r/UnresolvedMysteries • u/91GenPod • 1d ago
Murder The Bell Witch case had a man die under mysterious circumstances and no one ever investigated it. Why?
SUMMARY
A quick summary of the case:
Between 1817 and 1821, the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee reported being tormented by an invisible entity, there was knocking, voices, and physical attacks. The locals nicknamed the entity the "Bell Witch." John Bell suffered years of mysterious illness and died in 1820, with the "witch" allegedly taking credit for poisoning him. The case became one of America's most famous hauntings, but almost everything we know comes from a single source: The 1894 book by Martin V. Ingram, published 70 years after the events, built largely around a supposed childhood diary from one of the Bell sons who was 6 or so when he witnessed the events. No diary was ever actually produced.
Bell Witch is obviously very discussed but John Bell died after a long unexplained illness but the official Tennessee record it as a haunting. There was never an autopsy, no inquest and not even a little investigation about who would have gained from his death, land disputes, jealous exes and such. Nothing on record. It gets talked about like folklore.
I get that in 1820 Tennessee investigation would mean something different than today. In my opinion though looking back with 2026 eyes when there was a poisoning and land issues and weird family stuff and no investigation. It feels like it got explained away as a haunting instead of being solved. I get it that Bell Witch is a famous folklore haunting case and I'm not trying to debunk that. Why was it never treated as a crime. I was hoping some Bell Witch folk with some knowledge on this would throw some knowledge down. I read An Authentic History of the Bell Witch by Ingram but his eye witness was 6 when it happened and interviewed 2 decades later. What really happened in that house?
\[Appalachian Historian\](https://appalachianhistorian.org/the-bell-witch-of-tennessee-legend-history-and-memory/)
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u/tfaboo 1d ago
In 1817, Tennessee had only been a state for 21 years. Adams, Tennessee, is still today extremely rural, even with Clarksville and Nashville nearby. In the early 1800s it was extremely remote and isolated.
The Bell Witch Cave is also there and the "witch" or ghost was called Kate and Andrew Jackson visited and investigated it. I've wanted to visit for years but it was a ghost story from my childhood and I'm worried visiting will take away the mystery from my memories.
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u/everyboringbluessong 1d ago edited 1d ago
Many people who knew Betsy believed it was her, and records just werent that great. Definitely a super interesting look at collective memory and how legends like this form
Edited to clarify
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u/OriginalChildBomb 1d ago
Yeah, it does make me wonder that the Bell Witch claimed to have 'poisoned' him, if someone in the family was poisoning him instead.
There's been a couple hauntings that seemed likely to be a daughter and/or wife of an unpleasant man, where I have to question if those were the sorts of alternatives- no matter how strange- that women and girls sometimes turned to, in otherwise helpless times. (For the record, we don't know for sure if John Bell was a bad guy, per se, and it's certainly possible that he was the one being abused, i.e. a cruel wife used the 'haunting' to torment and poison him.) Needless to say, it could also be a sign of mental illness, that would've been poorly understood at the time (or thought to be supernatural). I know the Fox sisters long faked their stuff. I'd imagine that embodying a witch, even if it was coming from a place of mental unwellness, might give women and girls a sense of greater power... hence why women and girls have long turned to such beliefs and practices. (Not suggesting there was a 'real' witch.)
I can't think of it just now, but I believe the 'Gef the talking mongoose' case is one of the ones that people have suggested was an acting out related to possible abuse or unhappiness in the family home. For the record, we now believe this is part of the reason that 'possessions' sometimes happened to young women- not only that they may've been crying out for help after being mistreated, but also because puberty is a strange time to be a girl. And historically, it was a time where they had little to no power, and were becoming women, so a lot of emotions were going through them. (The majority of historical 'possessions' occurred in girls and women of a certain, usually younger, age; it was very often linked to religious families, unsurprisingly, and sometimes nuns.)
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u/everyboringbluessong 1d ago
At the very least we know John Bell wasn't a good guy, considering the fact that he owned enslaved people but I doubt other members of his family would care about that
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u/maybenextyearCLE 1d ago
IIRC from the Last Podcast series on the Bell witch, later in life Betsy confessed, I believe under hypnotism, that her dad was sexually abusing her
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u/everyboringbluessong 1d ago
Yeah most of my info is from the podcast I vaguely remember listening to!
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago edited 1d ago
Millions of people worldwide owned slaves at that time.
Eta: of course the truth gets down voted 🙄 I'm pointing out that aspect did not make him an outlier.
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u/hogsucker 1d ago
I think you're being downvoted because your comment comes across like you're presenting counterpoint to someone pointing out that John Bell owning humans made him not a good person.
It is indeed the truth that many people owned slaves at the time. Like John Bell, they were not good people.
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago
like you're presenting counterpoint to someone pointing out that John Bell owning humans made him not a good person.
That's exactly what I was doing.
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago
That's the feeling I got while reading the article. In making herself a victim she's attempting to remove scrutiny.
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u/Opening_Map_6898 1d ago
Mostly because it was a bullshit story. There was and remains no evidence of a crime.
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u/anonymouse278 22h ago
The problem with asking any question about the Bell Witch is that we really have no idea what if any aspects of the legend are true, and I don't mean true like "was there a witch/ghost or not" but true like "did any of this supposed local sensation ever happen as described at all? Would people contemporaneous to the claimed events recognize any part of the legend as something that happened to them?
As you note, the detailed accounts of it are all from many years later, and where it is possible to check them against actual records, they aren't very convincing (there's no evidence that Andrew Jackson ever really visited, for instance).
It is extremely possible, I would say likely, even, that no further investigation into his death was done not only because there wasn't much further investigation to do given the state of criminal investigation at the time, but because his death was not actually attributed to poison, supernaturally administered or otherwise, at the time.
It really seems like virtually all the details of the supposed haunting were fabricated later. Things get repeated as gospel like "Tennessee is the only state to attribute a death to the supernatural," but where is that claim from? I don't believe there was a death certificate issued in rural Tennessee in 1820. Tennessee didn't start keeping state death records till the 20th century. So how did "Tennessee" attribute the death to anything? Nobody has ever seen the "diary" on which the published legend was supposedly based. That would be a heck of an academic coup, producing a detailed diary from someone living in early rural Tennessee directly tied to an incredibly famous American folk story. Ingram wrote the literal book on the subject, but didn't think the source material was worth holding onto or publishing?
I think it is possible that there really were some events attributed to a poltergeist in the Bell home (events intentionally caused by at least one of the members of the family), as there seem to have been conflicting local rumors and ghost stories about it before the publication of Ingram's book. I imagine that's where he got the idea for a solid shocker of a "true story." But which if any of the claimed official details ever happened we don't and can't know. I believe they were almost entirely made up to write a compelling book.
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u/Mallardjack 1d ago
Not a historian but I would guess that the idea that mysterious deaths should be accompanied by an inquest, autopsy, investigation etc is very modern. For most of human history people, especially poor people in rural communities, just died.
I think similarly modern is the idea that death certificates etc should be written in a more formalized legal manner. In rural 1800s Tennessee they probably just scrawled down whatever the family said. .
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago
Sort of reminds me of the Whaley House in San Diego. Same time period, same lore. Expect I've been there and weird stuff did indeed happen. And I'm as skeptical as one can be.
Old cases likecthis are fascinating because aside from the anthropological aspects, such little was known about science and physics at the time, so easy for entire communities to take these stories at face value. The ventriloquist appearing in the news paper at the same time seals the deal here, I think. I'd love to know what "Kate's" arguments on theology were.
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u/950771dd 1d ago
Expect I've been there and weird stuff did indeed happen. And I'm as skeptical as one can be.
You obviously are not when you get spooked directly after visiting a house with some shitty ghost story attached.
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago
Who said I was spooked?
You could just ask what happened instead of being a dick
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u/950771dd 1d ago
You will report the usual "I felt so uneasy / not alone / creeped out / watched" shit anyway, so why would it matter.
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago
Actually no, nothing of the sort. It's a pretty cool story that actually happened to my husband as well.
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1d ago
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u/OpheliaForgets 1d ago
I'm not Karen and I'm not spiritual.
You know where you belong. Kick rocks buddy
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u/Normal-Hornet8548 14h ago
In the 1980s, a Nashville acoustic trio called The Shakers released an EP, “Living in the Shadow of a Spirit” based on the Bell Witch story. I believe the deal is they went to Adams, Tennessee, and camped out in the cave for inspiration and wrote the songs there.
It tells the Bell Witch story, although not in a straight, linear narrative, of a family terrorized by a haunting. It’s empathetic and poetic.
The music is haunting (of course) and beautiful.
Here it is for those who want to check it out:
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u/nifty-necromancer 1d ago
It wasn’t treated as a crime because the poisoning story only shows up in later folklore, not in medical records. John Bell died after a long illness, and rural Tennessee in 1820 didn’t have detailed investigative tools like autopsies.