Authors: KATHY
Other Worlds (8 page)
Drewry had bought a farm across the river from his father's and lived alone with only his slaves for company. His nature was not so resilient as his sister's. His father's dreadful death had left memories from which he never recovered, and he lived in constant fear of the Spirit's return.
John Junior was also living alone on his own property. In 1828 he brought home a bride, one of the daughters of the Methodist minister Thomas Gunn. However, he was still unmarried in February of that year when the Spirit, true to its promise, paid its second visit.
The family had never doubted that it would return. At that time only three of the Bells remained in the old home—Mrs. Lucy Bell and her youngest sons, Richard and Joel.
It came as it had come the first time, signalling its presence by scratching on the outside walls of the house, then moving inside, scraping and rapping and tugging at the bedclothes. Richard, sleeping alone in his former room, was the first to sense the Spirit's presence. Courageously he kept silent, hoping the unwelcome visitor would give up and leave. A few nights later, however, he heard sounds from the next room, where his mother and his brother Joel were sleeping, and knew his hopes were vain.
Lucy and the boys talked the matter over and decided the best course was to ignore the manifestations. Perhaps they had put two and two together—on its first visit the Spirit had not spoken until it was spoken to. The strategy was effective. Two weeks of comparatively minor disturbances followed. Then they stopped altogether. The Spirit had not spoken a single word. But it had not departed. Little did the rejoicing survivors know that it had merely found a more receptive host.
John Bell Junior had been one of the Spirit's most outspoken antagonists. He had berated and cursed it, he had offered to take on himself the sufferings of his sister and his father. It had suffered his threats with remarkable humility, so perhaps it is not surprising that on its second visit it should prefer his company to that of his mother and younger brothers. What does surprise us is how the entity had changed in seven years.
One March evening, as John sat reading in his study, came a voice long unheard but instantly recognized.
"John," it began meekly, "I hope you will not be as angry with me on this visit as you were on my last. I shall do nothing to cause you offense; I have been in the West Indies for seven years, and—"
"Wherever you have been, or whatever you are, your proper place is in Hell," John said angrily.
"There are thousands of human beings now living on this earth who are worse than I," the Spirit protested. "If their spirits could return to earth they would raise a thousand times more Hell than I have done."
John replied with a scorching denunciation. "I would give my life freely," he cried dramatically, "if I could grasp your form in my arms and crush you slowly, giving you the pain you caused my father scores of times, and then throw you straight into the fires of Hell."
Unmoved by John's threats, the Spirit returned on successive nights. The two bizarre companions had long conversations. The Spirit told John that there would be a great war between the states, to free the slaves. Though it was not fond of the Negro race, it felt it would be better to free them. It also predicted a war between nations, into which the United States would be drawn. There was danger of a second dreadful world conflict, which, "if it comes," would be worse than the first. Besides predicting these and other disasters—floods, earthquakes, drought—the Spirit entertained John with long, tedious descriptions of Heaven and Hell, the pre-Adamic history of mankind, and the nature of Jesus Christ. I regret to say that although its command of English had improved considerably, with no trace of the bad grammar and vulgarities that had marred its earlier conversation, it had acquired a literary style both pompous and imprecise. I will therefore spare you further quotations.
After several months the Spirit announced that its visit the following evening would be its last. "But," it said, "I will return again in one hundred years plus seven."
"That was the last we ever saw or heard of the Spirit," John told his son, the only person to whom he ever spoke of his incredible experiences. Of all the Spirit's remarks, the one that impressed him most was its "almost eyewitness accounts" (whatever that ambiguous description may mean) of the Crucifixion and death of Christ. John refused to repeat this even to his son. "It was too heartrending for me to call it to your mind. My life has been so saddened by this recital of the terrible torture of our Saviour that I can never get over it."
But was this really the end of the Bell Witch? By no means. It had promised to return in a hundred years plus seven. The promised date was 1935.
Shortly after
the Spirit's second visit, Mrs. Lucy Bell was laid to rest beside her husband in the quiet graveyard on the hill. After her death no one cared to live in the house that had seen so many strange and terrible events. Gradually it decayed and at last was torn down. Except for Drewry whose existence was lonely and fearful, the children of John Bell Senior lived long and prospered. Indeed, one might suspect that instead of being a family bane, the Spirit had brought them good fortune. John Junior succumbed to pneumonia at what was, for the Bells, the early age of sixty-nine. If he had taken better care of himself he might have enjoyed the life span given to his brother Joel—seventy-seven— and his sister Betsy—eighty-six. Several of the friends who had worn away so many evenings debating with the Spirit also lived to remarkable ages. Thomas Gunn, the Methodist minister, was ninety-six when he died, but he was outdone by Old Sugar Mouth, James Johnson, who missed the century mark by a single year.
The surviving members of the family resented the notoriety the Spirit had brought and refused to discuss the matter except, rarely, with close kin and friends. The only one to put the tale in writing was Richard. His diary is said to have been composed in
1846, but he refused to have it published, though many interested parties applied for permission to do so. Only after the last member of that generation had passed on did Richards son Alan Bell give the manuscript to a newspaperman of Clarksville, Mr. M. V Ingram. Ingram's book was published in 1894. In addition to Richard's recollections, it included letters and interviews with neighbors. Few of the eyewitnesses were still living; most of Ingram's correspondents were their sons and daughters, who had heard the stories told by their parents. One or two of the chapters are obviously pure imagination, embroidered by Mr. Ingram in the fulsome and flowery style of that time—it would make Sir Arthur wince to hear it.
Meanwhile, gossip and rumor had not been idle. Skeptics selected Betsy Bell as the perpetrator of the tricks, though none actually went so far as to accuse her of killing her father. Others suggested that the two older boys, John Junior and Drewry, had learned "magic arts" such as ventriloquism during their journeys to New Orleans, and had helped their little sister deceive the rest of the family. In 1849 the
Saturday Evening Post
published an article which suggested this theory. But they underestimated Mrs. Betsy. She brought a lawsuit, and the
Post
was forced to retract its innuendoes.
As time passed the story was more or less forgotten, except in Robertson County and in the section of Mississippi to which descendants of the Bells had migrated. Told and retold, embroidered and misinterpreted, it took on elements of a classic ghost story, with very little remaining of the original facts.
In Tennessee to this very day the "Bell Witch" Cave is a local tourist attraction, and residents regale credulous psychic investigators with solemn lies about the Witch's most recent capers.
The Bells themselves had preserved in writing and in family tradition a closer version of the truth. How close we will never
know, for Ingram's edition of Richard Bell's diary was not published until almost seventy years after the Spirit's departure. Forty years after that, another member of the Bell family, Dr. Charles Bailey Bell, took pen in hand to write about the "family trouble." It is from these two volumes that I have drawn most of the facts—and fictions—I have narrated this evening, ignoring the wilder tales passed on by persons not directly involved.
Dr. Bell, a physician and specialist in nervous disorders, was the grandson of John Junior. In 1934 he was sixty-four years old. Since boyhood he had heard tales of the witch from Uncle Hack (formerly Harry), Frank Miles, and other eyewitnesses. As a young man of nineteen he paid a visit to his great-aunt Betsy and listened to her reminiscences. His father, Joel Thomas Bell, son of John Junior, passed on in 1910, but before he died he told Charles about John's philosophical discussions with the Spirit. Dr. Charles must have been steeped in the story for decades. He was convinced that the Spirit would keep its promise to return, and that he would be the one it visited.
In 1934 he wrote his book, explaining in the introduction why he felt it necessary to publicize matters which the family had kept private so long. He believed the country and the world were in desperate straits. Though this is not an uncommon attitude for conservative old gentlemen to hold, he had some reason for pessimism. The United States was gripped by Depression. Europe was in turmoil. Adolf Hitler was Chancellor of Germany. Godless Communism reigned in Russia. Religion was dying. One might ask how the bizarre antics of a century-old ghost could assist the troubled world, which had problems enough without speculating on the supernatural. Dr. Charles had the answer. In its long and tedious conversations with his grandfather, the Spirit had testified to the divinity of Jesus Christ and the truth of the Christian faith.
The Spirit's religious views, like its philosophy, are too tedious to bear repetition. Whether they are to be attributed to the good doctor himself, or to his grandfather, or to a combination thereof, I would not venture to say, but I feel sure they did not come from the vulgar raucous thing, whatever it was, that had followed John Bell to his grave singing drinking songs.
Not that I believe for an instant that Dr. Bell set out deliberately to deceive. But we should note that by the 1930s many of the events the Spirit had predicted so accurately were a matter of history, and that war clouds were gathering again over Europe. The good doctor believed the family Spirit would come to him in 1935. He was disappointed. It came not to him, nor, so far as we know, to any other member of the family. The "Bell Witch" had finally been laid to rest.
When Houdini finished,
the air was gray with smoke and the glasses were empty. The stranger, who had displayed signs of increasing restlessness during the last part of the narrative, could contain himself no longer.
"Why, gentlemen, what a pack of nonsense! It is obvious that the true explanation—"
"Wait." Fodor wagged an admonishing forefinger. "We will hear your explanation in due course, my dear sir; it is in the hope of obtaining a fresh viewpoint that we did ourselves the honor of inviting you to be present this evening. But, with your permission, we would like to keep you to the last—for a sweet, as it were. Let us first present our own theories of what the Bell Witch really was. Will you go first, Frank? I'll wager most of us can predict what you are going to say. Another naughty little girl, eh?"
Podmore's thin lips curved. He leaned forward, hands clasped, and began.
Podmore:
The Naughty Little Girl
First, gentlemen,
let me perform a service for all of us and clear away some of the deadwood that has accrued to this case. We are to examine the evidence. What can be considered evidence, and what pure imagination?
One of our rules—a basic rule of any investigation—is to suspect any tale that rests on the statement of a single witness. On this basis, if on no other, we can throw out most of the evidence of the family servants. Many of Mrs. Betsy's tales fall into the same category. Particularly absurd is her story of the supernatural sleigh ride. Yes, I fear that in her dotage the old lady let her fancy wander freely. As for John Junior's conversations with the Spirit—out the window with them all. It matters not whether we attribute them to John or to his descendants; they are palpable falsehoods. Recall that the only time the Spirit, who is supposed to have known all languages, actually used a foreign phrase, it was to John Junior—and it was French, a language he alone knew.
Yet after all the nonessentials are stripped away we must admit that something invaded the Bell home in the spring of 1817. It was heard to speak by hundreds of witnesses. Its attacks on Betsy were seen by dozens. That is the core of the story, and a fact for which we must account.
Fodor is pleased to jest about my naughty little girl. Never let me be accused of bias against the fair sex, gentlemen; often the culprit is a naughty little boy. In this case, though, Miss Betsy must stand in the dock.
As you know, I have personally investigated numerous cases of poltergeists and haunted houses. In almost all of them the center of the disturbance was a child or a mentally retarded adult. I have been accused of being unfair to these unfortunates; so, instead of giving you an example from my own experience, let me make my point by quoting a case in which I was not involved. It took place in a small town in Berkshire, in 1895. The investigator was Mr. Westlake, one of our most experienced agents. It was, on the face of it, a typical poltergeist case. For several weeks the family had experienced outbursts of mysterious activities. Furniture darted around the room; burning coals shot out of the fireplace; sticks, teapots, and cups flew through the air.
