more was mentioned about the incident.
They continued with dinner until John Jr. asked,
“Father, why have you not eaten for several minutes?
It’s not like you to sit at dinner with a half-empty
plate before you; and, you look like you are worried.
Is something wrong?” John Bell replied, “Thank you
for your concern, son, but all is well. This has been
a very busy week, and I was thinking about some
things I hadn’t had time to think about until now. I
offer my apology if this has disrupted your dinner.”
“John, you do look very tired; perhaps you should
retire early this evening and get some rest,”
suggested Lucy Bell. “I think it would do me some
good,” he replied. The family finished dinner and
John Bell retired shortly thereafter.
About halfway through dinner the next evening,
Drewry Bell walked in and exclaimed, “Father, you
won’t ever guess what I just saw! It was the largest
bird I’ve ever seen, sitting right on the fence out by
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the lane! I thought it was a wild turkey, so I fetched
my gun; but it flew away as soon as I aimed at it. I
watched it for a good distance, and I swear it was
either the world’s largest wild turkey or some type of
big, ancient bird!”
“Are you sure it wasn’t an eagle, son?” John Bell
inquired, “you know eagles can get very big, and they
are very plentiful in these parts.” “No, father; I’m
sure this wasn’t an eagle, it didn’t have the grace nor
the wingspan of an eagle. I will look around the farm
in the morning and see if I can see it again,” replied
Drewry. “So just what did this magnificent bird say
to you, brother?” asked Elizabeth. “It said that
you’re not at all funny, little sister!” exclaimed
Drewry. “Okay, enough of the foolishness; you need
to eat your dinner before it gets cold,” Lucy Bell
remarked.
Philis, one of the house slaves, spoke up and said
she had heard her older brother, Dean, speak of a
large, black dog that followed him when he visited
his wife at the Gunn farm each night. The dog
jumped out of the bushes at the same place each
night, and would follow him to the Gunn property
line before running away. “Well, Dean is a very good
and honest man, Philis, but his imagination is
sometimes as big as Kate Batts’ stomach,” John Jr.
said laughingly. After some family conversation and
a long prayer later that evening, the Bells retired.
Knocks on the Walls
Several weeks elapsed without incident, and then
the Bells began hearing faint, knocking sounds on
the door and outside walls of their house after dark.
After being victimized by this seeming “prank” for
several evenings in a row, John Bell and his sons
rushed outside whenever they heard these sounds,
THE BELL WITCH: THE FULL ACCOUNT
39
hoping to catch the culprit. They kept up this
routine night after night…always returning
frustrated and without an explanation.
The force and frequency of the knocking sounds
grew with the passing of each night, and fear began
to set in as hopes of finding an explanation for the
“pranks” quickly faded. Something was terribly
wrong, and the Bells now knew it. The Bell children
found it increasingly hard to go outside after dark,
and John Bell himself often initiated important
conversations with his sons just prior to going
outside, so they often followed him to continue the
conversation. The rest of the family knew this was
out of character for Bell and that he was very
troubled about something.
Bedcovers Pulled from Children
As the nights grew colder, the noises that once
occurred outside the Bell home moved inside. The
Bell children began waking in the middle of the
night, extremely frightened and complaining of
noises that sounded like rats gnawing relentlessly at
their bedposts.
The noises would temporarily stop when a candle
was lit, but quickly started up again as soon as the
candle was blown out. After these noises had been
heard inside the Bell home each night for about a
week, the children began to feel light jerking at their
pillows and sheets as they were about to doze off.
When they tried to hold on to their sheets or hide
underneath them, the jerking became considerably
stronger — often pulling the sheets off the beds and
leaving the children freezing and trembling with
bone-chilling fear.
Sometimes when trying to resist this unknown
force pulling at their sheets, the Bell children were
40 P A T
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slapped in their faces by a seemingly invisible hand.
John and Lucy Bell always rushed to the children’s
bedsides to comfort them when such disturbances
occurred, but even this level of comfort and consoling
was not enough. The harder the Bells tried to resist
the mysterious force, the more restless and vicious it
became.
The disturbances occurred very late at night,
sometimes not ending until after 3 o’clock in the
morning. When awakened, the Bells searched every
room of the house in hopes of finding a reasonable
explanation for the humiliation and torment that was
being inflicted upon them by this mysterious entity,
seemingly at its own will. When they searched one
room, the noises began in another room. When they
ran to the other room hoping to find the culprit, the
noises ceased and soon started up in yet another
room.
Over time, the once light gnawing at the bedposts
became louder and sounded like a dog grinding its
paws into the floor beneath the bed. The Bells also
began hearing the sounds of stones falling and
chains being dragged across the floor late at night.
These disturbances took not only an emotional toll
on the Bells, but a physical one as well. Work on the
farm still had to be done, which meant rising before
daybreak each day. Since the Bells often did not get
to sleep until after 3 o’clock in the morning, they
grew tired quickly each morning and the days soon
became longer.
The Bells seldom spoke of the disturbances while
working during the day or having dinner in the
evening because their exhaustion and level of
emotional stress were beyond anything they had ever
experienced. By this time, it was clear in the minds
of John and Lucy Bell that the disturbances were the
work of an entity that possessed much greater power
THE BELL WITCH: THE FULL ACCOUNT
41
than their own, and which seemingly had a mind of
its own.
When the Bells occasionally spoke of the
disturbances among themselves, the only possible
explanations that came to mind were acts of the
Almighty or fallout from the New Madrid earthquakes
that occurred in west Tennessee several years earlier.
Elizabeth is Tortured
Shortly after retiring one evening, the entire family
was awakened by ear-piercing screams coming from
Elizabeth’s room. When John and Lucy Bell arrived
at their daughter’s bedside, they found her crying,
her hair in knots, and her face covered with welts.
“Oh God, my dear child, what has happened to
you? I’ve never seen a human being in as much fear
as you appear to be in now. Please, tell your father
and I what happened to you.” Elizabeth’s words were
not understandable, as she was still crying and
gasping for breath. Her body cold and trembling
from head to toe, she tried very hard to speak, but
the chattering of her teeth muffled her words.
Lucy Bell lay beside her while John Bell rubbed
her head and repeatedly told her everything was
going to be all right. “Your mother and I don’t have
all the answers about why these things are
happening, but I promise you in the name of the
Lord God Almighty that your mother and I will
always do everything we can not to let anything bad
happen to you. We love you very much, Elizabeth.”
He then knelt on the floor next to the bed, looked
upward, and cried, “My God, why…why is our
beloved and innocent daughter, Elizabeth, being
subjected to such evil and painful torture? What has
she done to deserve this? Even a horse thief does
not deserve treatment as cruel and sinister as this,
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yet with my own eyes I see it being inflicted on an
innocent child barely twelve years of age! Why, dear
God, why?”
Now much calmer, Elizabeth turned to her father
and said, “Thank you, father; I love you and mother
as much as life itself, and it deeply hurts me to know
that you are suffering my pain; but God will see us
through it, He always does.” She gave her father a
kiss on the cheek, and he and her mother tucked her
in and left the room. Less than a minute had
elapsed when Elizabeth began screaming again.
John and Lucy Bell rushed back to her room and
found her holding her ears as tightly as she could
with her now blood-soaked hands. “Oh God! What
is it, Elizabeth? Who or what did this to you?” Bell
inquired.
“Father, did you not hear that!” “We didn’t hear a
thing…what did you hear?” “A scream, a very loud
scream in both my ears and the pain is unbearable!
It was louder than anything I’ve ever heard before.
Please, I beg of you, stay in here with me for the rest
of the night. I’m very scared.” Lucy Bell crawled
under the covers and spent the rest of the night with
Elizabeth. The next morning, Elizabeth’s face was
covered with welts and bruises, and she could barely
hear a thing. John Jr. and Drewry comforted and
talked with her to help get the events of the previous
night off her mind. After these most recent events, it
became obvious to the Bells that they were not
dealing with the Almighty, but a sinister entity with
powers stronger than they could comprehend.
After much thought and discussion, the Bells
decided to see whether the mysterious entity
possessed intelligence. Late one night they began
asking questions that required numbers for answers,
such as “How many miles to Port Royal?” The entity
answered the question correctly by rapping on the
THE BELL WITCH: THE FULL ACCOUNT
43
wall seven times. When asked the question, “How
many slaves do we own?” the entity correctly rapped
nine times on a bedpost. From this point on, the
Bells considered the entity to be not only an evil
being, but an intelligent being as well. From this
point in time, they referred to the entity as, “The
Spirit.”
John Bell feared greatly the skepticism and
scrutiny of the community and church that would
befall him when others in the community learned of
his family’s encounters with the “Spirit.” There was
also the fear that if someone came and proved the
encounters to be a hoax, the credibility of John Bell
and his family would suffer irreparable damage. It
was for those reasons that John Bell swore his family
to complete secrecy in the matter of the “Spirit.” e
Up to this point, the apparitions that had occurred
were more mysterious than frightening; however, as
time went on, mysticism gave way to all-out terror
and fright.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Terror Takes Over
O NE MORNING, Elizabeth took her younger
brothers, Richard and Joel, on a hike
through the woods nearby. It was a
beautiful spring morning with the sound of cheerful
birds and ripples from the Red River filling the air
with beautiful music. Enjoying every step of the way,
they often stopped to smell the wildflowers or watch
a deer or rabbit darting through the woods. They
continued towards the Red River as they planned a
contest to see who could skip a rock the farthest
across the river.
As they approached a large sinkhole near the bluff
overlooking the river, a cold and unwelcome feeling
began quickly taking their breath and energy away.
Dark clouds quickly set in and the temperature
dropped several degrees in the matter of what
seemed like only a minute. What had been the
perfect spring day only a moment before was now a
cold and gloomy day. As they neared the sinkhole,
they noticed something in the distance that appeared
THE BELL WITCH: THE FULL ACCOUNT
45
to be greenish in color and hanging from a tree at the
sinkhole’s crest.
Now feeling very uneasy, Richard asked, “Are we
really supposed to be here?” Joel replied, “Well, I
don’t feel good at all any more. It feels almost as if
we’re unwelcome here and are being watched from
the woods. Something is not right here; I can feel it.
What about you, Elizabeth, why are you shaking?” “I