The Bell Witch - Tennessee The Bell witch or Bell Witch Haunting is a poltergeist legend from Southern folklore, centered on the 19th-century Bell family ofAdams, Tennessee. John Bell Sr., who made his living as a farmer, resided with his family in Adams, Tennessee in the early 1800s. In 1817, his family came under attack by a witch, who was believed to be a lady called Kate Batts. Various accounts written afterward, tell stories similar to other poltergeist legends. It began with noises in the walls and grew to include unusual sounds; people being slapped and pinched, objects being thrown, and animals being spooked without visible cause. In the 1894 book An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, author Martin Van Buren Ingram claims that the poltergeists name was Kate, and that she frequently cursed the Bell family out loud. The activity centered on the Bells youngest daughter, Betsy, and worsened after she became engaged to one Joshua Gardner. Betsy would wake up with scratches and clumps of her hair torn out, her dreams would become haunted by disturbing images of murders in the woods they were surrounded by. Several accounts report that during his military career, Andrew Jackson was intrigued with the story and was frightened away after traveling to investigate. Other stories relate that the family was haunted by scratching noises outside their door after Bell found a half-dog, half-rabbit creature. Some stories end up with Bell being poisoned by the witch. Accounts vary about the witch being someone who had been cheated by Bell or a male slave whom Bell had killed. Either way, the legend has been around since the 19th Century. There has actually been a few films based around the actions that took place, one being The Haunting of the Bell Witch (which I watched on Netflix last night) and another being An American Haunting. Both different time frames, An American Haunting being more of what supposedly happened to the Bell family, and the haunting of bell witch being more of what happened to a family in the 21st century that then lived on the Bell family land.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 10:07:51 +0000
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