Appalachian Folklore & Myths
In a bend of the Red River in Robertson County, Tennessee, a farming family named Bell took root in the early nineteenth century. Two centuries later, their homestead is remembered less for corn and tobacco than for a talking spirit that slapped children, quoted Scripture, and claimed it had murdered the family patriarch.
The Bell Witch has been called America’s best known poltergeist case. Yet like most good ghost stories, the closer we look at the sources, the more the solid ground gives way beneath our feet. What survives on paper tells us as much about the anxieties of later generations as it does about anything that might have happened between 1817 and 1821.
This article walks through what historians and archivists can actually see: nineteenth century county histories, late Victorian ghost literature, early twentieth century postcards, family narratives, and modern scholarship that treats the Bell Witch as legend, memory, and tourism all at once.
Red River, Frontier Tennessee, and the Bell Family
John Bell was born in Halifax County, North Carolina, in 1750. Like many white Southerners in the early republic, he followed the lure of cheap land westward. According to Martin V. Ingram’s late nineteenth century account, Bell arrived in Robertson County around 1804 and prospered along the south bank of the Red River, one of a cluster of families whose farms, church ties, and intermarriages knitted together a frontier community.
Later museum educators and public historians have picked up that thread. The Tennessee State Museum’s overview of the legend situates the Bell story firmly on the Tennessee frontier, a sparsely settled landscape of dense forests where neighbors might live miles apart and trips to town took planning and daylight. The Bells were enslavers as well as farmers, and enslaved people figure prominently in later tellings of the haunting, which already marks this as a story about power and hierarchy as much as ghosts.
By the time the legend was written down in detail, Red River had become the small town of Adams, Tennessee. The place was no longer wilderness. It was instead a community with a famous ghost.
The Haunting in Legend
In broad outline, the story that most readers know today comes from Ingram’s 1894 book, An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. According to that narrative, John Bell encountered a strange animal in his corn field in the fall of 1817. His son soon saw an enormous bird, his daughter Betsy saw a girl in a green dress swinging from a tree, and a household servant reported a black dog that walked him home at night and vanished at the cabin door.
Then the noises began inside the house. Scratching in the bedposts. Chains dragging across the floor. Covers torn from the beds. Slaps and pinches that left welts, especially on Betsy. When the family prayed and sang hymns with neighbors, the unseen presence repeated their prayers back to them in an eerily perfect imitation. Before long, the spirit spoke clearly in a woman’s voice, claimed the name “Kate,” and delighted in holding court with visitors who came from miles around to hear it argue theology, gossip about local families, and torment John Bell.
The legend reaches its grim peak in December 1820, when John Bell falls into his final illness. A mysterious vial is discovered in the house. The voice announces that she has poisoned “Old Jack” and boasts that he will never rise from his bed again. John Bell dies, and the witch is said to have sung a rowdy song at his funeral. The family believes the spirit murdered him.
In the story as printed by Ingram and retold in later summaries, the presence also fixates on Betsy’s engagement to Joshua Gardner, harassing her until she breaks off the match, before promising to leave and return again after an interval of years.
All of this is powerful folklore. Very little of it, however, appears in print before the late nineteenth century, which is where the historian has to start asking hard questions.
Before Ingram: Early Traces of the Bell Witch
The earliest independent printed mention of the Bell Witch that historians can point to with confidence does not come from a ghost book at all. It appears in a county history.
In 1886, Goodspeed Publishing issued History of Tennessee with separate county sections. The Robertson County entry includes a short but remarkable paragraph about “a remarkable occurrence” connected with the family of John Bell, who had settled near what was then known as Adams Station. The anonymous author describes an invisible spirit popularly called the “Bell Witch” that spoke with the voice and attributes of a woman, shook hands with visitors, stole sugar from bowls, spilled milk, and slapped and pinched the Bell children while laughing at their distress. The writer admits that a volume could be written on the subject, then adds that the story is included only as an example of superstition that remained strong in the region.
Goodspeed’s entry is crucial for two reasons. It predates Ingram’s book by eight years, and it shows that some version of the Bell Witch story circulated locally in the 1880s. The outline is already present: an invisible, talking female spirit that torments the Bell family and attracts widespread attention. What Goodspeed does not provide is the elaborate plot, theological debates, and poison vial that dominate Ingram’s later narrative.
Folklorists and researchers have also uncovered scattered nineteenth century references that may relate to the Bell story, including an 1856 article in the Saturday Evening Post about a “Tennessee Ghost” and an 1820 journal entry by Captain John R. Bell, who heard of a ventriloquist girl on the Red River. These are intriguing leads rather than firm anchors.
Taken together, they suggest that tales of a talking “Bell” ghost were already in circulation well before a Clarksville newspaperman turned them into a full length book in 1894.
Ingram’s Authenticated History and the Problem of “Our Family Troubles”
Martin V. Ingram’s Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch is the foundational narrative for almost every modern retelling. It is also a deeply problematic source.
Ingram claimed that the heart of his book came from a family manuscript titled Our Family Troubles written by John Bell’s son Richard Williams Bell in 1846. He wove that text into his own multi chapter history, adding local reminiscences, sermons, moral commentary, and a heavy dose of Victorian melodrama. Yet no one has ever produced the original Our Family Troubles manuscript. It exists only as typeset text in Ingram’s volume and in later reprints that depend on him.
Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell and others have gone much further, arguing that stylistic quirks, anachronistic language, and repeated phrases indicate that Ingram himself likely wrote the narrative he attributed to Bell. Nickell points to Ingram’s well documented ties to Freemasonry and reads parts of the story, especially the buried treasure episode and the cube shaped grave, as allegories loaded with Masonic symbolism rather than simple frontier reportage.
Nickell also highlights features that make a mid nineteenth century Bell authorship doubtful. For example, the supposed 1840s manuscript uses the term “detective,” a word that did not come into American usage until the 1850s, and it reflects the influence of spiritualism that did not flourish until after the famous Fox sisters’ séances later in the nineteenth century.
Popular historian Colin Dickey, writing for Atlas Obscura, emphasizes a different point. Even if we treat much of Ingram’s story as literary construction, the book crystalized an already circulating legend at a moment when Americans were rethinking the frontier and the figure of the independent patriarch. Ingram’s John Bell is an idealized frontier father whose authority collapses under the pressure of an invisible female spirit that he cannot fight or control.
From a historical standpoint, then, Ingram’s book tells us more about the anxieties of the 1890s than it does about what actually happened on the Red River in 1817. Yet it remains indispensable because it fixes the legend’s basic shape and provides the raw material that later generations constantly rework.
Family Memory and Dr. Charles Bailey Bell
In the 1930s the legend came back into print from inside the Bell family itself. John Bell’s great grandson, Dr. Charles Bailey Bell, a Nashville neurologist, published The Bell Witch of Tennessee: A Mysterious Spirit in 1934. Tennessee State Library and Archives staff regularly identify Ingram’s book and Charles Bailey Bell’s volume as the two most influential narrative sources for the legend.
Dr. Bell drew on family stories and on Ingram’s work, adding new anecdotes and emphasizing his own lineage. His book cannot take us back cleanly to 1817 any more than Ingram’s can. Instead it shows how the Bell descendants themselves chose to remember and market the story in the interwar years, a time when popular interest in spiritualism, “true” ghost tales, and regional color writing was extremely high.
That context matters because it helps explain what happened next.
“Year of the Witch”: Newspapers, Radio, and Return
In January 1937, Tennessee journalist T. H. Alexander announced that “America’s No. 1 ghost story” was due to return. In his syndicated “I Reckon So” column in the Tennessean, Alexander reexamined the Bell Witch timeline and argued that the spirit had promised to come back not in 1935, as some versions had it, but in 1937.
The Tennessee Historical Society has traced what followed in an article aptly titled “Year of the Witch.” Reporters descended on Adams. Locals reported strange noises from the cave associated with the legend, a mysteriously emptied corn sack, scattered feathers, and broken furniture. Some residents openly blamed the Bell Witch, while others refused to say the name aloud. Teenagers claimed to see the witch during a “weenie roast,” only to discover they had been staring at an ordinary stone.
Radio and theater producers joined in. Nashville’s WSM broadcast a forty minute dramatization titled “The Bell Witch of Tennessee,” and on Halloween night the Princess Theatre staged The Return of the Bell Witch. Charles Bailey Bell’s 1934 book, Alexander’s columns, and the centennial calculations of the witch’s promised return created a perfect storm of publicity.
By December the haunting had failed to materialize in any verifiable way, and skeptical voices in the press suggested that fear and rumor had done the work, not a supernatural visitor. But the legend had been successfully reintroduced to a mass audience of radio listeners, newspaper readers, and theatergoers. The witch had returned in ink and sound if not in person.
Material Memories: Postcards, Graveyards, and the Cave
While books and columns shaped the story on the page, the physical landscape of Adams became part of its memory. Early twentieth century ephemera show how quickly the Bell Witch was turned into a place you could visit.
A color tinted postcard from around 1909 in the Tennessee State Library and Archives’ Tennessee Postcard Collection carries the caption “The Bell Witch graveyard the tomb of William Bell, Adams, Tenn.” It pictures a fenced grave plot shaded by trees, inviting the viewer to see the Bell family cemetery as the resting place of a ghost story, not simply a pioneer family.
Later, a cave on the original Bell property became the focus of tours and tourist brochures. The Tennessee State Museum’s junior curators blog encourages readers to “visit the Historic Bell Witch site in person,” complete with cave tours and a reproduction of the Bell cabin. Run by private owners, the Bell Witch Cave operates as both commercial attraction and physical anchor for a story that has drifted far from its original oral setting.
Postcards, signs, and roadside markers may not tell us whether a poltergeist ever rattled dishes in the Bell kitchen, but they document something just as real: the deliberate construction of a haunted landscape in rural Middle Tennessee.
From Local Legend to National Folklore
By the mid twentieth century, folklorists, dramatists, and musicians were all working with the Bell Witch story. In 1934 the Journal of American Folklore published Arthur Palmer Hudson’s essay “The Bell Witch of Tennessee and Mississippi: A Folk Legend,” treating the haunting as part of a broader tradition rather than a unique supernatural event.
Composer Charles Faulkner Bryan later wrote a Bell Witch cantata that premiered at Carnegie Hall, and the name itself eventually migrated into heavy metal as the moniker for a doom metal band. Local theater groups in Tennessee have staged plays based on the legend for decades, including David Alford’s Spirit: The Authentic Story of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, performed annually in Adams as part of the Bell Witch Fall Festival.
Rick Gregory’s recent book The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory: From Local Legend to International Folktale traces that evolution in detail, from oral testimony and small town print to national popular culture and modern ghost tourism. That trajectory is familiar to anyone who studies Appalachian and Southern folklore. A story that once moved mouth to ear at quilting parties or after church now circulates in podcasts, horror films, streaming documentaries, and social media posts about “most haunted” lists.
Across these retellings, the core elements remain recognizable: the Bell family farm, the clever and cruel female voice, the torment of Betsy, the death of John Bell, and the mysterious promise to return.
Skeptics, Believers, and the Historian’s Tightrope
Modern investigators have approached the Bell Witch legend from every angle. Some treat the story at face value as a genuine haunting. Others frame it as a classic poltergeist case centered on a troubled adolescent, suggesting that Betsy or another member of the household could have staged the phenomena.
Joe Nickell’s analysis in Skeptical Inquirer pushes hardest against the legend’s claims, arguing that there is no good evidence for many of the most dramatic incidents and that Ingram likely fabricated the Bell manuscript to add gravitas to his storytelling. He notes that skeptics do not bear the burden of disproving a ghost. They simply point out that the available testimony is late, secondhand, and filtered through the pens of writers with clear agendas.
Colin Dickey, meanwhile, suggests that insisting on a single solution misses what makes the story interesting. Ingram’s book, he argues, captures cultural anxieties about patriarchy, religion, frontier masculinity, and the closing of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. A patriarch who cannot protect his family from an unseen female presence becomes a kind of American Job, suffering in a wilderness that no longer answers to him.
For the working historian, especially in an Appalachian context, the Bell Witch becomes less a puzzle to “solve” than a case study in how communities remember and rework the past. The legend folds together real people and places with invented dialogue and shifting motives. It turns a specific farm into a stage for debates over gender, race, class, faith, and violence.
Appalachia, Ghost Stories, and “Our Family Troubles”
Appalachian communities have never lacked for ghost stories. Old company towns and forgotten hollers are thick with tales of vanishing miners, headless brakemen, and women in white who walk ridgelines under a full moon.
The Bell Witch belongs on that map even though Robertson County lies outside the coalfields and hardwood coves that many people think of first when they hear the word “Appalachia.” It is a borderlands story, perched between Middle Tennessee and the Upland South, between oral tradition and print, between a haunted frontier and a modern region that markets its ghosts.
At its heart sits a phrase that sounds painfully ordinary to anyone who has lived through church fights, family feuds, or neighborhood gossip:
“Our family troubles.”
Whether or not Richard Williams Bell wrote the text that bears that title, the phrase itself captures how communities often talk about traumatic events. The Bells’ alleged haunting was not just a spectacle; it was, in legend, a crisis in which domestic violence, religious conflict, enslaved labor, and economic uncertainty all converged in one farmhouse on the Red River.
Seen that way, the Bell Witch legend is less about a single ghost than about the uneasy relationship between history and memory in the Appalachian South.
Sources and Further Reading
Martin V. Ingram, An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch (W. P. Titus, 1894). Public domain text digitized via the Internet Archive.
“History of Robertson County,” in History of Tennessee (Goodspeed Publishing, 1886). Short early printed account of the Bell Witch as an example of local superstition.
Richard Williams Bell, Our Family Troubles (as embedded in Ingram, 1894). Purported family manuscript that survives only through Ingram’s printed text.
Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Postcard Collection, “The Bell Witch graveyard the tomb of William Bell, Adams, Tenn.” Circa 1909 postcard documenting early promotion of the Bell site.Tennessee Virtual Archive+1
Charles Bailey Bell, The Bell Witch of Tennessee: A Mysterious Spirit (first published 1934). Family authored narrative that expands and reframes the legend.Facebook+1
Rick S. Gregory, The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory: From Local Legend to International Folktale (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). A book length study of how the legend has evolved across oral, print, and popular culture contexts.JSTOR
Joe Nickell, “The ‘Bell Witch’ Poltergeist,” Skeptical Inquirer 38, no. 1 (January–February 2014). Historical critical analysis that questions the authenticity of the Bell manuscript and reads Ingram’s book as largely fictional.Skeptical Inquirer
Skyler Gordon, “Year of the Witch: 1937 and the Return of the Bell Witch,” Tennessee Historical Society blog, 2017. Explores how journalists, radio producers, and promoters revived and reshaped the legend during the New Deal era.Tennessee Historical Society
Victoria Kleinpeter, “Tennessee Legends: The Bell Witch,” Junior Curators blog, Tennessee State Museum, 2022. Public facing summary that pairs the haunting with life on the Tennessee frontier and the growth of Adams as a tourist site.tnmuseum.org
Colin Dickey, “The Elusive, Maddening Mystery of the Bell Witch,” Atlas Obscura, May 2, 2023. Interpretive essay that situates the Bell Witch in the context of American frontier mythology, gender, and anxiety over failing patriarchs.Atlas Obscura