AD-bell-witch-1817Class IIOpen
The Bell Witch
The Bell Witch is one of America's most famous ghost legends, set on the John Bell farm near Adams, Tennessee, around 1817 to 1821. As the story goes, an unseen entity called 'Kate' tormented the family, afflicted daughter Betsy, and was even blamed for patriarch John Bell's 1820 death. But there is no contemporary record of any of it — the tale rests almost entirely on a newspaper editor's 1894 book and a family manuscript no one has ever produced.
PARANORMAL
DISPUTED
36.58° N · 87.06° W
Our read
SettledContestedOpen
Evidence — 9 claims
8 supported · 1 contested
supportedcontested
Sources — 4
4 sources · reference + folklore / local history + secondary
Specimen
Contested
Adams, Tennessee. Sometime around 1817. An unseen entity began tormenting the Bell family on their farm near the Red River — pulling bedcovers, slapping faces, making sounds in the walls. It had a name, Kate. It hated the patriarch, John Bell. It allegedly killed him in 1820. Andrew Jackson, the story goes, visited and left shaken. It is one of the most famous ghost legends in American history.
None of it appears in any contemporary record.
What happened
The Bell Witch legend, as most people know it, comes from a single source: a 1894 book by newspaper editor Martin V. Ingram titled An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. Ingram claimed to be working from a family manuscript — "Our Family Trouble," supposedly written by John Bell's son Richard — but that manuscript has never been produced. The earliest known printed mention of the Bell Witch in any source is Goodspeed's History of Tennessee in 1886, roughly 65 years after the alleged events. The story rests almost entirely on Ingram's book and on oral tradition that built up in the decades between.
The basic outline of the legend: the Bell family, starting around 1817, experienced escalating disturbances — sounds, physical attacks, a disembodied voice. The entity focused particular torment on daughter Betsy Bell and particular malice on John Bell, who died in December 1820. A vial of strange liquid was found near his body. The voice, according to the legend, claimed credit.
Adjacent specimens
Paranormal
The Enfield Poltergeist
Beginning August 30, 1977, the Hodgson family at 284 Green Street in Enfield, North London reported moving furniture, knocking noises, and disembodied voices that lasted roughly fourteen months. Two investigators from the Society for Psychical Research were present for most of it, recording about 1,500 incidents. A police constable signed a statement saying she saw a chair move on its own. Some events were later admitted to have been faked. Others were not.
1977-08-30
Paranormal
The Amityville Horror
On November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville — a real and tragic crime for which he was convicted. The 'haunting' came later: the Lutz family fled after 28 days in 1975-76, and Jay Anson's 1977 bestseller made the house infamous. But DeFeo's own attorney admitted the story was 'created over many bottles of wine,' and investigators found the paranormal claims unsupported.
1974-11-13
Paranormal
The Rosenheim Poltergeist
The German state telephone company tried to disprove a haunting and ended up itemizing one on a bill: the speaking clock in a Bavarian law office was dialed dozens of times in fifteen minutes, on rotary phones that physically could not dial that fast.
Get the launch dispatchSubscribe →