Description Of Place: Most of the land hasn’t changed in over one hundred years. The old John Bell House is long gone, supposedly burned down years ago by superstitious locals, but a modern brick house now stands on the property. Access to the cave is down over a steep path down to the level of the Red River; the gated cave has changed and varied in description as the river has flowed into the cave and changed the shape and appearance of the mouth of the cavern and its interior. As such, photo exteriors of the cave have varied over the years. The cave is illuminated by electric lights that have had to be replaced on random occasions.

“I said, ‘Come on in here and watch behind this tree till I get my gun and fetch my clothes on.’ I thought it was someone trying to break in. That’s what I thought it was. So, I got dressed and went down into the basement with my shot gun and my light and sneaked my way around and came all the way around it. I kept peeping and looking and walking clear around the tree. I looked down for the tracks in the snow, but there were only my tracks. I looked over the walkway, and there wasn’t a single track on my walkway. It’s such things that make me believe in ghosts.”

Other than Bill Eden, friends and visitors to the Eden Farm also saw and bore witness to a host of strange phenomenon that could occur without warning. Bill Eden recalled one young lady who had come up from Nashville to fish on the river nearby:

“Well, we came back up here, and she said she had walked around to the front of my house on the hill. She was just sitting there, you know, looking for rocks and making herself to home, and there was a girl who walked up to her. (She) said that she was blonde-haired, sort of blondish-looking, had blue hair and her hair hung down to her waist. She thought she just walked up to where she was at, and she looked back to say something to her, and she was gone. “

“What kind of clothes did she have on?” Winer asked.

“Said she was dressed in a long black skirt and a white blouse.” Eden goes on to describe another occasion. “(Another) lady came here to go to the cave. So, we started off down to the cave, about twelve or fifteen of us. All at once, this lady just sat down in the path. One of the people who was with her asked what she was doing down there in the path. She answered, ‘I’m not sitting here. Something just lit on my back just like a heavy weight – like a ton of lead and just pressed me into the ground. I can’t get up.’ So, they got a hold of her arms and helped her up and got her back up her hill to her car.”

The cave in question is the Bell Witch Cave, a cave in the embankment of the river that is featured in the tour. It reaches practically a hundred feet or more underground and constants floods whenever it rains and the water level of the river rises. Bill Eden has played host to the cave for several guests and Halloween outings to the farm. He has even had a strange experience inside at one time or another.

“You can hear footsteps in there at times.” Eden says. “And I only ever saw one thing. Lots of people come out here expecting to see a ghost or a witch or whatever you call it. I just call it a spirit, and I only saw one thing and it looked like a real person with its back to you. Looked as if it was built out of a real white-looking heavy fog or snow, or something really solid white, but you couldn’t see through it. It had the complete figure of a person till it got down to about its ankles. It wasn’t touching the floor at all. It was just drifting – bouncing along. There was about five of us there at the time.”

Before Bill Eden owned the farm, a man named Cope and his sister lived in a house on the same location of the present house. When they lived here, Cope saw a bright light about the size of an old oil lamp up in one of the trees. One night when it appeared, Cope’s father shot it and it went out, but nothing feel to the ground. They never figured out just what it was they had shot, or whether or not they had actually hit it.

Bill’s wife, Frances Eden, had also experienced her share of spirit activity at the farm. Like her husband, she could sometimes hear a woman’s voice calling out to her at any time of the day, but, of course, she could never find out just who was supposed to be calling her. One time while she was preparing lunch, the sound of someone dragging a long chain came through the front door and into the living room. Passing through the dining room, the sound entered the kitchen and stopped near her and the cooking stove. She never saw a single thing the whole time, bust she has heard on two or three occasions a loud, shrill scream just like a woman screaming. Bill has heard the ghostly screams at the cave at one time or another. Trying to follow it into the cave, he headed as far as he could into it, but couldn’t catch up to it or figure out what was doing the screaming. Whatever was doing it was just managing to keep ahead of him to goad him into going deeper and deeper into the cave. 

A few descendants of the John Bell family still live in the area of Adams. One of them became good friends with Bill Eden through his ownership of the farm, and together, they shared stories and facts of the Bell Witch. The camaraderie between the two seemed to lead to more mischief from the witch.

“His mother had inherited this bunch of old china dishes and kept them stored in a cabinet.” Bill tells the story. “She hadn’t used them in over forty to fifty years. She lived just two houses down from her son, and one morning, it sounded as if ever dish in those cabinets had fallen out on to the floor and broke all to pieces. She had thought someone had broken into the house on her. She was an old lady so she called upon her son and told him to get up there quick because she thought someone was in there breaking all her dishes. So he grabbed his pistol and raced on down to the house. When he got into the house, every single dish that had been in the cabinets was lying all over the floor, and there wasn’t a single cracked dish in the whole bunch.

“I lived with some of the Bells over here. The house would fill up with smoke and drive the company off and things like that would happen. They all got scared to live there and moved away because they couldn’t stay there anymore. So I lived on in there, and all I ever had happen sounded like a team of horses or mules running across the front porch. It had a wooden floor, but you could jump up and look outside and look all you wanted to and there’d be nothing to see so I poured a concrete porch, but it didn’t help.

“And a funny thing, that old house, right today, the lady that lives across the road, she told me last summer that the lights upstairs still light up and time of the day or night, and there hasn’t been an electric line going to that house for years. She says those lights still come on upstairs.”

History: John Bell, his wife Luce (Lucy), and nine children, Jesse, John, Drewry, Benjamin, Zadoc, Richard, Joel, Esther and Elizabeth “Betsy,” moved to Tennessee like so many families from their native North Carolina in 1804 with all their slaves. Near Adams, Tennessee, Bell had purchased a thousand acres into which he created a cotton plantation combined with other crops and livestock. The children were taught by the local schoolmaster, a man named Richard William Powell. Powell took an immediate liking to the Bell’s oldest daughter, Betsy, but she already had a suitor in the form of a man Joshua Gardner. It was about this time that the Bell Witch first entered the lives of the Bell Family.

In the beginning, the so-called witch started out subdued and unthreatening. In late summer of 1817, John Bell saw what he thought was a strange dog prancing and moving through the cornstalks. He took a shot at the creature with a shotgun and seemed to hit it, but when he ran over to get a better look at whatever he had it, he could not find a single trace of whatever he had hit.

A second sighting occurred shortly after this incident. As John Bell and two of his other sons were hunting, they noticed an odd bird larger than any other bird they knew or were familiar with perched at the top of an old oak tree. Same as before, John Bell took a shot at the strange creature this time and also seemed to hit it. The strange bird was seen to fall to the ground and even hit the bottom of the tree. However, as John and his boys searched and circled round the tree, there was nothing remotely alive or even dead to be located at all. Perhaps, they must have wondered, the shot had grazed it and the strange bird had glided off just short of hitting the earth.

A few weeks later, Betsy was heading toward the main house and noticed a strange girl about her own age dressed in green and sitting in a swing attached to this same old oak tree. As Betsy headed to the tree to meet her, the girl vanished. She was just there one minute and gone the next.

Dean, one of the Bell slaves, also had a story to tell his employer. He described seeing a large black dog on the property that he knew didn’t belong to the family. The vicious animal was snarling and threatening him, but when Dean started to approach it with a stick, it disappeared from right in front of him.

Despite this mild beginning, neither the Bell family nor any of their friends were aware of the specter that would enter their lives or of the torment yet to come. One neighbor named Alex Gunn suggested that the family was prone to wild very active imaginations, but some people actually took the incredible stories to heart and believed them for what they seemed to suggest. Eventually, the exploits of the supposed Bell ghost were the subject of whispers and secret tales amidst their neighbors and being retold across the state. The Bell Witch was born from these simple rumors.

At the Bell House, the family started experiencing new activity that defied explanation with increased intensity and even frustrating frequency before both family and friends. The sound of someone franticly and determinedly knocking at the front door in the middle of the night would drive everyone to the door, but no one was ever there. On windless nights, someone broke the still night air by rattling at the windows trying to get inside the house. As weeks went by, the disturbances became even more unnerving, and the lack of sleep made everyone short and bad tempered to each other. No rational explanations could cover all these problems. There were sounds of an unseen rat nibbling at bedposts, and of an invisible bog clawing at the floor somewhere inside with them. The sound of fighting dogs chained together would fill the entire house. Noises spread from room to room just far enough to keep from being discovered. They only stopped when the lights came on and the family members searched for the source of the sounds.

New sounds eventually filled the house. The sound of someone choking and gurgling or dragging chains from room to room replaced the reverberations of unseen animals. The Bell children felt their bed sheets ripped from off of them as they slept. If they tried to fight against their invisible intruder, they would feel the sting of an unseen hand striking them faces and leaving it red and sore. In the summer of 1818, ten-year old Richard and even Betsy felt someone yanking at their hair. At times, the ghost focused on Betsy, and she would run screaming from her bedroom in the middle of the night without any memory or provocation of what had caused her to do so.

Betsy’s suitors, young Joshua Gardner and the schoolmaster Richard Powell, at that time, were both very active in seeking Betsy’s hand in marriage and trying to dissuade her decision from the other. She was obviously more inclined to be romantically-connected to a man closer to her in age, but any time she showed preference to Joshua over Richard, the nightly attacks seemed to focus more on her that night.

Betsy made several attempts to escape the wrath of the witch. In order to get badly needed rest, she often stayed in the homes of close friends and neighbors, but the spirit seemed to follow her. Her long hair was being yanked until she would be in tears, and the side of her face would be struck hard, leaving a red imprint on the side of her face in the shape of a human hand.  She also began experiencing fainting spells as if the breath was being sucked from right out of her body. At times, she felt she was being smothered. She also complained of being stuck with pins and needles, and once, she seemed to vomit forth a mouthful of pins and needles.

John Bell soon formed an informal committee of close friends, neighbors and allies in order to delve to the source of the haunting that had infested his home and family and to hopefully eradicate it. From all over the area, came alleged exorcists, dewitchers and expellers of evil spirits, all with attempts to expel the malicious spirit, and hordes of the morbidly curious and idly skeptic trying to see the witch perform. None of the supposed exterminators were successful except for James Johnson and he only managed to decrease the ferocity and focus of the attacks to some degree. A close friend of the Bells and a devout Christian, Johnson came and listened to the sounds in the house of lips smacking and the noise of gulping and hissing of breath through teeth and rationally determined that the entity had to have some sort of intelligence. If it had intelligence, it could be rationalized with.  Gradually, Johnson was able to get incoherent words and even full sentences from out of the air and atmosphere. Announcing his level of success to the public, Johnson exorcised the witch in the name of Christ and the attacks and abuse on Betsy ceased for a while, only to increase later with an intensity never seen before.

William Porter, another close friend of John Bell, stayed a night in the house and woke to find a physical but unseen presence pulling away at his nightclothes. Jumping up, he noticed that his bedcovers had been rolled up and placed in a bundle on one side of the bed. Convinced that this was his opportunity to finally destroy the witch, he grasped up the thing lying beside him in the bed in the bed covers and started across the room to hurl the entire bundle into the fireplace before he was thwarted. The bundle in his arms suddenly began getting very heavy for him to carry and started giving off an odor later described as “the most offensive stench (he) had ever smelled.” Overcome by the pungent attack to his senses, Porter dropped the bundle and dashed out of the house for fresh air and returned later to locate the bundle where he had dropped it. Shaking it out completely, he found it empty and odorless.

According to legend, it is about this time that General Andrew Jackson, political leader and future President of the United States, is believed to have heard about the ghost from friends and guests in his home near Nashville and rode off to see it for himself after being asked if he was aware of its existence. Interested in confirming if the legend was true, Jackson boarded a coach and set off on a journey with a small entourage of associates and soldiers. Somewhere within the confines of the Adams city limits, Jackson and his company were nearing the Bell Farm and their coach suddenly and inexplicable stopped in its tracks. Suspecting they were stopped in mud or an unseen gully, the general and his men got out to inspect the damage, but didn’t see a thing holding up the carriage. The horses were struggling and fighting, their wails and frenzied screams filling the otherwise silent wagon trail, but the coach did not move. It was neither lodged in place nor locked up, but some incredible force was holding it in place.

“By the eternal, boys!” Jackson suddenly had a startling revelation. “It is the witch!!!” From somewhere over his head, another voice, not belonging from any member of his retinue of sightseers, cried out from the dark shadows of the surrounding wilderness.

“All right, General, go on! I’ll be talking to you again tonight!”

Without warning, the coach suddenly lurched forward with a crash and Old Hickory continued on his way to a paranormal meeting with the ghost at the Bell farm. The witch predicted Jackson becoming President of the United States, the Civil War and several other future events. She also whisked his hat off his head as he dared challenging her. While the entire story of Jackson’s encounter with the supernatural is quite impressive and gives a somewhat accurate depiction of the time and the character of the Tennessee hero, there is no proof that it ever really happened. Jackson did own land near Adams, but whether or not he actually visited the Bell farm is a matter for debate.

Meanwhile, the Bell Witch was making full use of the voice, which James Johnson had given it. She was beginning to be heard laughing, talking and even singing during all hours of the time or day. Some skeptics and critics accused Betsy of being talented enough in ventriloquism to perpetuate the entire hoax. This imputation was challenged and disproved when the family doctor put his hand over Betsy’s voice as the witch spewed forth with a volley of words. Subsequently, the witch announced its destiny and purpose to the Bell Family in no certain terms.

“I am determined to haunt and torment Old Jack Bell for as long as he lives!!” The witch declared. Jack was the oft-used name for John Bell.

As the attacks on Betsy diminished, new and increased antagonism was unleashed upon Old John “Jack” Bell. He began suffering a facial twitch ever since the Witch had first made herself known, and suffered other strange physical afflictions. His whole tongue would swell up to the extent his face appeared misshapen. Theses spells sometimes lasted two to three days and then he’d be up as if nothing had ever happened. As time passed, the witched grew angrier and more virulent and continued to blast John Bell with curses and heinous threats, but even while all this was happening, his wife, Luce, was treated tenderly and with loving respect. It was almost as if there were two ghosts present as the witch showed another aspect of her personality. While Luce Bell was bedridden by an illness, cracked hazel nuts and wild fresh grapes unique for the season appeared from nowhere by her bedside. Nobody knew where they had come from or even how they had got there. However, during one of John’s more severe attacks, lasting eight days, “the witch cursed and raved like a maniac for those days and ceased not troubling him.”

There were times when Doctor George Hapson, the Bell Family doctor, would feel the impact of the witch’s presence. Once he entered John’s room and set his bag on the floor. Within a few minutes, there’d be the sound of breaking glass as if every pill and medicine bottle in the bag had been broken. Yet, when the doctor would run over and check the bag, everything would be in order.

A week after the eight-day siege, John Bell and his eldest son, Richard, together encountered the witch. Richard Bell committed much of the hauntings to a diary he later published; the memoir has since become the number one record on the family’s terror. According to his writings, he and his father were walking on their way for the hog pens as one of John Bell’s shoes was jerked right up off his feet and sailed off several feet. Richard retrieved it for his father, and replaced it, making sure he tied it tightly with a double hard knot.

“After going a few steps farther,” Richard recalls. “The other shoe flew off in an identical manner, which was replaced and tied in the same case as the first. In no way they I can tie them, would they hold, notwithstanding his shoes fitted close and were a little hard to put on, and we were walking over a smooth dry road.

“After much delay and worry, we reached the place and tended the hogs and we started back for the house. We had not gone many steps before his shoes commenced jerking off as before, and presently he complained of a blow to his face, which felt like an open hand, that almost stunned him, and he laid down on a log that laid by the roadside.

“Then his face began jerking with fearful contortions, soon his whole body, then his shoes would fly off as fast as I could put them on. The situation was trying and made me shudder. I was terrified by the spectacle of the contortions that seized Father, as if to convert him to a very demon to swallow me up.

“Having finished tying Father’s shoes, I raised myself up to hear the reviling sound of derisive songs piercing the air with terrorizing force. As the demonic shrieks died away in triumphant rejoicing, the spell passed off, and I saw tears tracing down Father’s yet quivering cheeks.”

“Oh, my son, my son,” John Bell lamented. “Not long will you have a father to wait on so patiently. I cannot much longer survive the persecutions of this terrible thing. It is killing me by slow tortures, and I feel the end is nigh.”

On regaining his senses, John Bell returned to the house feeling calm and collected, although he would never be able to leave the house alive again. For no sooner had he entered his house, he immediately took to his bed where his health began to rapidly decline. As the witch continued her deviltry, his declination and ultimate demise became obvious.

On the morning of December 19, 1820, John bell was found to be lying in an unnatural position and in a complete stupor. All attempts to waken him proved fruitless. Drewry traveled to Port Royal to get Doctor Hapson, and John Jr. went to the cupboard to get his father’s medicine, but upon opening the cabinet, his eyes instead fell upon “a smoky looking vial, which was about one third full of a dark-colored liquid.”  Neighbors James Johnson, Alex Gunn and Frank Miles arrived and were still speculating on the contents of the vial as Dr. Hapson arrived. As the doctor bent over the unconscious form of John Bell, the witch cried out: “It’s useless for you to try and relieve Old Jack. I have got him this time. He’ll never get up from that bed again.”

“What is this vial?” James asked his old rival.

The witch’s voice cackled proudly: “I put it there and gave Old Jack a big dose of it last night while he was asleep which fixed him.” No other information concerning the ingredients of the vial or its origins could be brought forward. Hapson said it was no type of medicine he had ever brought into the house. Someone suggested the vial be tested on something in the house. Alex Gunn found a cat and a drop of the contents from the vial were placed on the unsuspecting feline. The cat eventually swirled wildly in a circle for several seconds, rolled over on to its back and died. John Bell lay all that day in night in a semi-coma from which he could not be aroused. Dr. Hapson confirmed that John Bell’s breath smelled similar to the contents of the vial. Without taking any further samples for chemical evaluation, he smashed the vial into the fireplace as a large blue flame exploded up the chimney.

During the following night, the voice of the Bell Witch was partaking the revelry and jubilation of the dying man and at the same time deriding the dying man. By morning, John Bell was dead and the witch finally drew silent.

John Bell Sr. was buried on a cold, bright December day with more people in attendance at his funeral than at any other funeral ever before that time in Tennessee. After the service was finished, the gravediggers began to shovel the ground over what would be John Bell’s final resting place. Over the subdued conversation of the dispelling mourners, the Bell Witch’s loud shrill voice drowned out the voices of the crowd by sing “Row Me Up Some Brandy O” over and over again. Following the death of John Bell, the hauntings began to taper off. After seemingly run their course, an object resembling a cannonball plummeted down the chimney one evening and exploded in a cloud of smoke. From the smoky room, the witch called out to the surviving family, “I’m going, and I will be back in several years.”

Despite the vow, the Bell Witch returned briefly during this period of dormancy to Betsy Bell. She had grown up into a shapely blue-eyed woman with waist length blonde hair. She finally accepted an engagement ring from Joshua Gardner and plans for her eventual wedding were finally being made. The two lovers were in pleasant revelry in the peace after the witch’s departure, but their wedding was not going to occur. The witch’s voice pleaded with Betsy over and over not to marry Gardner until her pleads began to sound like a warning. Fearful of what might if she married Gardner, Betsy tearfully returned her engagement ring to Joshua Gardner on Easter Sunday 1821 and called off the wedding. Betsy renewed her relationship with Richard Powell and subsequently the two of them were betrothed. They lived together peacefully out of the shadow of the Bell Witch until Richard’s death seventeen years later. As a widow, Betsy Bell and her daughter lived in Panola County, Mississippi until her death in 1890 at the age of eighty-six. Joshua Gardner would live a prosperous life in West Tennessee until he died at the age of eighty-four.

After ruining and destroying the love between Betsy Bell and Joshua Gardner, the Bell Witch remained silent for the rest of her promised seven years. The majority of the Bell children had become adults and forgot about the witch as they moved on with their own lives. Only Richard and Joel remained at home with their aging mother. When the witch did finally return, she was just a brief echo of what she once was. A mere annoyance than the terror she once exhibited, she returned to tapping on walls, scraping against the house and even her old trick of tugging at bed clothes. Seemingly showing her age, she left the farm to visit John Bell Jr. at his home to announce her presence. From there, she promised to return in “one hundred years and seven more.”

During the time the Bell Witch vowed to be away, there were a few paranormal confrontations in Robertson County around the city of Adams, but almost all of these can be attributed to other local ghosts, phantoms and revenants. A few Bell Witch stories surfaced during these years by people visiting the farm, but these stories can be discounted. After the hundred and seven years, nothing happened on the farm for 1935, the year the witch was expected to return. It seemed she had finally run her course of mischief up until Bill Eden acquired the farm and started the tradition of giving local tours. The Bell Witch seems to like her celebrity status, but she refuses to perform on cue. The Bell Family descendants in the interim, however, underwent a few family tragedies. One of John Bell Sr’s grandchildren, John Elijah Bell I, was struck and killed by a speeding ambulance in Memphis, Tennessee, and his son, John Elijah Bell II, married a woman who suffered from a mysterious nerve ailment that prevented her from talking and was accompanied by stiffness of the throat, an ailment very much like what John Bell had experienced a century and a half before. His daughter, Ann Bell, lost her husband and two daughters to a fire in the family home, and later committed suicide by taking a reported eighty-seven sleeping pills. She has one immediate surviving relative, Richard Borden Adam.

Over several years, the late Bill Eden helped to establish the tradition of Bell Witch Cave Tours, and it now continues without him. The year before he had acquired the farm, a spiritualist had tried to re-establish contact with the Bell Witch, but there was almost four thousand people and so much noise that it became virtually impossible to communicate with the ghost at all. Today, the property is owned by Walter and Chris Kirby, who still continue to take people on tours to the Bell Witch Cave.

Identity Of Ghosts: There has been a lot of speculation trying to determine the identity or source of the Bell Witch. According to one story, the ghost was that an overseer hired by John Bell to work on his farm, but who also took his temper out on the slaves. This overseer also had an eye for the eldest Bell daughter, but in this story, the eldest Bell daughter is named Mary, which detracts to the veracity of this account John Bell killed the overseer in a duel and pled self-defense in his preceding trial and was exonerated of the murder. The ghost of this disgruntled overseer caused trouble on the Bell property in North Carolina, and John Bell retaliated by moving the family out of state to the acres of land near the Red River in Tennessee. It was here that the ghost of the overseer was warped into the legend of the Bell Witch.

Nicknamed “Old Kate,” the traditional Bell Witch had in life been a woman named Kate Batts (or Bates). John Bell Sr. encountered her when he first arrived in Tennessee and cheated her in a business deal. After Kate died under suspicious and mysterious circumstances, her ghost exacted its revenge upon John Bell from beyond the grave.

Noted Hungarian psychologist and psychic researcher, Nandor Fodor, developed a rather fascinating theory of his own. He concluded that the witch was not a spirit nor a ghost of the dead returned to haunt the Bells, but rather a poltergeist. He suggested that the witch had in fact “come into manifested life through Betsy Bell,” and that it was a splinter of Betsy’s own personality formed at the onset of puberty that developed into an independent entity.

Another theory that is barely elaborated upon is that the alleged ghost was actually the creation of Richard Powell himself, the schoolmaster who had been romantically connected to Betsy Bell. Described as very intelligent and coming from a very wealthy family, he was certainly in a strong local position to be privy to the sort of rumors the Bell Witch repeated to the Bell Family, and he certainly did not care for Betsy’s relationship with Joshua Gardner. He developed political aspirations after marrying Betsy and certainly was still alive during her later appearances, but critics of this theory doubt he could have been responsible for even half the activity the Bell Witch was credited unless he was following the lead of an actual spirit and using its existence to further himself and gain what he wanted. Of this, there is no proof or authentication.

In his book, “Haunted Houses,” Richard Winer questioned if the ghost of Betsy Bell herself could be returning to her father’s old property, or if the witch was capable of appearing in her likeness.

Source/Comments: An American Haunting (2010) Phenomenon and history from the sources: Haunted Houses by Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn-Ishmael, pages 13-31; Reader’s Digest: American Folklore and Legend, pages 134-135; Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey by Kathryn Tucker Wyndham, pages 150-159; Time Life Books: Mysteries of the Unknown: Hauntings, pages 93-95,98; Famous Ghosts, Phantoms And Poltergeists for the Millions, pages 79-91; Volunteer Ghosts by William Collins, pgs. 17-28;

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