Other Worlds (2 page)

We may be sure her duties were unceasing and tiring. Modern ladies who complain of their hard lives would take to their beds after a few days of Lucy Bell's routine. The settlers imported few luxuries. Almost everything they required was produced on their farms—the food they ate, the clothing that covered their bodies, the furniture and farm equipment they used. Cobblers and carpenters and coopers, seamstresses and spinners and cooks were, most of them, slaves, but these workers required constant supervision. Besides, the religion followed by the Bells and their neighbors taught that idleness was a sin. Even their social pleasures, such as barn raisings and corn huskings, involved hard labor—and the women worked as hard as
the men, cooking vast quantities of food for the workers and occupying their spare time with sewing and mending. Lucy Bell's hands were never idle except when they were folded in prayer.

At the time of the witch's persecution only five of the Bell children were living at home. The youngest was little Joel, just four years old. Richard was six, golden-haired Betsy, the only remaining daughter, was twelve "going on thirteen." Drewry was sixteen, and John Junior a grown man of twenty-two.

A dashing young fellow, six feet two inches tall and powerfully built, John Junior had qualities—imagination, daring, restlessness—the others lacked. Finding himself one day in the nearby town of Springfield, he had seen a recruiting poster and enlisted in the army. The United States was at war—one of our minor wars, a little spat with England over the question of impressing sailors from American ships. You British did well in the east, burning the half-built capital and sending
Dolly
Madison scampering for safety with Washington's portrait under her arm. But Britain lost that war, thanks in part to the military skill of a fiery Tennessean, Andrew Jackson, who was to become the nation's seventh president.

John Bell Junior served under Andy Jackson in the campaign that ended in the Battle of New Orleans, where a rabble of backwoods hunters thumped the British regulars. John was among these riflemen; he could "bark" a squirrel from a tall tree, shooting its perch out from under it without touching it. No doubt he celebrated the victory in the genial taverns of New Orleans. It was a charming city even then; small wonder that after being mustered out John Junior refused to stay down on the farm, but found excuses to return to the bright lights and the charming Creole ladies.

Being a discreet and ingenious young man, he discovered a
practical excuse for traveling. Before the advent of the steamboat, goods were transported from the interior of the country by means of flatboats—an exceedingly economical method of transportation, requiring only strong muscles and a few crudely hewn planks. The boats were built on the banks of the river during the late summer and fall and cabled to trees until the spring thaw caused the water to rise high enough to float them. From the Red River, which flowed by the Bells' farm, to the Cumberland and into the Ohio, the swift current led finally onto the broad bosom of the Father of Waters, all the way south to New Orleans. Hams and whiskey, tobacco and corn, and other native products brought a handsome profit in the markets of the city. His brother Drewry was one of John's partners in this enterprise, and he had no trouble finding other young men anxious to share in the profit and the fun. Once the boats were unloaded in New Orleans they were abandoned or sold for scrap lumber, and the daring boatmen set out for home, on horseback or shank's mare. The uncertainties of such forms of travel gave them plenty of time to amuse themselves in the city and on the return trip— with no embarrassing questions asked when they arrived home.

John must have started this business almost as soon as he was discharged from the army. His last trip took place in the spring of 1818. An invoice dated April of that year indicated that fifty hogsheads of tobacco brought eighteen hundred dollars in cash, two hundred dollars' worth of sugar and coffee, plus two hundred pair of boots.

Why, we might ask, did John abandon this lucrative trade? For one thing, steamboats were rapidly replacing the slower, clumsier rafts. There may have been another reason. When John returned to Tennessee in May 1818, he found a desperate situation at home.

The trouble
had actually begun a year earlier, in the spring of 1817. The first of the family to see something strange was John Bell Senior, but he attached no significance to the incident at the time, only thought it mildly curious. He had left the house after breakfast in order to give his instructions to the overseers. As he strode briskly toward the north end of the farm, where the men were to work that day, he carried his rifle over his shoulder in the hope of getting a shot at a rabbit or some other tasty addition to the menu. Instead of a rabbit he saw, between two rows of corn, a peculiar-looking animal that resembled a large dog.

The creature must have been very peculiar indeed, for John Bell fired at it. He would not have done this if he had thought it was a domestic animal belonging to one of his neighbors. The creature promptly vanished. Mr. Bell assumed he had missed and that the animal had taken to its heels. He thought no more about the matter—then.

A few days later Betsy and Drewry reported seeing strange creatures about the place. Betsy also saw a woman strolling in the orchard. When she spoke to it, the apparition disappeared.

No doubt Mr. Bell dismissed these tales as the products of youthful imagination. He had no reason then to connect them with another bewildering set of phenomena that began about this time—knocks and raps on the doors, and scratching sounds on the outer walls of the house. These could also be rationally explained. Wild animals may approach quite close to a dwelling to forage for scraps. Raccoons have been known to gnaw at wooden door frames; rats and mice invade even a well-run house. Gradually, however, the knocking at the door became so distinct as to suggest that someone was demanding entry. But when the door was flung open, no one was there.

All through that summer and into the following fall and winter the unseen trickster continued its odd pranks. Mr. Bell decided neighborhood children must be responsible. The disturbances were mild and caused the Bells only minor inconvenience. The younger members of the family were not even aware of them at first, since they usually occurred after dark when Betsy and Joel and Richard had gone to bed.

Then, almost a year after they had begun, the sounds found a way into the house. Richard Bell never forgot that night.

The day was Sunday, sometime in the month of May 1818. The family had gone to bed. The boys shared a single bedroom, John and Drewry occupying one of the big double beds and Joel and Richard the other. Betsy's room was across the hall. The parents slept on the ground floor, in a chamber directly under
Betsy’s
.

The candles had been put out and the boys were settling down to sleep when Richard heard a sound like a rat gnawing on the bedpost, not far from his head. The others heard it, too. The older boys jumped up and lit a candle, ready to kill the offensive intruder, but as soon as they got out of bed the sounds stopped. Examination of the post, and the rest of the bedstead, showed no marks of gnawing.

The boys went back to bed. As soon as they lay down, the noises resumed, only to cease when they arose. This went on for hours, till long after midnight. The exasperated boys searched the room again and again, finding no sign of a rodent or even a hole by which one might have entered.

This procedure continued night after night, week after week. Betsy's room was also affected; the sounds moved to her chamber while the boys were searching theirs. No one could sleep, particularly after the sounds increased in intensity. Now they resembled the scratching of a dog instead of a smaller animal such as a rat. The Bells extended their search to other rooms of the house, stripping the beds and moving the furniture, but found no evidence of an animal's presence, or any means by which it could have found its way in.

Before long the invisible creature began to vary its performance. One new sound was a bizarre gulping and smacking. The bedcovers started to slip off the beds. Noises like heavy rocks falling and massive chains being dragged across the floor kept the bewildered Bells up until one or two in the morning.

It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. It also breeds indifference. The family got used to the mysterious noises. They were only noises, after all, and had not harmed anyone except by depriving them of sleep. The Bells took to snatching naps during the daytime. As if annoyed at being ignored, the intruder moved to direct action. It is no wonder that many years later Richard retained the most vivid memories of this first physical attack.

"I had just fallen into a sweet doze when I felt my hair beginning to twist—then a sudden jerk, which raised me. It felt like the top of my head had been taken off."

Richard let out a yell. His little brother Joel began to scream. An invisible hand was tugging at his hair, too. Then came a
shriek from Betsy, across the hall. She continued to scream until her parents rushed upstairs to see what was the matter.

They found Betsy sitting up in bed, shaking from head to foot. Her luxuriant golden hair hung tangled and twisted around her shoulders. The child was so upset that her parents had to take her to their room for the remainder of the night.

From then on, the disturbances were impossible to ignore. The children were constantly tormented, the coverings ripped from their beds, their hair pulled ruthlessly. At times the house fairly shook with raps and rumblings. John Bell clung stoutly to rational explanations. Remembering a minor earthquake that had struck the area a few years earlier, he wondered if a similar natural cause might not be responsible for the reverberations that rattled the house. But an earthquake could not tug at a child's hair, or cause the strange illness that began to affect Mr. Bell. It felt like a stick laid crosswise in his mouth, with the ends jabbing into his cheeks, and caused his tongue and jaws to swell so badly that while the effect lasted he could scarcely eat or speak.

One source of Mr. Bell's bewilderment was that he had no convenient label for what was happening. Witchcraft? Superstition dies hard; the family slaves whispered of haunts and witches around their cabin fires, and the children had probably listened to their tales in delighted horror. Betsy's reports of apparitions and strange animals were undoubtedly derived from such sources. As everyone knew, witches could transform themselves into cats, dogs, and hares. They also nurtured familiars, demons in animal shape who assisted them in their evil tricks. But Mr. and Mrs. Bell were not superstitious. Not then or ever did Mr. Bell yield to the temptation to ascribe his sufferings to a malevolent witch. Disembodied spirits, then? The year was 1818; it would be another twenty years before the merry little
Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, learned how to crack their knee joints and produce the rappings that heralded the birth of modern spiritualism. The Bells were unacquainted with seances and spirit guides. They had never heard the word
poltergeist.

Being more experienced, we know that this German term means "noisy spirit," and we are familiar with hundreds of such cases, from the earliest times to the present day. If the Society for Psychical Research had been in existence in 1818, and if John Bell had consulted its experts, the verdict would have been unanimous, for mysterious raps and scratching sounds, unexplained movements of objects such as bedclothes, and even slaps and pinches are typical of the tricks in the poltergeist's repertoire.

Let us then clarify our terminology. The Bell Witch was no witch. We may as well give it the name the Bells used when referring to it—a Spirit—and we will grant it a capital letter, like a given name, for the entity had its own distinct personality— one more vivid in some ways than the living persons it persecuted. Like a human child, it grew and developed with the passage of time.

Of course the word
poltergeist
is not an explanation, it is only a description, and John Bell would not have been comforted by the knowledge that the strange force could be classified. And indeed, in this case the experts would have been in for a shock, for after a relatively tame beginning the Bell Spirit would prove to be unique in the annals of poltergeistery

For
A
long time
the Bells kept silent about their "trouble," as they called it. It is hard to believe that none of the neighbors knew what was going on; surely the slaves must have whispered among themselves, or the younger children complained to playmates. Little Joel was only five; he could hardly be expected to understand why he shouldn't tell his friends about the horrid thing that tugged at his curls and jerked the covers off his bed. Be that as it may, no one outside the family was officially informed about what was happening until matters got so bad that Mr. Bell decided to confide in his best friend.

James Johnson was the Bells' nearest neighbor, as devout a Methodist as they were Baptists. The denominational differences did not prevent the families from being close. Mr. Johnson took turns with the Bells in holding weekly prayer meetings that members of both churches attended. Johnson's two sons, John and Calvin, were also on excellent terms with the Bells, and his adopted daughter, Theny, was Betsy's chum.

We can readily imagine Mr. Johnson's consternation and concern on hearing his friend's amazing story. He immediately
agreed to come and spend the night, to observe the phenomena at first hand and see what, if anything, could be done.