After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Bell Witch of Tennessee

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

It's America's greatest ghost story: the 1817-1821 haunting of a rural family by a mysterious entity—sometimes violent, sometimes mischievous, even offering marriage advice. Poltergeist? Witch? Hoax? Or pure legend from the beginning?Maddy Pelling tells Anthony Delaney the story this week.Edited by Tomos Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARK.You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast

Welcome back to After Dark. Today, we are going to be exploring one of our most requested episodes. I feel like we say that quite a lot, but then we do get quite a lot of requests. So actually, we probably have quite a few requested episodes. Anyway, you get where I'm going with this. But here to tell us a little bit more is one of you amazing listeners. So over to you, Catherine. Hi, guys. My name is Catherine and I live in Nashville, Tennessee.

I've really been loving the After Dark podcast and I wanted to suggest a creepy story from my neck of the woods. Growing up in Middle Tennessee, I always heard about the legend of the Belle Witch. And that dates to the early 1800s in the town of Adams, Tennessee. The Belle Witch is like our local boogeyman. She was the source of much terror at middle school slumber parties. If you say her name three times into a mirror at midnight, she's supposed to appear and I guess murder you. I wouldn't know because I was always too scared to follow through on the dares to try it. But anyway, I've heard many different versions of the Bell Witch's story,

and I'm hoping that Anthony and Maddie can get to the bottom of it for me. Thanks so much. And guys, as you know by now, if you have any ideas for an After Dark topic, then you can email us on afterdark at historyhit.com. We'd love to hear your suggestions. So now, let's get into this episode. 1817, Tennessee near the Kentucky border. The town of Adams was small at the start of the 18th century. Its populace was made up of a handful of families, their homes, wooden, solid, creaking, spread across the vast landscape. Among the settlers of this land, for settlers they were, having

pushed native Cherokee and the Chickasaw off it, was John Bell. Together with his wife Lucy, he had six children. The youngest, Betsy, was just twelve. There was also at least one enslaved person in the household, a man named Dean. Life here was hard. The land was unforgiving and everywhere danger lurked. There were black bears, cougars, coyote, even wild hogs. Then there were men too. Violence and survival went hand in hand. But as the Bell family would discover that year, there was something else lurking in the Tennessee wilds. Something far more terrifying.

It was nightfall when John Bell first saw the strange creature. Huge and blacker than the night closing in around it. It stalked him along the edge of a field, keeping to the shadows. John grew uneasy. Was it following him? He raised his gun and fired. The thing fled, its huge bulk crashing through the undergrowth. Other strange occurrences followed. John's son, Drew, saw a giant bird, unfeasibly big, fly over his head. Betsy saw a young girl in a green dress hanging from a tree only for her to disappear when she approached. Dean reported being followed by a large, dark dog. Nothing obvious connected these events, and separately they may have been

forgotten, overlooked, and put out of mind by those who'd experienced them. Taken together, however, they left the Bell household with a distinct feeling of unease, and they were right to worry. Whatever it was out there that had disturbed their peace would not stay outside for long. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today we are talking about one of the most requested episodes, I think, that we've had since we started After Dark. And it tells the story and the history of how an individual becomes haunted, how a family becomes haunted, and then how that expands into elements

of the community becoming haunted. And it also tells us a little bit how we tell ghost stories and what purposes those ghost stories can serve to us as modern consumers of older ghost stories and to the people who are alive at that time. And this is one of the ways in which we try to approach these paranormal elements on this podcast as historians, where we go, what are those ghosts telling us about the people at that time and what can they tell us about our own time and the way we interact with those paranormal elements. So Maddie, before we get into it, because I know there's a lot to get through in this episode, can you situate us a little bit here?

What is the context of what's happening in Tennessee and across the world at this time? I absolutely can, yes. So we're in 1817 initially in America, in Tennessee. In the years leading up to 1817, we've got Britain's war with Napoleon with France. Napoleon at this point in 1817 is captured already, and he's been captured for three years, and he's on the island of Santolina in exile. And this is a moment when the world can breathe and relax after that turmoil. It's been a global war. It's been fighting land and sea, and it's been a really difficult road to get to that point. Napoleon, he's a really fascinating character in terms of the fact that he is captured and not executed. He's out there in the

imaginations of people on this little island in exile where he spends the rest of his life and he dies there. And it sort of plays havoc on people's imaginations in terms of a threat being out in the world that's not quite dealt with. So it's not necessarily central to the story, but I think it's something to kind of bear in mind that that's the psyche in this moment. In the US, we've just had a presidential election the year before in 1816. Now 1816 might ring a bell or two with our listeners because it is famously the year without a summer. A bit like this year. I was like, what?

One could say. I genuinely in my head went, who's Arthur Summer? I was like, who is Arthur Summer? We've never done an episode on somebody called Arthur Summer. Clearly need to enunciate more. Okay. It's a year without a summer. And maybe without Arthur Summer, we don't know.

He was missing. Yeah, he was missing. Everyone was searching. So basically, a very famous meteorological moment across the Northern Hemisphere. There's an island in the East Indies where the volcano, which is most of the island, erupts

catastrophically and it throws all of this volcanic ash and plumage and dust and all of that into the atmosphere. And the result is basically a whole summer of darkness. There's unseasonal weather. So in North America, in the height of July, it's snowing. There's a real darkness over the world in that year and it is reflected in all kinds of art and literature. So famously, there's a real darkness over the world in that year and it is reflected in all kinds of art and literature. So famously, there's a really great work like an art historian who looked at the paintings of Turner in that year and his whole palette, his color palette changes and everything's darker, the landscape's so much more grimy and gloomy. And it's famously the year in

which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who is going to become Mary Shelley, but they're not married at this point, her and Percy Shelley and her sister run away to Europe together and they go to Lord Byron's house, his villa in Switzerland. And in the midst of this dark gloomy summer, they have the competition to write a ghost story. And that is the birth of Frankenstein on the night. There's a storm and she begins to write. So there's a real feeling of unease going on. There's Napoleon exiled on an island. There's a lot for the imagination, isn't there? Like if you are in any way after dark inclined and you're alive in 1817, it's the year for you.

It's the year for you. Yeah, absolutely. So the presidential election that happens, James Monroe was elected. And there's a feeling in America of sort of hopefulness by the time we get to 1817, this is the 41st year that the US has existed. There's a sense that there's been great struggle in building the nation and Monroe is really selling an idea of hopefulness moving forward. He's pursuing warmer relations with Britain. Britain

and the US are renegotiating the land boundary across the northern US and Canada. And so the shape of the United States is changing, the nature of it is changing, the character of its people. Everyone's asking what is America? What is the US? What do we want to be going forward? And the backdrop is uneasiness and turmoil. This is one that's been really requested. People are always DMing me on Instagram. People have emailed in. This is one I was so excited to do, but I've always understood it as a legend, not a historical event. And we're going to talk a little bit around this. The other thing that I know about this case before we start to unpack what supposedly happened is that it is the at least partial inspiration for several great movies, including the Blair Witch project,

which never seen it too scary possibly. I'd hesitate to watch it. Love that one. Other film and this I do adore is Robert Eggers about a witch? Is it a ghost story? Is it a poltergeist story? Or is it something else entirely? Because the categorization of what this thing is that we're going to talk about changes all the time in terms of how people talk about it. Even the people who experience it at the time don't really have the vocabulary for it. It changes shape, it changes its characteristics so much, I'm not clear on what it is so I want your opinion. Have you ever wondered if the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually real? Or what made Alexander so great? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week every week on the Ancients from History hit where I'm joined by leading academics, bestselling authors and world class

archaeologists to shine a light on some of ancient history's most fascinating questions like who built Stonehenge and why? What are the Dead Sea Scrobs and why are they so valuable? And were the Spartan warriors really as formidable as the history books say? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week every week on the Ancients from History hit wherever you get your podcasts. Right, well let's get into the weeds of it then and give me some of the details. Not long after firing his gun at the unsettlingly large creature in the fields, John Bell starts to fear the thing, whatever it was, has followed him home. Inside the sturdy log cabin he shares with Lucy and their children, its thick walls punctuated only by small windows looking out onto the darkness beyond.

Strange knockings and tappings begin to sound under the floor. Soon they migrate to the walls, scratching and scraping across the grain of the beams. For a while, the family try their best to ignore what's happening. Lucy doesn't want to scare the children, but things will only get worse. Nighttime is when the activity comes alive, and candles are extinguished and the fire in the grate has died to a dull crackle. Shapes move in the dark. Soon, bedsheets are ripped from under sleeping infants, hair is pulled, and Betsy, just 12 years old, feels her skin pricked with needles. John is at a loss to explain it. How can he fight something he cannot see, but which is able to cause physical harm to those he loves most. Then they hear a voice, low at first, metallic,

gravelly, but certainly a woman's there's no doubt of that. She speaks in the air, from all directions, the sounds of her words filling the whole house. Lucy cowers in fear in the corner, while the children cry, watching their terror-struck parents. The thing, whatever or whoever it is, regurgitates scripture, imitates Betsy, tells her she should marry a local man, Joshua Gardner. Sometimes it's kind, speaking in soothing tones to Lucy, showing respect to John. Sometimes though, it's cruel. It threatens to hurt, to curse, to kill. It cackles and screeches and answers to old Kate. For the next few years, the Bell family are haunted by the witch. News travels fast, and

hundreds of curious neighbours, then travellers from further afield, find themselves dumpstruck inside the house listening to the improbable babble of a supernatural being. Old Kate performs tricks too. She spies on neighbours, flying invisible to houses and churches miles away, and is able to report on secret conversations. She spreads gossip and exposes scandal. Eventually, life under her terrible reign proves too much for John. It's claimed in some versions of the tale that the witch herself poisoned him. In others, he simply suffered a stroke. Is this a witch? Is it a poltergeist?

Is it a ghost? Is it imagination? Well, it's made up. But let's be a little bit more considerate than that. So there are so many elements of poltergeist activity here, what we would now term poltergeist activity. So we have a young girl, Betsy's 12, did you say? Anytime we've got a teenage girl, she's 12, yeah. Instantly I'm thinking poltergeist. As with historic and modern poltergeist cases, she seems to be the center of the

poltergeist activity. So the poltergeist focus, as it's called, or the poltergeist center. of the Poltergeist activity. So the Poltergeist focus, as it's called, or the Poltergeist center. So that all very much fits Poltergeist activity as does as it develops voices. So is Old Kate coming through Betsy at all? No. So Old Kate's voice is in the air. And people are looking at Betsy. I mean, you don't know, you weren't there, but is that what the accounts tell us?

So, no, not necessarily. Betsy is one of the people who interacts with it, speaks to it, and it speaks to her. So when she's little in 1817, when she's just 12, and of course she grows over the next few years, the haunting ends in 1820, 1821, something like that. So it's several, it's several years and it's the years of Betsy's teenage life that this happens, but she's not necessarily the sole focus. Her skin is pricked and she's attacked and she's pulled from the bed. Her hair is pulled and that of her siblings as well. Which is quite witchcrafty. The pricking of the skin is more linked to witchcraft than it is to pulverize. And crucially in terms of Betsy, there's this strange moment where the ghost says, you need

to marry the neighbor, Joshua Gardner. Does Joshua get a say in this? I'm guessing Joshua's really hot and Betsy's totally into him and she's like, oh, the ghost says, Joshua, I have to marry you. I'm so sorry. It feels a bit like that, doesn't it? Yeah, it totally does. You know, that's the equivalent of like a teenage girl writing in her diary, like Mrs.

Antonina Delaney, as I'm sure many girls do. Yes, well, and they're all weeping themselves to sleep now. You know, so there's that element, but there are other members of the family who are attacked by the entity, whatever it is, who are spoken to by it. It seems to latch onto the mother Lucy. It calls her the best woman in the world. And is it Lucy doing the voice? And makes out that she's this sort of angel. And often it's an adversary of John and it goes after him and it says, I will kill you, get away. Sometimes it's

fine with him and they're a bit more relaxed. Sometimes they're at odds with each other, John and this being in the house, which is invisible, by the way, the whole time. So it's something that's existing in a space with them and they're seeing the tangible effects of it, but they don't see it at all. I just want to think a bit more about that domestic space as well and the relationship of the family who are for many years experiencing this. If we understand this haunting as a psychological event or an imaginative event rather than a paranormal event, what does this tell us about the domestic, the home life of John Bell and his family, of Lucy and their children? There's something there about potential tensions in the marriage,

there may be violence towards the children or that they're feeling unsettled. The other thing to bear in mind here is in the context of their community, their settlers in a vast landscape, a landscape that's full of dangerous wild animals. It's a landscape that in this period, in this year in fact, there are formal attempts made to remove the last of the Native Americans off the land. This is a land that's been fought over, that's been emptied of its indigenous people. Could this be a reflection of some of those anxieties? And also to live in that kind of community where life is so difficult and you really have to fight every day to survive. What about the elements of this story, the ghost, the witch, whatever it is,

going to other people's houses? It's an invisible force that can transgress those small, safe cabins that are keeping people alive, those shelters. It can go through the walls, it can spy on people, you can see what your neighbours are saying about you. There are reports in this story that the ghost can say word for word two different sermons going on miles apart in different churches. I mean, how anyone verified that, I'm not really sure. But this idea of transgression, of being able to move around this landscape, these spaces, to me that feels like a manifestation of all those anxieties in one terrifying package. I think you're right. What I will caveat with is how many times when we encounter a story like this, or an account like this, it's almost universal, where particularly, again, there's a young girl at the center of the story, and it tends to take place within a family and within a family home. How many times is that what you've just described layered over the top of it? Almost in every single case there is frustration from the young girl that she's not being hurt, not being taken seriously, her body is changing, her place in the family is becoming less secure

because she knows she's going to be married out of it soon, well relatively soon. So we get this kind of, I want to say modern psychology because it soon, well, relatively soon. So we get this kind of, I want to say modern psychology, because it is in many ways a modern psychology layered on top of what is being reported from within this family. And the other thing, Betsy might have been very happy with her lot within the context of 1817, even though that feels very uncomfortable for us. Now, she may not, and there is no universal experience to speak to this, but we also don't know. And that's a historian hat coming on there, I suppose, because these people are not archives from history. But at the same time, this is actually relatively late.

So if you watch, if you do watch Robert Eggers, The Witch, it's set much earlier than this. I think 17th century. So this is coming into the 19th century. Belief in the supernatural is by no means universal now. And nor is it ever, but certainly by now, we have been through to a certain extent, so-called enlightenment. I know we're maybe not reaching all parts of the world with that. To me, this feels like, and I'm inferring here, but I'm putting it together based on what I'm hearing you tell me, I think the whole family needed to be in on this. I think all of the people within that house were for whatever reason, concocting

these events, stories, voices, sounds, gathering information from potentially the community, if that's what was happening, because it would take the entire ensemble to carry off what you're describing. I agree. That is, of course, if we can consider it a real historic event, and then we can put those motives onto people. If it is just a story that's been handed down, and we're going to get into how this has come down to us in a minute, to me, inventing a story like this, or this

story being seeded in people's minds in this area and then growing and being added to, to me, that's more likely to take on these broader narratives, these anxieties, these thoughts about the American landscape, about who is an American, who is considered not an American, who has ownership of the land. These are all questions that I think come into this story if it's a story. And I'm not denying that if Betsy and the rest of the Bell family, who did exist, there are records to verify that they did exist and their descendants still live in this town, some of them today. So they were real people, but if they really did experience this in whatever form, whether you believe in it

or not, I think we can bring into it those elements of more intimate and personal, less national, less broad brushstrokes in terms of motivation and narratives and how they perceive the world. But to me, it's a story. It's starting to feel very like that to me. So let me add in another element of this, which I think is going to convince you more of the narrative, the story-ness, yes, of this. So part of the legend, let's say, surrounding the Bellwitch is that the Bellhouse is visited by General Andrew Jackson.

Now, Andrew Jackson- Is this real? Has this archivally happened? Wait, wait, wait. Okay. So Jackson is, he'll be best known to people as being the seventh president of the US. So he served from 1829 to 1837. Any involvement he has in the Bell story is taking place in the years before that.

In that period, he was a lawyer, he was a plantation owner, he was a military man, and he was a statesman. He was a politician before he was the president. And in the Bell lore, the Bell legend, he was a politician before he was the president. And in the Bell lore, the Bell legend, he's supposed to have come with some soldiers down to Tennessee to the Bell House. In some versions he goes specifically to see it because according to the story, hundreds of people are flocking there to see it. In other stories he's passing through and he's like, oh, that's going to look. On his way to the Bell House, some of his soldiers are moving a cart and they suddenly feel the cart

stop against an invisible barrier and it can't go any further. And Jackson is supposed to have exclaimed, and I'm not going to do my best 19th century American accent, but he says, by the eternal boys, it's the witch. There's a sense of like panic and sort of delicious intrigue amongst his soldiers and they all decide to go to the bell house that night. But before they do, the wagon is still stuck. And then in the general's ear, he hears this voice, this female voice say, all right, general, let the wagon move on.

I will see you again tonight. Stop it. It's too good to be true. It's not. Do you know what? Now I just hate it. So it gets better, right? So they get to the bell house. See, I better, right? So they get to the bell house.

See, I think this is cinematic. They get to the bell house, they decide to spend the night. The poor Bells just inviting people, General Jackson turns up and wants to sleep in your little cabin. Great. And of course, they're not going to say no. So some of the soldiers and the general are staying in the house and the witch does make an appearance and she speaks to them and she attacks them and there's one guy in the soldiery group I want to say, platoon maybe, who is sitting on the end of the bed and he's like I don't believe in this, this is nonsense and woe betide this gentleman in his views because the witch attacks him, she beats him to a pulp invisibly and she drags him by his nose out of the house and this is my nose. This is my favorite line.

Jackson's supposed to have said, I never saw such fun in all my life. This beats fighting the British. Okay. What are you going to do? Listen, that changes this entire thing because that means this didn't happen. I mean, not that, you know, when we're talking about a similar case like the Cochlein ghost or something, you kind of go, well, there is historical archival thing for this. There is a rootedness in this. Also, there is, I was reading about this and there's so much archive to show that General Jackson in this period was nowhere near the bell house.

We will know whether he's there. Yeah. So then this just punctures all of that. Also, something about a general who goes on to be president, to me, again, this is feeding into ideas about early America, well, 41, two, three at this point, years into the US existence. This is about America and what it is. Yeah. Not necessarily about the Bell family. We've lost sight of them now.

Exactly. As soon as you really get that this is a warning story, you know, a story that's really nothing, nothing truthful in it, particularly as far as we can make it. I mean, there's too much happening here that the archive is too silent on. That's just the case of it. Like if a lot of this was happening, we would definitely know. They would leave trace and they haven't. And as you say, actually some of it is directly contradictory.

Or did they? Oh, go on. Dot, dot, dot. Okay, go on. The truth of the Bell Witch case is difficult to ascertain. So much is hearsay, passed down through generations in Adamstown and beyond. There are little to no records from the period from 1817 to the early 1820s when the haunting, if that's what it was, was supposed to have taken place. What we do have is a rich archive of storytelling.

So many voices added into the mix. We have journalists, locals, family members, ghost hunters and filmmakers all offer a different version of a tale that, very quickly after it was supposed to have happened, passed into legend. But it would be towards the end of the 19th century that the Belle Witch would enjoy her biggest revival. Indeed, she was dug back up from the archive, if she was ever there, and displayed, recast and remodelled for the pleasure of a reading public in an age in which true crime and the supernatural sold papers in the thousands.

Her shadowy form crops up again and again, peering in at the window on similar but not identical stories, clawing at the collimages dedicated to speculating on the nature of life and death. We find her in the story of a newly married and deeply unhappy couple, caught in an apparent poltergeist haunting, though it turns out they just wanted rid of each other. We find her again, in a tale from the 1890s, in which Cole is mysteriously thrown from the ceiling of a grand house to land on the mistress's head. But again, the truth is far less terrifying, though perhaps no less scandalous. It transpires, it's the servant girl doing the throwing.

But there is one storyteller in particular who gives us what has become the definitive account on the Bell Witch. In 1894, Martin V. Ingram, a journalist, published his Authenticated History of the Bell Witch. It's a full-length book, filled not only with Ingram's version of events, but the supposed real letters of the Bell family themselves, all conveniently deceased at the point of publication. Today it's Ingram's witch that we inherit. But if we look closely, is everything really as it seems? So we're entering into, in terms of paranormal history, we're entering into a very specific time frame here the end of the 19th century and to the beginning of the 20th century. Yeah.

We're going to be thinking about things like in England, at least the Society for Psychological Research is doing a lot at this time. You've got your Arthur Conan Doyle, you know, all of that. This is a worldwide phenomenon in terms of the interest in mesmerism, in the afterlife, in mediumship, specifically actually very much centered around mediumship. And huge in America, absolutely huge. Yeah, this is the moment this is happening. So the book is published in 1894. And it's a moment when the bells who have this story supposedly in living memory have all died off now. The story is handed down through the family, but I think that's a convenient thing to remember. Do you want to read the full title of this work?

Because it's ridiculous, but it also gives us a sense of this struggle again to categorize what the thing is that we're talking about here. This is serious business. He's putting his glasses on. OK. The full title of this book from 1894 is An Authenticated History of the Famous Belle Witch, the Wonder of the Nineteenth Century and Unexplained Phenomenon of the Christian Era, a mysterious talking

goblin that terrorized the west end of Robberstown County, Tennessee, tormenting John Bell to his death, the story of Betsy Bell, her lover, and the haunting Sphinx. Catchy. No publishers publishing that today. Yeah, absolutely not. You'd need a really catchy title. So the premise of Ingram's work is that it is supposedly the product of him having gone down to Tennessee, and he visits the area, he conducts interviews of the locals,

including the surviving Bell family members. And supposedly they give him a whole huge pile of letters and a manuscript reportedly in John Bell's own hand. This is probably nonsense. No one has ever been able to verify this. It doesn't exist anymore. It's only in Ingram's account and it has references in there to things that happened much later in the 19th century. So it's virtually impossible that John Bell actually wrote it. So nevertheless, it's an absolutely fantastic read, like genuinely very entertaining and does really take you into that world. So I would recommend it. What I love about this story, so Ingram really positions himself as the expert on this and he's

trying to sell it at a time when, as you say, there's this huge interest in the paranormal. And I suppose as well, you know, we're into the sort of Gilded Age here at the end of the 19th century in America. Once again, it's having a moment of reinvention and thinking about what it wants to be on the world stage this time. And it's no surprise then that this story of sort of by then old America is sort of being brought up again for another reassessment. What I love is supposedly the witch makes another appearance when the book is being printed at the printers.

She appears in the printing house and rattles all of the printing presses and apparently is like leaping from the beams in the ceiling. And of course this goes out in the press. And as you can imagine, Ingram sells a lot of copies of the book. So, you know, I think it's so fascinating, the sort of reception of this story. So we have that the 19th century, and there's a lot of scholarship that's been done on this. And to me, these theories are the ones that sort of speak truest to what the story is about. There's a lot of work being done on, is this a story about, as we've said, emptying the landscape and the sort of American shame as well

as anxiety around the removal of Native Americans from that land. There's also discussion that it's really about the shame around slavery. So there are characters in the story and this depends on the version you read as well. There are so many enslaved characters that crop up and sort of change name or change shape and it's which speaks volumes in and of itself, right? That they're not necessarily sort of set standard characters in the same way that the bells themselves are. One thing that I think is a really compelling argument is that the entity, whether it's a witch, whether it's poltergeist, is kind of a trickster. And what it does is it undermines patriarchal white power and authority. It undermines John Bell, the patriarch of the house, the head of the household. And then when

General Jackson comes, who let's not forget is a plantation owner, he's going to be the president, it completely humiliates him and beats up some of his soldiers and drags them out the house and proves their skepticism wrong. The people that it allows to witness it, that it helps, that it enriches the lives of, that it shows deference towards, are all the marginal characters actually. They're the Betsy's, they're the Lucy's, in some versions Dean, the slave in the household, in the bell household, is also treated with some kindness by the witch, by the ghost, by the poltergeist. I think that's interesting that it's really a disruptor of society at that time. And then it's a sort of shorthand for wanting to undermine those structures.

It's a fascinating history. But I think what you're getting at, which I've realized over the course of this episode, is more than that, it's a fascinating story with a history of its own, as opposed to this being a history. Therein lies the appeal, I suppose, that it is forever questioning. There is no answer. And so therefore it will persist and has persisted and will continue to persist because of that. Well, listen, it's real after dark material.

It encompasses so many of the different elements of Poltergeist cases or, you know, which cases that we have looked at before. So it's interesting to see them all coalesce together in this. If you have enjoyed this episode, then we have plenty more like this in our back catalogue. Go and check those out. Leave us a review so other people can find us. And until next time, we'll see you again soon. you