Time Done Been Won't Be No More (14 page)

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.

So what, if anything but the birth of a folktale, happened?

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.)

There are other explanations, but this seems sufficient.

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, naïveté 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 amuck 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 guard rail 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.

At the mouth of the cave Chris turns toward us.

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.

Thirty feet or so into the cave there's a heavy steel gate.

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.

But folks still believe in it her? I asked.

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 fairy-tale 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.”