Episode 31 – Witchy Woman – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 31 Show Notes

Source: American Folklore

This week on MYTH, we’re headed down to Tennessee for a real life ghost story. You’ll see that just because a poltergeist is hellbent on your death, that doesn’t mean it can’t also be helpful, that ghosts can get wasted, and that you should never get into bed with the ghost of a witch. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll drive over to West Virginia to meet the mysterious flying monster that might just be trying to warn you about shoddy design. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 31, “Witchy Woman”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
Halloween is almost upon us yet again, and that means it’s time for our third annual Halloween episode. We covered one of the classic tales from H. P. Lovecraft last year, so I thought it would be appropriate to go the other way with it this year and cover a story that’s as much history as it is legend: the Bell Witch. This particular story of ghosts, deception, and violence comes from the 19th century American South. Much of what we know comes from An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, by Martin Van Buren. As is often the case with folklore, it’s difficult to tell exactly where real life events leave off and embellishments and outright fabrications begin. We’ll start with the parts that are undeniably historical, but I’ll leave it to you to figure out where history ends and legend begins.
John Bell, son of William and Martha Bell, grew up in Halifax County, North Carolina. As a young man, he had apprenticed as a cooper, or barrel-maker (which was a perfectly respectable job at that time). He met Lucy Williams, daughter of John and Mourning Williams, at the Union Baptist Church (later renamed to the Upper Towne Creek Baptist Church), and the two were wed in August of 1782 when John was 32 and Lucy was probably 17 (there is some discrepancy about her birthdate, so it’s possible she was 12 when they married, but ew, so I’m hoping she was 17 which is less ew).
The couple moved to a large farm that John owned on the south side of Kehukee Swamp, near Blackman’s Branch in Halifax County. The farm was fairly successful, and the couple had several children, including (from oldest to youngest) Jesse, John Jr, Drewry, Benjamin, Esther, and Zadok. They also owned a slave servant named Chloe and her son Aberdeen (this being decades before the Civil War).
In the early 1800s, John and Lucy moved their family from North Carolina to the Red River bottomland in Robertson County, Tennessee, which would later be renamed as Adams, Tennessee, which is about 50 miles north of Nashville. He bought the land from Kate Batts, Lucy’s niece, as well as her husband Frederick, who weren’t doing well financially.
Shortly after the Bell family moved in, he and Kate had a loud, angry fight. She claimed that he had cheated her on the land deal, but people pretty much ignored her. Some of this might have been sexism, but most of it was probably that Kate had a reputation for being fucking weird. Some of the locals even thought she might be a witch, mostly because any poor, eccentric woman was a prime target for such rumors but also because she had an odd habit of always asking to borrow a pin from every woman she met (probably because they were expensive and she was frugal). According to the superstitions of the day, clothing pins could be used in a voodoo-like ritual to control the person lending the pin to the witch. Not everyone really thought she was a witch, but they hid their pins around her just the same, so it’s not a surprise that no one paid her accusations any mind. Some versions of the story claim that she died shortly before all of the weirdness began, but the records say she died in 1842, well after it all went down. Stuff gets murky when history becomes legend.
Over the the years they lived there, he acquired additional land, increasing the size of their farm to 328 acres. He also became a well-known and respected member of the community. The couple had three more children, Elizabeth (usually called Betsy), Richard, and Joel, bringing the total up to nine children. They all lived together in the big house, one of the finest in Robertson County, which had six rooms, one and a half stories, and a huge porch across the entire front of the double log building. Things went well for the family until one fateful day in 1817.
The exact date has been lost to time. Whatever day it was, John Bell was out on his land alone, inspecting a corn field. Everything was looking good for the coming harvest, but then he noticed something decidedly odd up ahead. He moved closer to get a better look, but the animal just got weirder. It had the body of a large black dog, but the head of a rabbit. He rubbed his eyes, but the creature was still there, sitting still. John had never seen anything like it, and he did what any red-blooded American would do in this situation: he decided to shoot the fucker first and ask questions later. He fired several shots from his rifle, and at this range, he’d almost have to be trying to miss not to hit it. Rather than dropping dead, the animal bolted off from the field and promptly vanished. Over the months to come, the family would stage several nighttime hunting expeditions for the creature, but were never able to successfully capture or kill it.
At the time, John didn’t think much of the weird creature. Tennessee at this time was still fairly wild country, and for all he knew, there could be all sorts of weird shit living in the woods that no white man had seen yet. He shrugged, finished his tour of the fields, and went home for dinner. Hey, the 1800s were weird, man. No one had the time to lose sleep over something small like an impossible animal. They had shit to do.
Things were normal through dinner, and then it was time for bed. This was before the time of electric lights, and candles and lantern oil were expensive. Once the sun went down, people went to bed. Everyone dressed for bed, said their prayers, and got under the covers. The house was pitch black and silent, save for the creak of the wind in the trees and the occasional hoot of an owl. Then, somewhere in the darkness, the family could hear faint scratching noises moving across the walls. It was an eerie sound, but one that the family wrote off to nature. There was a big pear tree in the front yard, and with the wind blowing, the branches could easily be scraping the walls. Tuning it out, the family went to sleep.
Things seemed normal the next day, but that night, the scratching and scraping were back, just a little louder. It happened again the next night. And the next night. And the next night. It went on, night after night, and then the scratching started to change. It no longer sounded like a tree scraping its branches across the wall; the sounds were coming from inside the wall. It sounded like rats had gotten between the logs and were trying to burrow through. Weird, especially happening every night, but rats happened. It was nothing to lose sleep over.
Then the sounds ramped up yet again. It started with a pounding on the front door in the middle of the night. John leapt out of bed and rushed to throw open the door, worried that some impending disaster was bearing down on his home, but the night was silent and empty. There was no one there. As the nights went on, the banging would come back night after night. Sometimes it was at the door, and other times it was on different walls around the building. Many, many times, John and his sons would rush outside to try and catch what they were sure was some mischievous prankster playing a dumbass joke, but they never saw even the flicker of movement of another soul when they would burst out of the house.
As the year wore on, more weirdness began to follow the family. In the days following the first incidents, Drew Bell, John’s son, reported seeing a large bird of unknown species (some say with a human or a cat’s face) perched on a fence post. He tried to approach it to get a better look at the bird of quote “extraordinary size”, but it flew off before he could get close. Daughter Betsy observed a girl in a green dress, a stranger to the small, close-knit town, swinging from the limb of an oak tree. Other children reported seeing a mysterious old woman wandering through the orchard.
The enslaved Aberdeen, usually just called Dean, reported being followed around the property by a large black dog on nights when he went to go and visit his wife. All through the rest of 1817 and on into 1818, these weird occurrences kept happening. Something odd was definitely afoot, but so far, everything had been at worst mildly annoying. No one saw much to be concerned about. On a Sunday in May of 1818, all of that began to change.
It started innocuously enough. The scratching and scraping sounds that had plagued the cabin walls off and on for months now stopped fucking around outside and entered the house. Richard Bell and three of his brothers were asleep in one of the rooms when they awoke to the loud, insistent sound of chewing. In his sleep addled state, he initially tried to tune it out as just more of the same, but there was something odd about the sound and it finally penetrated his brain: the sound wasn’t coming from outside, but from the foot of the bed. Now fully awake, he and his brothers sat in the darkness listening to what sounded like a horde of rats chewing on the bedposts. Two of the brothers got out of bed and lit a candle, but as soon as light began to spread through the dark room, the sound ceased. None of the four boys saw any evidence of anything alive in the rooms except themselves.
They were sure they hadn’t been imagining things, though, so they decided to investigate. They looked all through the room, but found nothing. No rats, no droppings, not even any chewed up wood. Maybe they had just imagined it. Maybe they’d been having some weird shared dream. They crawled back into bed and snuffed out the candle. As soon as darkness blanketed the room, the chewing sounds returned, as loudly as before. They lit a candle again, and again, the sounds stopped. This time, all four brothers investigated, but again they found nothing. The doors were shut, as were the windows. There were no holes chewed in the walls for the rats to have crawled through. In short, there was no way for rats to be entering and leaving the room, and certainly not with the impossible speed with which the sounds started and stopped.
The brothers snuffed out the candle again, and tried to ignore it when the chewing started up again. After that, the chewing became a nightly occurrence in the Bell household. Although it was initially confined to the boys’ room, the gnawing sounds soon began to move from room to room, waking up the occupants of each room in turn, before vanishing in an instant once candles had been lit in all of the rooms. As before, as soon as darkness fell once more upon the house, the chewing sounds would begin anew.
Things were getting decidedly weird, but humans can adapt to some surprising shit, so soon everyone had grown accustomed to the phantasmal chewing sounds. Naturally, that was when new sounds began to join the gnawing of the invisible rats. At various times, different members of the family would awaken to hear scratching at the doors like that of a massive dog demanding to be let in, loud thumps that sounded like huge stones being dropped on the floors, the clinking and scraping of chains being dragged throughout the house, smacking sounds like someone moving their lips without speaking, and, perhaps most disturbingly, gulping and gasping that sounded like listening to someone being strangled to death. Below it all, faint whispering could be heard. The voice was faint and incomprehensible, but it sounded like an old woman, possibly singing hymns. John woke and tried to say something comforting, but found that his mouth had been paralyzed, which would become a recurring thing.
As the Bell family struggled to adjust to these new nighttime disturbances, they reached a whole new level of horror and started to get physical. As the children lay tucked in their beds, trying to ignore the phantasmal sounds, the covers were ripped violently off from the foot of the beds and cast to the floor. No one entered or left the room and all of the children were in their beds. Then, as the children lay shivering from fright and the sudden chill, unseen hands grabbed them by the hair, jerking and twisting violently until all of the children were screaming in pain and pure terror. Betsy got particularly nasty treatment, scratching her, stabbing her with pins, and slapping her hard enough to leave hand prints or welts.
Up until then, John had made the decision to keep what was happening private. Hauntings like this could cause people to turn on the victims, blaming them as witches or devil-worshippers, but once things became physical, he couldn’t keep it to himself any longer. He finally went to his neighbor and best friend, James Johnson, and told him of the terror that had been stalking their house every night. Since they were apparently extras for a horror film, James and his wife decided that the best idea was for the two of them to come over and stay in the haunted-ass house with the Bell family. Surely nothing could go wrong with this ingenious plan, right?
As always, the nocturnal thing was quiescent until everyone had retired for bed. The Johnsons were probably thinking that the Bells had blown this whole thing out of proportion, but they were very, very wrong. As soon as the lights went out, the gnawing, scratching, flapping, barking, knocking, smacking, gasping, and strangling sounds started up as one in an unholy chorus. Throughout the house, loud bangs could be heard as chairs were violently flipped over and tossed around. Bed covers were ripped off of beds. Invisible hands began to slap Betsy over and over again, knocking her head from side to side and turning her cheeks bright red with the repeated impacts. James himself was dragged out of bed and slapped around, causing him to call out “In the name of the Lord, who are you and what do you want?!?” There was no answer, but the disturbances ceased and did not return that night. No one slept well after that, and in the morning, James told his friends that he believed them. “It was a spirit, just like in the Bible!”
When the morning sun rose at last, the Johnsons were all too happy to get the fuck out of that horror show and go home. In what came as a surprise to precisely no one, the Bell family’s dark secret wasn’t a secret after that night. The story spread like wildfire through the town, and it wasn’t long before people came from all over the county, some from great distances. Some came to offer advice and support, others just to gawk and maybe catch a glimpse of the impossible. No one was able to provide a solution, however, and the nightly disturbances kept happening, and poor little Betsy always seemed to get the worst of it.
As the nights wore on, the whispering voice got stronger and stronger, and given the short-lived success of James Johnson, John Bell soon decided to try and communicate with the spirit, demon, poltergeist, or whatever it was. One night, once the horror had started up as it always did, he demanded answers of the spirit. “Who are you, and what do you want?” No answer from the voice, but a loud knocking echoed in apparent response. He tried a different tactic, wanting to at least see if the thing was sentient. “How many people are there in the room right now?” Knock. Knock. The room held only John and Lucy. The spirit was right. Still, it could be a coincidence. “How many horses are in the yard?” Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Again, the spirit was correct. They tried more complex questions, such as how many miles from here to the next town, or how many days until Sunday, and always, the spirit would answer correctly with firm, sharp knocks like someone beating on the wall.
This question and answer session proved that the thing was sentient, but it did something else too: it made the spirit stronger and bolder. At mealtimes, it would sometimes rip food right out of their mouths and hurl it across the room. The whispering voice grew louder and more distinct, and outside the house, lights would flit through the fields and the trees at night. These will-o-the-wisps looked like candles or lanterns, but had no source and no one could get close enough to them to see where the light came from. Maybe that was for the best.
As the thing grew stronger, its physical manifestations began to grow more dangerous. It graduated from slapping to hurling chunks of wood, stone, tree limbs, and even bricks at family members and inquisitive visitors on the Bell family property. The thrown objects seemed to appear from nowhere, thrown by no one visible, and always seemed to hit the target with terrifying, unerring accuracy. As knowledge of the apparition spread, a cold, acidic fear began to burn in the hearts of those in Robertson County.
The whispers in the darkness grew stronger. No longer was it an indistinct, broken whistling sound, but a clear, distinctly feminine voice. Naturally, once it became clear that the thing had grown strong enough to answer questions that didn’t involve knocking, the first question they asked was “What are you?” The voice answered. “I am a spirit. I was once very happy, but I have been disturbed!” The family tried to ask it more about itself, but it refused to answer. At first.
After more long, torturous weeks had gone by, the spirit finally gave in and told the family more about itself. “I am the spirit of an Indian who had once lived in this place. I died here and was buried in the burial mound not far from here. I fear it is my greed that has trapped me here. I buried a stolen treasure in the mound before I died to keep my people from taking it after I died. Perhaps if you retrieve it, I can rest at last!” She gave Drew Bell complicated but specific directions to the burial mound located on the Bell lands to dig up the buried treasure. Drew spent a day of backbreaking labor digging deep into the earth, hoping that the treasure was always just a little bit lower, a little bit farther. Finally, as he collapsed to the earth, dirty and exhausted, he heard the voice began to laugh spitefully at him. “You fucking idiot! You really believed that bullshit treasure story? Come on, what kind of Indian would actually call herself an Indian?”
This was the beginning of a long tradition of the spirit offering up conflicting accounts of who it was and what it wanted. Some people wonder if this was because the creature didn’t actually know who or what it was, and lied to hide that fact. One time, she claimed to be a pioneer woman; another, she claimed to be Old Kate Batts’ witch. As mentioned earlier in the story, Kate and John had fought loudly and violently not long before all of this haunting business had begun, and since people already thought she was a witch, the idea of the spirit being Kate Batts’ witch stuck firmly in the minds of the people. Thus was the idea of the Bell Witch born, and the spirit was always cheerfully accepting of the name Kate from then on.
Although the witch was hesitant to talk much about itself, if loved to talk about almost anything else. Once it grew strong enough to speak, it was hard to get it to shut up. Weirdly, it loved to get into religious and philosophical debates with the family or with visitors who now arrived with increasing regularity at the farm, quoting the Bible chapter and verse to prove its points. The story goes that the witch was damnably clever and rarely lost a debate.
Even more odd for a violent, destructive spirit, the thing appeared to go to Sunday church services at the Methodist and Baptist churches in the area as it would spend the afternoons quoting the services from that morning in eerily accurate imitations of the preacher’s voice (which it could only know if it had been in the church itself, which is disturbing in its own right). On at least one occasion, it appeared to have gone to services at both churches, 13 miles apart, at the same time as it regaled those in the house with snippets from both services. What I’m trying to say is that this witch was fucking weird.
Once it started leaving the property, it also started snooping on the people of the county like the world’s worst nosy neighbor. It listened in on private conversations and shared juicy gossip with whomever happened to be around, much to the embarrassment of whomever the witch had eavesdropped on. John Johnston, James’ son, decided to test the witch by asking it a question that it couldn’t have found the answer to by snooping around, something only his family could possibly know. “What would my Dutch step-grandmother in North Carolina say to her slaves if she caught them doing something she didn’t like?” The witch replied to his query in the voice of his step-grandmother, startling him. “Hut tut, what has happened now?”
This was the first time that the witch showed some sort of access to impossible knowledge, but not the last. Another story has an Englishman visiting the farm and offering to investigate the witch. The witch overheard him, and responded to him in the voices of his parents, who still lived back in England. He stayed the night, fruitlessly trying to learn about the witch, before finally falling asleep only to be awoken to the sounds of a scene from his own life, complete with his own voice arguing with his parents. That was enough for him, and he quickly packed his bags and got the fuck out of there. Later, he wrote the Bell family and told them that the witch had apparently visited his family that day, and he apologized for his earlier skepticism about the entity.
With its deep knowledge of the scripture, its fondness for religious debate, and its access to impossible knowledge, many people began to think that this was no evil spirit, but a divine one. This was reinforced by its odd kindness to Lucy Bell, who it fondly described as “the most perfect woman to walk the earth.” It would bring her fresh fruit and sing hymns to her. Lucy was the only family member the witch seemed to genuinely like (which would jive with the spirit being related to her niece somehow), although it often showed respect to her son John Jr.
The Bell family knew this witch was no angel, which was only reinforced when the spirit discovered a still house nearby and began to mix with a more earthly kind of spirit. The witch began to get absolutely shitfaced and come back to the home roaring drunk, and, like any asshole alcoholic, would proceed to keep everyone around awake by screaming paint-blistering curses or bellowing out raunchy drinking songs.
The drunken, belligerent, violent spirit was bad, but she soon proved that it could always get worse. It’s not clear if Kate invited her whole spooky family to move in, if she had multiple personalities, or if she just thought it would be horribly funny to pretend to be a bunch of different, distinctive ghosts, but four new disembodied voices joined Kate in the tormenting the Bell family. Blackdog had a harsh, gruff feminine voice; Mathematics and Cypocryphy had delicate female voices; and Jerusalem sounded like a young boy. The five of them threw the house into an uproar, yelling together, destroying furniture, and attacking the inhabitants. The other four seemed to come and go, but Kate was a fixture in the Bell household, never wandering away for long.
The spirits loved to perform for visitors, and especially loved to demonstrate their power by assaulting the Bell family. For reasons unknown, poor sweet Betsy was usually the recipient of these assaults from Kate. The witch absolutely loved to torment Betsy, far more than any of the others. She would be prodded, poked, stabbed with invisible needles, and slapped repeatedly across the face until her cheeks grew hot and red. The witch would yank the combs out of her hair and smash them to the floor (without breaking them for some reason); she would unlace the young woman’s shoes and drag them across the floor, tripping her.
It reached a point where the family was afraid to ever leave Betsy alone for long for fear that the witch would kill her. Two of her close friends from girlhood who lived nearby would spend the nights with her, watching the witch bully the poor woman without being able to do much to protect her. They tried taking her back to their own homes to sleep to get her away from the witch, but old Kate would follow her and torment her in whatever home she tried to hide. Given that the witch had already proven that she could travel overseas, Betsy knew that there was nowhere she could go to escape her abuser. She was trapped by the witch.
Somehow, in the midst of all of this, Elizabeth Bell managed to meet and fall in love with a young man named Joshua Gardner. He was from one of the most respected and well-off families in the county, and was widely considered to be an excellent suitor for Betsy, but the witch hated him. When it began to look like the two would wed, the witch demanded that she break it off with him. When she refused, the witch began to interrupt them whenever they spent time together and overall doing anything in her power to break the young couple up. She warned Betsy that if she married this young man, Kate would follow Betsy for the rest of her life and ensure that neither she nor any of her children would ever know a moment’s peace. Terrified of the witch’s wrath, Betsy called off the engagement.
As much as the witch loved to torment Betsy, Kate straight up loathed John Bell. She never gave a reason for her pure, naked hatred, but she swore she would kill him. Soon thereafter, John Bell began to suffer from mysterious ailments. During the attacks, his tongue would swell and stiffen in his mouth, making it hard to breathe and almost impossible to eat or speak. On one occasion, John described the attacks as feeling like having a sharp stick wedged sideways in his mouth. While he struggled to get by under this terrible affliction, the cackling laughter of the witch would follow him, interspersed with additional threats to kill him.
Although she never explained it, Kate was not always a vindictive spirit. When the mood took her, she could be quite helpful and informative. Maybe she was just trying to drive them all insane by making it impossible to be sure whether she was trying to fuck with them on any given occasion. In one account, John Jr. was planning a trip to North Carolina to settle his father’s share of an estate, when Kate popped in. “This trip is a waste of your time, Johnny. The estate hasn’t been settled yet, so if you leave now, you’ll come back with nothing at all.” “Yeah, sure, I’m gonna trust the evil spirit haunting our home. Right, that’s not a crazy thing to do.” “It’s your loss, asshole. Especially since there is a truly lovely young woman on her way to Robertson County right now to visit relatives. I’ve seen her, and she is stunningly beautiful and fabulously wealthy. I promise that if you stay here instead of going on this foolish trip, you can win her for your bride and live a very happy life. Well, as happy as you can be with me chucking rocks at you for shits and giggles, I guess.”
John Jr. ignored the crazy old ghost and went off to North Carolina anyway. Given that Kate was usually spiteful and mean-spirited, I probably would have done the same (and maybe this whole thing was designed to be ignored). No sooner had he left the county than a beautiful, wealthy young woman rolled into town with 40 slaves (which, while morally reprehensible, was a sign of opulent wealth for the time). She left not long before John Jr. returned from his trek, and the two never got the chance to meet, just as the witch had predicted. Also as promised, the estate hadn’t yet been settled, and he came home with nothing. Another trip would have to be made later to settle the estate.
As mentioned earlier, Lucy Bell was the only member of the family that Kate actually seemed to like. At one point during the whole haunting thing, Lucy became seriously ill and was confined to bed rest. Kate became worried about her, and would usually hang out in Lucy’s room with her, singing her favorite hymns. When she wouldn’t eat, the witch would bring forth delicate and tasty treats to try and tempt her to eat so as to keep up her strength. On another occasion, Lucy was entertaining guests when Kate interrupted. “Hold out your hands, dearie, and I’ll give you a surprise.” Lucy did as she was instructed, and hazelnuts began to appear out of nowhere to fill her cupped hands. Lucy set the nuts down on the side table nearby. “Why aren’t you eating them, dearie? I know you love hazelnuts, and I went to so much effort to get them for you.” “I am sorry, Kate, but I don’t have anything to crack them with. I can’t very well eat them in their shells!” A startling chorus of popping noises erupted from beside her as all of the nuts were neatly cracked for her convenience. A few days later, Kate brought Lucy bunches of grapes the same way, figuring she would have an easier time eating them than the nuts.
As if all of this wasn’t weird and unbelievable enough, they were about to take a turn that seems almost too fantastic to believe. By this time, Kate had made quite a name for herself in the county. One of her favorite tricks was to tell visitors, especially those who had come from a long way away, what was happening to their families at that exact moment, often in the voices of their family members (as we saw with the British chap). News of this insanity soon found its way to one General Andrew Jackson in Nashville, and yes, I mean that Andrew Jackson; the one who would later become the 7th US President. John Jr, Drewry, and Jesse Bell had all served under General Jackson and had fought with him in the Battle of New Orleans in 1812. When he heard about this supernatural affliction of his former soldiers in 1819, Jackson decided to investigate. You can say a lot of terrible things about Jackson, but he definitely wasn’t a coward.
The witch, as she always seemed to, knew he was coming long before the family did. Whether through spite or amusement, Kate decided to wreak havoc on Jackson’s party. The trouble began as soon as the company approached the boundary of the Bell family lands. Jackson was riding in a horse-drawn wagon, watching the stars come out as night fell, when the whole thing suddenly lurched violently forward. He righted himself and crawled to the front of the wagon to yell at the driver. “What’s the holdup, son? Get this piece of shit moving again, on the double!” “I’m trying to sir, but it won’t budge! We’re not stuck on anything, we’re not caught on anything; I don’t know what’s happening!” The hapless driver whipped the horses, trying to force them to pull the wagon out of whatever was holding it, but to no avail. No matter how the horses screamed and strained, the wagon didn’t budge a single inch. Some invisible, impossible force was holding it in place.
Just as the General was realizing that maybe there was more than incompetence at work here, a voice echoed from the darkness. “Alright, old General, let the wagon move on. I will see you again tonight.” Just like that, the horses suddenly lurched forward, throwing Jackson backwards. He had been skeptical, but now Andrew Jackson knew: there was a malignant spirit on the Bell property, and it knew he was here. “By the eternal, boys! It is the witch!” Now that he knew for sure that there was a malevolent, incorporeal entity with the power to affect the physical world, General Jackson was more determined than ever to confront it, so they rolled on to the house to spend the night with the Bells. He was a shithead, but he was a brave shithead (even if it was fairly irresponsible to drag soldiers under your command into a potentially dangerous situation purely for your own curiosity).
Unsurprisingly, Kate was more than happy to perform for this new audience. Poor Betsy Bell screamed her throat raw from the pinching, stabbing, slapping, and dragging the witch dished out to her throughout the night. The soldiers had sat up in the parlor, one of the men cradling a rifle loaded with a silver bullet, hoping to kill the ghost. Jackson spent a cold, disturbing night of listening to a helpless young woman scream for help he couldn’t provide and of having his own blankets ripped violently off his body each and every time he tried to pull them up. From the darkness, they heard heavy footsteps approaching them. “Alright, witch hunters. I am present and accounted for, and ready for business. Fire away!” The witch hunter shouldered his gun and fired at the voice in the darkness. Now, this is a really stupid idea, and could easily have killed an innocent person, but Kate had already sabotaged the gun, and it didn’t fire.
“Oh, having trouble with your big, dangerous gun, little man? Here, try again. I’m waiting.” He pulled the trigger again, and again nothing happened. He lowered the gun from his shoulder. “My turn.” The witch hunter’s head was knocked roughly to one side with a resounding SLAP. He straightened up, dazed, and then rose suddenly to his feet, overturning his chair with a loud clatter. He screamed nasally as he danced oddly around the room that the witch had him by the nose, that she was going to rip it off his face. He was dragged outside and driven out of the house and down the road.
This was an enemy that they absolutely could not fight. They could only suffer. By morning, the soldiers wanted to get the fuck out of Dodge right the fuck now. General Jackson had finally realized that being here wasn’t helping anyone, and so he agreed. Jackson and his men left Robertson County. Years later, after he had taken office, Jackson supposedly commented “I saw nothing, but I heard enough to convince me that I would rather fight the British than to deal with this torment they call the Bell Witch!” Multiple accounts of this incident exist, but it doesn’t appear anywhere in Jackson’s own writings.
After Jackson’s men left, the intensity of the attacks increased, and some of them got really weird. William Porter, a bachelor who lived alone in Robertson County, had been over to the Bell farm many times and spoken to the witch. They had formed a weird sort of friendship, leaving William with no fear of the witch. One cold winter’s night as he lay alone in his bed, he heard heavy footsteps in the empty room. His covers were pulled back by an unseen hand and Kate’s familiar voice echoed in the night. “You look cold, dearie. Never fear; old Kate’s here to warm your bed all night long.”
William may have been lonely, but he sure as shit wasn’t that lonely. However, he also knew better than to piss Kate off. He’d see what the witch could do when roused to anger. “Alright, Kate, but if you’re going to spend the night with me, you’ll need to behave yourself. Can you do that?” There was no answer, but he felt something sliding between the covers and into the bed next to him. Things were quiet for a moment, and then all of the covers were pulled off of him as Kate rolled over, taking the blankets with her. In the flickering light of the fire, he could see a form clearly outlined in the rolled up blankets, and he had an idea.
William stood up, scooped up the blankets and the form inside them, and headed to the fireplace. In a lot of folklore, fire is a cleansing force that can sometimes destroy evil spirits, so this wasn’t a completely crazy idea. When Kate realized what was happening, she thrashed momentarily in fear and then pulled out her voodoo. The blanketed mass got heavier and heavier with each step, and a foul, unholy stench began to rise from the blankets. Between the growing weight and the dizziness from breathing in the awful odor, William realized he wasn’t going to win this one. He dropped Kate and ran from the house. Kate never trusted anyone else enough to get into bed with them. She’d learned her lesson.
By 1820, the family had grown somewhat used to the hauntings, but they kept getting worse. She still hated Betsy, but she seemed to be focusing more of her effort than usual in tormenting John Bell, who she still swore to murder. The swelling tongue attacks got more and more frequent, and he began to waste away, unable to eat for days at a time. He began to suffer from a violent facial tic that would leave him bedridden for days. In an attempt to fight off the weakness, John tried to walk around outside for some fresh air. John Jr tied his shoelaces extra tight, with double knots, which infuriated the witch. She beat John to the ground and ripped his shoes off, dragging him across the yard in the process. When John Jr rushed out to help, she beat him savagely, leaving him concussed and bleeding. Between John and John Jr, things had gotten very bad, so the family called for a doctor, who prescribed medicine for John, to help his fits.
On the morning of December 19th, 1820, John Bell was found in his bed in an unnaturally deep sleep, possibly a coma. John Jr, still suffering from his own injuries, rushed to the cabinet to get his father’s prescription. The bottle was gone. On the shelf where it had been was a strange, smoky vial, filled with a weird, dark, viscous liquid. The family again sent for the doctor in nearby Port Royal, but Kate began to cackle. “It’s useless! The doctor won’t get here in time. I’ve done it. I’ve got him this time. He’ll never get up from that bed again!”
“Why, Kate? What did you do? Did you replace his medicine with this bottle? What is it?” The witch cackled again. “I did it. I put it there. I gave Old Jack a big dose of it last night while he was asleep, which fixed him!” In what I consider to be a fairly dark decision, the family grabbed the bottle, sucked some up into a straw, and forced it down the throat of one of the family cats. Given that the evil spirit had just straight up told you she poisoned a man with that, why would you test it on your pet? The terrified cat went into violent convulsions as soon as the liquid hit its gut. It died in agony and for no good reason. Horrified, John Jr hurled the vial into the fireplace. It exploded in a gout of sickly blue flames which burst from the top of the chimney.
The next morning, John Bell was dead. The doctor hadn’t arrived in time. They held his funeral a few days later, and even then, Kate couldn’t leave the man she hated so much alone. She showed up at the gravesite and interrupted the service with bawdy drunken singing and screamed insults at the corpse. They buried him to the sound of a disembodied voice crowing about the murder it had committed. After John was dead and buried, the witch lost interest in the family. Her appearances became fewer and farther between, and Betsy finally started to get some real rest. As life returned to some semblance of normal, she began to think that maybe she could be with Joshua Gardner, who she still loved, and maybe even marry him without suffering at the hands of the witch. They began to date again, and were soon engaged.
Kate returned with a vengeance on Easter Monday of 1821. Betsy and John had gone fishing with several other young couples from the area. It was a beautiful day, and the banks of the Red River were swarming with fishermen taking advantage of it. The line on Joshua’s pole went tight and then jerked violently. The fishing rod was ripped savagley out of the man’s hands and dragged off by a three foot long fish (which was massive for this part of the river). The fish dragged the pole around the river, leaping into the air and then dragging it down under the water only to surface again and swim around in front of him. Those watching were sure this was no ordinary fish, and it seemed to be taunting the poor fisherman.
Betsy’s stomach fell at the sight of this unnatural fish, and her worst fears were confirmed when she heard a familiar voice from nowhere. “Please, Betsy Bell, don’t have Joshua Gardner!” Tears running down her cheeks, Betsy took off her ring and gave it back to Joshua. “She’ll never leave us alone. I can’t marry you; it wouldn’t be fair. You don’t deserve to suffer under the witch.” Heartbroken, Joshua knew she was right. He’d seen what the witch could do to Betsy, and knew that she had killed John Bell. He accepted the ring back and soon left Robertson county for Obion County in west Tennessee. He and Betsy never saw one another ever again.
Now that the witch had accomplished her two self-appointed tasks, she again faded away. Later in the spring of 1821, she suddenly announced that she was leaving. “But, dearies, I will be back in 7 years. Count on it!” Things got quiet. In time, Betsy dated her former school teacher, Richard Powell, who was 11 years her senior. He had been creepily interested in her for some time, and had expressed interest in marrying her when she got older. With Joshua out of the picture, the two got married, causing some to speculate that Richard had been behind the haunting (possibly using his book learnin’ to study the occult), but I don’t think that really explains most of what happened.
The witch returned as promised in February of 1828, announcing her presence with the same knocks, scratching sounds, gnawing on the bedposts, and snatching off covers as before. Most of the children, including Betsy, had married and moved away over the years, so only Lucy and her sons Richard and Joel were still around. John Jr came to visit, and had a long, rambling conversation with Kate about the origin of life, civilization, Christianity, and the need for a massive revival of spirituality in the country. During this conversation, Kate is supposed to have predicted many things, including the Civil War. She didn’t stay long this time, announcing that she was leaving again, but would come for John Jr’s most direct descendent in 107 years. That would have been in 1935, and as far as we know, she didn’t keep her promise. At least, no one ever reported a visit from the witch that year.
To this day, people say the witch still haunts the property, although the Bell house has long since been torn down. Disembodied voices of people talking or children playing can be heard in the silence at times, and it isn’t uncommon to see candlelight will-o-the-wisps dancing through dark fields late at night. Weird figures have supposedly appeared in pictures taken in the area where no one was standing at the time. Who knows? If you’re truly curious (and a little adventurous), you could always head down to Tennessee and wait for Kate Batts’ witch. You could even visit the Bell Witch cave, where local lore claims that the witch would go when she wasn’t out tormenting the Bells. Some stories claim that the cave marks the boundary to the spirit world and is the door that Kate came through and returned to again. Apart from a story about Betsy and some friends exploring the cave, getting stuck in a hole, and being rescued and lectured by the witch, the cave doesn’t appear in the original legend at all. It feels like an attempt to cash in on the Bell Witch, but I’ve never been there, so maybe I’m wrong.
Either way, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s monster is the infamous mothman of West Virginia.
In keeping with the Halloween theme this year, the legend of the mothman is a supposedly true story. It all began on November 12, 1966 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Five men were digging a grave, a tedious, thankless job, for a burial the next day. A rustling in the trees drew their eyes, and they saw what they could only describe as a brown human-like figure lift up out of the nearby trees and fly off over their heads on huge wings. It flew close enough for everyone to get a pretty good look at it; it definitely wasn’t a bird. It looked more like a man with wings, which was impossible.
Late in the evening on November 15, two young couples were driving passed an abandoned TNT plant, formerly a WW2 munitions plant, near Point Pleasant. Roger and Linda Scarberry and Steven and Mary Mallette swerved violently when their headlights picked out two huge eyes glowing in the reflected light. The four later described the thing to Deputy Sheriff Millard Halstead as “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six or seven feet tall. And it had big wings folded against its back.” The creature appeared to be headed towards the door of the plant, but the two couples didn’t wait around to see. They floored it, and drove off to what they hoped was safety. They raced down Highway 62, leaving the thing behind them, only to see it on a hillside near the road moments later. It spread its massive wings and took to the sky, then dove after the terrified people. The car had reached 100 mph by this point, but the creature easily kept pace with them all the way to the county line.
Around 10:30 the same night, a local building contractor named Newell Partridge, was watching tv in his home in Salem (about 90 miles away). The screen suddenly went black only to be replaced by a weird pattern. From outside, a loud whining sound like a generator starting up grew in volume and pitch, then ceased suddenly. In the eerie silence, Partridge’s dog Bandit began to howl from the front porch, prompting Newell to venture outside to see what the fuck was going on.
He found Bandit standing stiffly at attention and staring intently at the barn, which sat about 150 yards from the house. Wondering what had his dog so riled up, he turned his flashlight on and shined it in the direction his dog was looking. Shining back at him from the darkness were two glowing red orbs that looked like bicycle reflectors. Or like eyes. They were far too large to be the eyes of any animal native to the area, and their steady, unblinking gaze frightened him. Bandit, who had been trained as a hunting dog, hurled himself into the darkness after the glowing things, ignoring his owner’s demands that he come back. Newell went back into the house to get his gun, but once inside, he found he was too terrified to journey back into the darkness, alone, with whatever was hiding out there waiting for him. He fell asleep that night with the gun propped next to the bed.
Bandit didn’t come home that night, and he was still missing two days later when Newell read about the sightings of the creature at Point Pleasant earlier the night Bandit had disappeared. Roger Scarberry, who’d been in that first car, was quoted in the story. He said that, as they entered the Point Pleasant city limits, they had seen the body of a large dog laying by the side of the road. When they had returned back the same way a few minutes later, the body had been gone. They had even stopped to look for the dog, worried it had been hit by a car and needed help, but they didn’t find it. Poor Bandit was never seen again.
The police held a press conference on November 16, and the couples told their story. The police and the reporters there that day all felt that the couples were telling the truth. Some had known the four their whole lives, and they weren’t the type to make up a story like this. The weird creature was dubbed “The Mothman” after the popular Batman villain.
Over the next several months, the abandoned TNT plant became ground zero for Mothman sightings. It couldn’t have picked a better lair. The site encompassed several hundred acres of woods, numerous abandoned concrete silos used to store high explosives in the 40s, and a honeycomb of tunnels and caves running throughout the area. It also backed up to McClintic Wildlife Station, a heavily forested nature preserve inaccessible to the public. There were numerous ways for the Mothman to move around unseen and countless places to hide.
There were very few houses in the vicinity of the plant, but there were a few, including the one that Ralph Thomas lived in with his family. On November 16, they spotted a strange red light in the sky that flitted and hovered over the TNT plant. It didn’t move like an airplane, and the family could not figure out what it was. While they were staring up at the sky, family friend Marcella Bennett pulled up. She got out of the car with her baby when she heard a rustling nearby. She turned to see a figure rise up out of the darkness right next to her car: a big, gray thing larger than a human and watching her with terrible glowing eyes.
In shock and horror, she dropped her baby daughter. The poor child’s scream broke the spell. Marcella scooped her baby off the ground and hauled ass into the house. They locked the door behind her with everyone inside. They held their breath and listened to the shuffling and scraping sounds coming from the porch. Through the window, they could see the Mothman’s silhouette staring inside with his red eyes. By the time the police arrived, the Mothman was gone.
Marcella was haunted by the incident for months to the point that she sought professional help for her anxiety. She was tormented by awful nightmares and by the certainty that the creature had visited her home several times. She could hear a keening noise from the haunted night, high pitched and anguished like a woman’s scream.
Sightings like this occured throughout Point Pleasant throughout the next year, as well as UFO sightings and encounters with the Men in Black (who are far less friendly that Will Smith). The stories filtered out of the small community, eventually capturing the attention of author John Keel, who went on to write The Mothman Prophecies. It all came to a head a year later, in December of 1967.
Sightings of the mothman had become a fairly frequent occurrence, and multiple described a feeling of dread, as though the monster was trying to tell them something, or warn them of something. Then, on December 15, 1967 the Silver Bridge collapsed during rush hour traffic, killing 46 people. Official reports say the bridge collapsed due to the bridge having been designed for far less traffic than it carried during rush hour, resulting in an eyebar shearing off and bringing down the bridge, but many locals insisted that the Mothman was connected somehow.
Partly, this was due to the fact that sightings ceased after the bridge collapsed, and partly this was due to the fact that people like to find meaning in random events. Some people believe that the Mothman caused the collapse somehow, maybe by generating a sonic boom with his wings. Others believe that the Mothman was trying to warn the town of what was to come (hence the Mothman Prophecies idea). Other stories from other towns popped up in the years after, always connected with some disaster that happened soon after (although none as well documented as Point Pleasant).
The Mothman has remained a mysterious figure in West Virginia, with numerous explanations offered ranging from being a demonic creature of dark prophecy to being an alien creature from another world. The most likely explanation, however, comes from wildlife biologist Dr. Robert L. Smith from West Virginia University. He told reporters that the descriptions offered and behaviors described matched incredibly well with a sandhill crane, a massive bird nearly as tall as a man with a seven foot wingspan and reddish rings around its eyes. The bird is not native to the region, but isn’t far off its migration route. The only purported picture of the creature has been written of as showing a bird, maybe an owl, carrying a frog or snake. So what is the Mothman? A mystical monster from another world, or a big scary bird? You decide.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on Stitcher, on TuneIn, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth and on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you like what you’ve heard, I’d appreciate a review on iTunes. These reviews really help increase the show’s standing and let more people know it exists. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff, whom you can find on fiverr.com.
Next time, we’ll hop a ride with an ancient caravan to the deserts of the Persian empire. You’ll see that you should never lie to your parents, that stealing from your parents, though, is sometimes the best idea, and that sibling rivalry can be a real pain in the ass. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll meet the horrifying tag team duo of the Zoroastrian afterlife. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.