ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 19
The Bell Witch
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On October 19, 1820, a cavalry
officer named John R. Bell crossed
the Red River at Port Royal, Tennessee, on the return leg of a grueling
eight-month expedition to the Rocky Mountains, and stopped that evening at the
Murphey residence in Robertson County for dinner. In his journal, he recorded
what he heard that night: tales of an invisible, talking voice, heard by
thousands, haunting a farm not far from where he sat. Bell wasn't a relative of
the family whose name the legend would eventually carry. He just happened to
share it.
Historians who've examined the documentary record agree on an uncomfortable fact about the Bell Witch: there is no surviving contemporary source for the haunting from the years it supposedly occurred. The story’s entire modern foundation rests on a manuscript called “Our Family Trouble,” attributed to Richard Williams Bell, John Bell Sr.’s son, and said to have been written in 1846, twenty-six years after his father’s death, describing events twenty-nine years gone. That manuscript has itself never been located in its original form. It survives only because a newspaperman named Martin Van Buren Ingram claimed to have been given it decades later, and published it, heavily embellished with his own invented dialogue and additional lore, in his 1894 book An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, the single text virtually every popular account of the haunting still draws from today.
Captain Bell’s journal entry predates
Ingram's book by seventy-four years, and it is, as far as the surviving
documentary record shows, the earliest known reference to the legend in any
form, written by someone with no family stake in the story and no reason to
embellish it. It doesn't use the name “Bell Witch.” It doesn't need to. What
Bell recorded, by multiple historians' accounts of his journal, was local
testimony about a voice, mysterious, apparently disembodied, heard by a crowd
of onlookers, already drawing enough attention in October 1820 that word of it
reached a dinner table two states away from where the officer himself called
home. John Bell Sr., the patriarch the legend would later say the “witch”
tormented to death, had roughly two months left to live when that dinner
conversation took place; he died on December 20, 1820, the event Ingram's book
would later credit to the spirit's own poisoned vial. Whatever was actually
happening on that farm in the autumn of 1820, something was already happening,
loudly enough for strangers passing through to hear about it secondhand at
dinner.
Bell’s journal sat largely overlooked as a piece of Bell Witch scholarship for nearly two centuries, published in full as early as the 1950s by historians interested in the “Long Expedition” itself, rather than in Tennessee ghost lore. It took a Discovery Channel broadcast in November 2020, featuring local historian David Britton, to bring the connection to wider public attention, nearly exactly two hundred years after Bell himself sat down to dinner at the Murphey house. That’s a genuinely unusual research story in its own right: a two-century-old government expedition journal, filed away for its geographic and scientific value, turning out to double as the oldest surviving witness to one of America’s most famous ghost stories, discovered not by folklorists chasing the legend but by scholars who happened to be reading an explorer's travel diary for an entirely different reason.
Far more elaborate versions would
come later: the talking entity that quoted scripture, sang hymns to Lucy Bell
while physically tormenting her husband and daughter, and reportedly frightened
off a young Andrew Jackson’s traveling party decades before his presidency (a
story told so often it’s become inseparable from the legend despite no
contemporary record connecting Jackson to the Bells at all). What Bell’s 1820
entry does establish, carefully and without any of that later embellishment, is
that some kind of story involving an unexplained voice was already circulating
in Robertson County barely three years after the haunting is said to have
begun, well before any Bell family member, any newspaper, or any book-length
“authenticated history” got anywhere near it. For a legend built almost
entirely on evidence assembled decades after the fact, a disinterested
outsider's dinner-table journal entry, written while the story was still fresh,
may be the single most valuable piece of documentation anyone has.
The
Bell Witch: An American Haunting
By Brent Monahan | St. Martin's Griffin, 2000
While
Brent Monahan’s The Bell Witch: An American Haunting, published by St.
Martin's Griffin and later adapted into the 2005 film starring Donald
Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, is marketed with a framing device that has misled
more than a few readers (the publisher's own copy describes it as a “recently discovered
manuscript” written by Richard Powell, the schoolteacher who married Betsy
Bell, prepared for publication by novelist Brent Monahan rather than written by
him), it stands as one of the finest occult novels in recent years.
Monahan
tells the story through Powell’s voice, writing a long letter meant for his
daughter's eyes only if she ever shows signs of being “afflicted” the way her
mother once was, and the device gives the familiar material real narrative
propulsion: the rapping sounds, the voices, John Bell's death, all filtered
through a character invested enough in the outcome to make the horror feel
personal rather than recited. Reviewers have consistently praised Monahan's
prose and pacing even while objecting to the marketing sleight of hand, and the
consensus holds up: this is a well-crafted, effectively creepy novelization of
Tennessee's most famous ghost story, written by someone who clearly did his
homework on the legend's existing lore even as he invented his own throughline
for it.
Where
this leaves a reader of today’s post should be plain enough. Everything this
blog has tried to establish about the documentary record, the absence of any
contemporary 1817-to-1821 account, Ingram's own embellishments in 1894, Captain
John R. Bell’s 1820 journal entry as the one piece of writing anyone can
actually trust, applies here too, just one layer further removed. Monahan isn't
claiming to have found new evidence. He’s writing fiction inspired by a legend
that was already, by his own book's writing in 1894, heavily fictionalized.
Read it for what it actually is: a well-told, well-researched ghost story, and pair it with Ingram’s Red Book if you want to see where Monahan drew his raw material, and with Captain Bell’s own 1820 account.
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