slap on her face and watched a red mark rise on her cheek, though there was no one standing near her. In the end her parents were afraid to let her sleep alone for even a single night.

Later, she became engaged.

When she was with the young man, the witch came in a different form. This time the voice was soft and sorrowful, sighing in the distance, then drawing nearer and nearer, pleading in a loud whisper, over and over:

“Please Betsy Bell, don’t have…”

“Please Betsy Bell, don’t marry…”

Every time, the sentence ended with her fiancé’s name.

The pleading grew more desperate each time, and everyone who heard it felt a chill run down their back. No one knew why the witch would not let her marry him. And no one had yet understood that this was never the only thing the witch wanted.

The Vial in the Cupboard

By the winter of 1820, John Bell had been ill for a long time.

All his life he had risen at the same hour every morning and woken the rest of the household, and even after he fell sick he had never once been late. On the morning of December 19, he did not get up.

The family thought he was just sleeping deeply. His wife slipped quietly out of the room to see to breakfast, his sons went to tend to the farmhands and the animals, and no one was allowed to wake him. After breakfast, the family began to worry. They went in to wake him and found him sunk in a stupor so deep that nothing could rouse him.

One of his sons went to the cupboard for the medicine the doctor had prescribed, which had always been carefully put away there. That morning, the medicine was gone. In its place stood a smoky-looking vial, about a third full of a dark liquid. He asked everyone in the house. No one had touched the medicine, and no one had ever seen that vial before.

The doctor was sent for in a hurry, and several neighbors arrived. While they were all looking at the vial, the witch spoke up, full of triumph:

“It’s useless for you to try to relieve Old Jack, I have got him this time; he will never get up from that bed again.”

Someone asked about the vial in the cupboard.

“I put it there, and gave Old Jack a big dose out of it last night while he was asleep, which fixed him.”

The doctor examined the vial. He said he had not left it and could not tell what was in it. Apart from the doctor, no one had ever brought any medicine into that house.

The doctor said there was a smell on the sick man’s breath very much like what was in the vial.

They threw the vial and everything in it into the fire. A blue blaze shot up the chimney like a flash of gunpowder.

He never woke again. All that day and all that night he lay in that bed as if he had been heavily drugged. No one could rouse him, and no one could get a single dose of medicine into him.

For as long as there was breath left in him, the witch filled the house with wild rejoicing and mocking songs, as if waiting for him to die. On the morning of December 20, he died, and the singing stopped with him. The house went so quiet that it seemed the witch had gone too. It stayed quiet until the day of the burial.

It was a bright December day, and a great many people came to see him laid to rest. The grave was filled, and as the mourners turned to leave, a loud song suddenly broke out around them. The witch was singing at full volume, and the song was a drinking song. The singing followed the mourners all the way back to the house and did not stop until the last of them had gone inside.

Seven Years Later

After his death, the witch lost much of her fury, but did not leave. The witch stayed through that winter and through the spring of 1821, growing quieter by the week. That spring, his daughter broke off her engagement.

Then the witch said an affectionate goodbye to the woman of the house. Seven years away, the witch said, and then a sure return, and on that return, a visit to every house in the neighborhood.

In February 1828, the witch came back.

By then the other children had moved away, and only the widow and two of her sons still lived in the old house. The son who wrote it all down said the return was exactly like the first time. There was a long spell of scratching on the weatherboarding outside, then the sound came in and scratched at his bedpost, and then the covers were ripped off his bed. He pulled them back up. They were ripped off again. It went on most of the night.

For several nights he said nothing, afraid of frightening his mother. Then one night he heard a noise in her room, and soon his mother and his brother came rushing into his room in a panic, saying their covers had been pulled off too.

The three of them sat up late into the night. They all knew the witch had come back. This time, they agreed, no one would speak to her, and no one outside would be told. After about two weeks, the witch left again.

Seven years earlier, the witch had promised a visit to every house in the neighborhood. Where the witch went after leaving the old homestead, the son who wrote it all down could not say. Perhaps that February, in some house nearby, a family woke in the night to find their covers torn away, and, just as the Bells had once done, kept it a secret and never told a soul.