Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Bell Witch

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

A legend in Tennessee tells of the real-life Bell family, who were haunted back in 1817 by a ghost witch - arguably the worst kind of either of those things.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. I'm I Belongoria. And I'm Maite Gomes Gron. And this week on our podcast, Hungry for History, we talk oysters, plus the Mianbi chief stops by. If you're not an oyster lover, don't even talk to me. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster.

No way. Bring back the ostracons. Listen to Hungry for History on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. It's Josh and Chuck here, and our scary October rolls on. It's rolling along with the short stuff on the Bellwitch. That's right, rolling along the Red River of Tennessee, because that's where the Bellwitch is now Adams, Tennessee. But that's where the Bellwitch story finds its roots about an hour north.

of Nashville, and there was a family, the Bells, that moved from North Carolina in 1806 to Tennessee and did pretty well. They were landowners. They were very respected. They had a pretty good life. And about nine-ish years after they moved there, they started to get haunted by a angry ghost witch. Yeah. And before we get too much deeper into, I want to shout out a historian named Pat Fitzhue, who runs bellwitch.org and wrote the book, The Bell Witch, colon, the full account. Legends of America, Victoria Klein, Peter at the Tennessee State Museum. Okay?

Got it. Rocky Top, baby. So the haunting of the Bell family began in 1817 when John Bell, the patriarch of the family, sometimes called Old Jack Bell, because remember this is 1817 in Tennessee. Yeah. He was in his field. He was a huge planter in the area, and he was in one of his fields at one point, and he noticed a big animal sitting in his field.

So he looked at it a little closer, and he found that it was quite disturbing. This large animal had the body of a dog, but the head of a rabbit. Okay. And John Bell was like, did I eat mushrooms this morning? It's like, no, I didn't. And he said, well, I'm going to shoot at this because I'm a homesteader in Tennessee in 1817. And when he did, the animal either vanished or scurried off to the nearby woods, depending on who's telling the story. But either way, John Bell, let it be.

Yeah, so that's dad's first incident. There would also be successive incidents with kids. Duri, his son, and Betsy, his daughter, Duri saw a, and if you're wondering how that's spelled, it's D-E-W-R-Y. I've never seen that name before, but I think I love it. I'm glad that you love it. I think I misspelled it. I think it might be Drury because I also saw him referred to as Drew before. I like Dury.

I like Dury more, too. So we're going to rename Drury Bell. Yeah, so Dury was haunted by a giant bird, supposedly a bird that he had never seen before. It was sitting on a fence post. So, of course, he shot at it as well. But it disappeared into thin air. And then Daughter Betsy, maybe the most frightening thing, although the dog rabbit's pretty frightening. Yeah.

But also so is a little girl in a green dress hanging from a tree, and I assume that means by a rope and not just by her hands. I could not get any further information about that. Okay. I mean, if it was haunting, it had to be like that girl was hanged there as a child or whatever and came back. Yes. So these appearances seem to portend all of the haunting that followed. Haunting by the ghost of a witch, don't forget. That's the worst kind.

Yeah. Because I think the same night after John Bell saw the rabbit dog, or the dog rabbit, I guess, depending on your perspective. Yeah. The family was awakened by beating noises on the outside of the walls of their home, like it was being pounded on. And that was just the first night. These things continued night after night after night.

Sometimes they would be pounding really hard, sometimes kind of light. But either way, Bell and his sons, he had several sons, they would get out of bed and try to catch the person. and who was pounding on their house. This is basically like 1817 ding-dong ditch, I guess. But they never found a trace of anybody. Yeah, and the hauntings, or the sounds continued, rather, the children I know were haunted by the sounds of what they thought was rats chewing on their bedposts at night,

which was probably just rats chewing on their bedpost at night. Right. But you've got to toss that one in. You got to toss that in because it is scary. The hauntings would turn physical. Sometimes the sheets were pulled off of the kids while they slept. Young Betsy was ghost slapped, apparently hard enough to leave welts and bruises. She was ghost pinched.

She was ghost hair pulled. And it became pretty clear that Betsy and old Jack, the dad, were the main targets in this family. Yes. And we'll see why in a few. But I think probably what makes the whole thing the most disturbing is that the witch began to talk. It's one thing for poltergeist activity. Polterguists don't talk, everybody. Ask your parents.

The witch started speaking, the witch ghost. And at first it was faint. They were just barely whispered. You couldn't really make out what the ghost was saying. But over time, the voice grew louder, clearer, and would sometimes hold conversations, like entire conversations with the Bell family in their home. So much so that John Jr. was known to debate the witch voice.

Sure. I don't know over what. Nuclear energy? Maybe, and whether it was safe or not. Probably. But he later wrote the conversations down that he had with the Bellwitch, and he published it, I think self-published in 1934. That's right. And if you think maybe just this family had some weird mold in their house that was driving them all to the brinks of sanity.

Not true because, you know, unfortunately, this is 1817, and they had enslaved people on their land. And they also had similar experiences, the most famous of which, you know, unfortunately, this is 1817. experiences, the most famous of which was an enslaved man there named Dean, who encountered the witch multiple times in the form of a two-headed dog with sensibly dogheads. I saw a drawing of this, Dean being met by a two-headed dog, and it actually kind of missed the mark because it looked like it was hopping up to play with them. Oh, well, maybe it was. Because in this picture, the drawing, Dean is holding a ball, but it's not supposed to be like

a ball that the two-headed dog wants to him to toss for it. It was a witch ball that Dean's wife made. And that's a real thing. A witch ball is a blown glass sphere, usually kind of colorful. And depending on where you're using this or who you ask, it's either used to trap witches or ward off witches. And Dean's wife made it for him, I think after the first time he saw the bell witch to protect himself. Yeah. And he was like, you know, I know tradition says it's got to be a ball, but this two-headed dog just wants to get that ball. Can we go with something else? She's like, sure, how about a witch's dick?

Right, exactly. Shall we take a break? Mm-hmm. All right, we'll come back and finish up with the bell witch right after this. It's Anna Ortiz. And I'm Mark and Delicado. You might know us as Hilda and Justin from Ugly Betty. We played mother and son on the show, but in real life, we're best friends.

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Betsy's getting ghost pinched. Dad is getting haunted. The whole family's getting haunted. And it became pretty clear that Betsy was getting haunted because this bell witch did not like the fact that she was engaged to a guy named Joshua Gardner, local kid. And she tried to keep this wedding on,

but eventually would break it off in 1821 and marry an old guy, so old. How old was he? He was so old that she ended up nursing the man for 11 years before he eventually died. Yeah, Betsy fell on hardships of her own. Even after she moved out of her father's house, she had eight children and four of them died.

In that 11 years with the old sick guy? I don't know if it was during or before. I don't know how long they were married before he fell ill. I don't know. But yes, they had eight children for sure, but only four made it to adulthood, sadly. So Betsy had her own troubles. because of the Joshua Gardner thing.

But John Bell, the witch, saved the worst for him. Like, she was verbally abusive to him. She was physically abusive to him. Shortly after she appeared, John Bell was afflicted by some unknown illness and just kept getting worse and worse over the next few years as the haunting war on. He would have seizures sometimes, Chuck. And as he came out of the seizures, the Bell Witch would slap him around. She was really mean and ruthless toward John Bell.

hated John Bell. Can you imagine that? Like, he comes out of a seizure and she's like, hey, what do you think of this? Smack, smack, smack. I've been waiting for you to come out of it. Boy, he sadly passed on in December 1820. He believed that the witch had poisoned him. And apparently the witch confirmed this. And the day before he died, said, it's useless for you to try and relieve old Jack. I've got him this time. He will never get up from that bed again. I put it there and gave old Jack a big dose of it. Last Last night while he was asleep, which fixed him. Nice.

There's a nice little preview of our Halloween episode. Oh, I hope so. The neighbors found out about this stuff too, right? Yeah, so he swore his family, John Bell swore his family to secrecy. This is just kind of not the thing that you wanted your fellow townsfolk in 1817 Tennessee to know about, but it just became such a big deal that it spread and got out. And so some of the townsfolk tried to catch the witch. They tried to, one guy tried to shoot the witch, to no avail, right?

No one could do anything to assuage the Bell Witch. They even came up with their own legends, too. The one that stood out to me the most was that at one point, the Bell Witch recited two different sermons verbatim that were being given, delivered at two different churches at that moment, miles away from one another. And I mean, if that's not an 1817 Tennessee folk superstition that you'd just be like, damn, when somebody told you that, I don't know what it is. Yeah, because that's literally impossible in that time to know exactly what was being said in two different places at once. There's a lot of holes in that legend for sure.

Thankfully, after John died, maybe taken care of by the Bellwitch, the hauntings basically stopped. I don't think we mentioned that at his funeral, the witch even haunted him there was like singing, drinking songs and interrupting the wake in the funeral. But much later, in 1849, the Saturday Evening Post would publish a story that people basically said it's like the first commercial publication of this story. And it accused Betsy of being behind the whole thing. And she threatened to sue unless they printed an apology and a retraction, which they did. So I guess they did make that up. And Betsy just, you know, she never wanted to talk about it. She aged.

She never spoke of the Bell Witch. Yes. So the Bell Witch, I'm pretty sure even at the time, but certainly shortly afterward, in Tennessee and the parts of Tennessee, it was attributed to a local woman named Kate Bats. And there's a couple different explanations for why Kate Bats would care about the Bell family so much that she would hound them beyond the grave. The first one takes place entirely in Tennessee because we didn't say, but not just Tennessee, but also North Carolina and Mississippi, put some claim on the Bell Witch,

even though it all happened in Tennessee. But in the first explanation, John Bell, remember we said he was one of the bigger planters, he had a 300-plus-acre homestead that he built by acquiring land from neighbors. And there was one land deal that he had with the brother-in-law of Cape Bats, a man by the name of Benjamin, and Bell is said to have taken advantage of Benjamin on the deal, and that in her death, Kate hounded John Bell to the grave and revenge for this land deal.

Why would he do Benjamin Brant like that? I don't know. Such a fine actor. Yeah. The other version, like you said, takes place also in North Carolina because they also do lay claim. And this is that Bell, well, seemingly,

he had sex with Kate Bats and had an affair with Kate Bats. And that is why he left to go to Tennessee because he had had this affair, broke it off. Kate was really sore at this, obviously, and threatened to tell everybody, including the family. And so as the legend goes, Belle tied her up in a smokehouse

and left her there to die, and she haunted him there. And so they had to pack up and leave to Tennessee, and she was like, oh, no, I don't think you know how ghost witches work. We can travel interstate. Tennessee's not that far away. Yep.

The whole way, she just kept going, are we there yet? Are we there yet? So one of the things that makes the story so unsettling, aside from all the details of it. And if you really want to dive into it, check out Pat Fitzhue's website. Bellwitch.org really has a lot of exhaustive research on it. But one of the things that makes it unsettling, like I was saying, is that these people really did live in North Carolina and Tennessee at the time this legend covers.

Like, genealogists have found Kate Bats in Edgecombe County. They found Kate Bats in Adams, Tennessee. Apparently, batses still live in Adams, Tennessee, and there's Bells as well. The Bell family graveyard has all these people's headstones from the correct time frame. So the idea that these people really did live, and at the time, they believed that this was happening to the Bell family, as did the Bell family. That, I don't know, I think that makes it even cooler. It's not like the hitchhiker with the hook hand or something like that. this actually happened. Yeah, I mean, this, I think, throws it in there with the category of, like, the

Amidaville House and stuff like that of these supposed real hauntings that took place. For sure. But you can still go there. It's like a tourist destination. Apparently, the town of 674 people, it's a pretty big boon for their economy. You think so. They have rebuilt, the house has gone, but they rebuilt a replica in its place. It must be so popular. Yeah, you can tour it inside the replica of the house. There's also a cave on John Bell's property that they believe the Bell Witch lives in, and you can tour that cave as well. I can't remember how much it was, but it was reasonably priced. It's not going to break you for a family of four. And again, it's just an hour north of Nashville. It looks quite neat. They also offer lantern-guided

tours in the dark. So if you're really feeling scary, maybe do that one. Yeah. And if they don't have some sort of animatronic rabbit dog, they're doing it wrong. That's right. The whole town's saving up for it. Don't you worry. Tell them, Chuck. I think that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio.

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