Historic Oddity Headline: July 25, 1894 - Story Of Witchcraft

December 08, 2020 / adam benedict

The Hartford Herald

July 25, 1894

“STORY OF WITCHCRAFT.”

IN THE SOUTH - - - OLD KATE BATTS’ AWFUL SPELL.

History of the Famous Bell Witch and Its Tragic Persecution of an Entire Family in Tennessee.

A CHAPTER OF MYSTERY.

[New York World.]

Here is almost the strangest story ever written - a tragedy of witchcraft beyond anything in the annals of Salem, now published for the first time. In its day it was the sensation of two States. People of eminence and reputation, Andrew Jackson among them, went miles to investigate it. The fame of it spread throughout the South. The witchcraft was wrought by something outside human ken - something which had power to take any shape it pleased, to change from one to another in the twinkling of an eye; that spoke and fought, raced and ran.

It all happened seventy-five years back. Unlike those other noted manifestations, the Cock Lane ghost and the Rochester knockings, no explanation has ever been given of it. Those afflicted shank from publicity, regarding what they called always “our family trouble.” For their own protection, however, one of the sons wrote down an exact statement of all its wonderful manifestations. A family council decided that it was better left unpublished so long as any of the original sufferers was alive.

The last of them died a year or two ago, and now the history has been made public in a most interesting and well-illustrated book.

M.V. Ingram, of Clarksville, Tenn., is the compiler, and responsible author of the book. By his permission a synopsis of the story has been obtained. It is the most pitiful recital - bald and severe as a Greek tradition, yet at times dripping unctuous humor. The Witch - the Bell Witch, to give the full name, style and title - was a creature of infinite jest, and more infinite malignity.

The central figure, John Bell, was an honest, God-fearing planter in Robertson county, Tenn., notably thrifty, intelligent and upright. He had land - a thousand acres - slaves and stock. His wife was a pattern of all the Christian virtues. There were five sons and two daughters.

The witch’s human exponent was a neighbor, in almost the same social grade as her victims - a big woman, strident and coarse. She went through the country daily, walking in front of her old gray horse, with a copperas homespun riding skirt flung over her arm. A negro girl led the horse, and two smaller negroes walked on either side of it. Ostensibly the woman’s business was to buy wool, flax, butter and eggs. But it was whispered that she went abroad that she might beg a brass pin of whomever she met. If she got it, the giver was thereafter always subject to her spell.

She was wonderfully pious in spite of her witchery. Though she got to church late - so late the sermon was half over - she never failed to shout before it was finished.

It was this woman’s familiar which the Bell Witch proclaimed itself to be. The tortured family, though, gave the proclamation neither credence nor currency. They had come out from North Carolina to Tennessee in 1804. It was in the summer of 1817 that anything unusual first made itself manifest. Then John Bell, the father, met a strange dog, shot at it and saw it vanish, changing its shape as it went. One of his sons had the same experience with what had seemed to him a wild turkey. Dean, the negro wagoner, reported that a black witch-dog had chased him to his wife’s house. Last of all, Betsy, the younger daughter, a girl of fourteen, saw a girl a little in light-green garments swinging under the limbs of a great tree.

Though Betsy was so young, she had already a lover, as was fit and proper for a tall, pretty girl with eyes blue as the sky, skin like cream and rose leaves, and the finest yellow hair. He had been her schoolmate at Mr. Powell’s academy, and, next to herself, was the master’s favorite pupil.

Gentle, amiable, the household pet and pride, it was certainly a most malign spirit that could slap her face till it reddened with the mark of ghostly fingers, pull and tangle her fine yellow hair, stick her full of invisible pins until she screamed aloud, and end by throwing her into a sort of spasmodic trance, from which no effort could rouse her until the witch chose to relent. The seizure ran for an hour or so. If she were left undisturbed, she came out of it as one waking from a refreshing sleep. Physicians who examined her said she was in perfect health.

Her father had even more mysterious ailments. His tongue would seem to swell, until speech or swallowing was alike impossible. It was, he said, as though a stick had been set crosswise in his mouth. By and by the swelling turned to a series of spasmodic twitchings of the whole body. For more than a year the witch showed itself only at intervals in the form of a hare, very old and thin and lame, or a black dog or a big strange bird. But every night, as soon as lights were out, there began a carnival of noises - knockings, scratching, gnawings, the sound of heavy chains dragged over bare floors. Investigation showed nothing. The whole house was ransacked, turned upside down, but in vain.

The noises became so unendurable that Mr. Bell called in one of his neighbors, a brother Baptist, Mr. Johnson, hoping that his powerful prayers might send away the witch. Mr. Johnson came and prayed, but did not conquer. He was hardly snug in bed when whiff! went sheets, counterpane, pillows and bolster.

Thus it happened that the Bell house was thronged every night by watchers. At first the witch answered questions by raps and knocks. But soon it made articulate speech, at first low and faltering, but strengthening until it was heard throughout the room.

What follows only the book can adequately tell. The witch gave a hundred accounts of itself. It was an Indian spirit whose bones had been disturbed; a child done to death in North Carolina, and haunting the Bells for vengeance; and early settler who had buried gold and silver under a big rock near the Bell spring, and sought to have it exhumed and given to Betsy Bell; then it was the spirit of an evil stepmother; at last, when questioned by a minister and taxed with lying, it admitted itself to be “Old Kate Batts’s witch,” and that it meant to worry old Jack Bell to death.

Here was sensation with a vengeance. Old Kate Batts, she of the riding skirt, was known to have had a slight disagreement with Mr. Bell. Neither he nor his family, though, took the witch’s statement for truth. Their neighbors were less forbearing. Thereafter the witch was known as Kate or Old Kate, and held more than ever in awe.

It was certainly a most astonishing goblin. It could quote Scripture in a way to astound the most learned minister. No transgression could be hidden from it. It searched out the most secret thoughts and proclaimed them from the housetops. It took supreme delight in going to church, and later, when the minister came to the Bell house, repeating his sermon, mimicking him exactly.

The witch was omnipresent, omniscient. She replied to Mrs. Bell’s inquiry about her son’s trip to Carolina that he had returned and had fared badly, and thus heralded his return before the family saw him. She repeated Parson Johnson’s sermon, delivered thirteen miles away, to the parson himself as he sat that night in Mr. Bell’s house. Then the witch became profane and ribald, howled, sane and swore; and, worse still, became a fearful toper, filling the room with her tipsy breath.

Soon there was another strange development. In place of one witch there were four. Black Dog, Cypocryphy, Mathematics and Jerusalem. Up to this time the voice had been feminine. Now Black Dog spoke in a high, harsh key, withal feminine; Mathematics and Cypocryphy had softer feminine voices; Jerusalem the rough, changing pipe of a boy. All were ribald and furiously intemperate. Many times doors and windows had to stand wide to escape the stench they made. They were forever quarrelling in tipsy fashion.

Betsy paid a visit to her sister, who had married Bennett Porter. One day Mrs. Porter went out to greet a neighbor coming up the lane. She went out to greet her, but found an apparition, who was joined by two younger women and a boy. All four at once bent down saplings, and rode them as children do. Betsy came out to see the phenomenon. Mr. Porter came up with his gun and fired at the log behind which the witches had sheltered themselves. That night at Mrs. Bell’s the witch Black Dog complained that Porter’s bullet had broken Jersualem’s leg!

The witch showed a fierce, concentrated malignity against Mr. Bell. For Betsy there was the same petulant tenderness, the same entreaty; “Don’t, please don’t, marry Joshua Gardner.” Wherever she moved, there the witch followed. Few households in the neighborhood escaped her visitation.

Dean, the negro wagoner, reported some wonderful experiences. When the black dog took to following him home he cleft its head with the axe he always carried. The axe sunk out of sight in the ground. The next night the black dog was as chipper as ever, with two heads instead of the single one it had worn at first. Then Dean’s wife made him a witch ball of fox-fire wrapped with her own hair.

The next time the witch met him she demanded it upon pain of turning him to a horse which she would ride over the river to the still-house. “Den,” said Dean, “I say: ‘I ain’t gwine gin you my ball. I gwine split you open clur ter de tail ef you doan’ git out my way.’ But sho’s you bawn I ‘menced ter git weak. De axe drap outen my han.’ Dar pintedly wus er spell on me. When I stoop ober ter pick it up, I couldn’t git no mo’. An’ dar I wus stannin’ on fo’ han’s en’ foots. Den suppin say: ‘He’s too high behine. He ‘oont tote double wuf nuffin’. Den suppin’ else say ‘I lebel him down,’ Den my tail was jerked har, an’ I kicked out, an’ bofe my foots felled off kerflop in de road.”

Dean declared in a most convincing manner the witches had turned him temporarily into a mule.

In the throngs who came to see and hear was Gen. Andrew Jackson, not yet President. His home, The Hermitage, was some forty miles from the Bell house. He came with a party among whom was a famous witch doctor. He boasted that within three days he would unravel the mystery by means of a silver bullet and two inches of a black cat’s tail. It was the tip of what had once been a witch cat. He had but to tickle his nose with it to make the whole invisible world plain to his eye. Then the silver bullet would do the rest.

Presently the party came to a halt. The road was dry and firm. The team had not been over-driven, yet in some mysterious fashion the wagon was stuck fast. In vain the driver lashed and swore; in vain men tugged at the wheels. At last Old Hickory threw up his hands, exclaiming: “By the eternal, boys, it’s the witch!" Nothing else!” At once a metallic voice called from a near thicket: “Yes, General, it is the witch. You may go on now. I will see you again to-night.”

At the Bell house the witch doctor said that he would soon unearth the imposture. Gen. Jackson said, in a disgusted aside: “I wish the thing would make mince-meat of the braggart. I know he’s an arrant coward.” As if in answer the witch called out: “Here I am, General, ready for business!” Then to the witch doctor: “Now, Mr. Smarty, here I am! Shoot away!”

In spite of the cat’s tail the seer saw not. Instead, he felt a rain of blows that sent him howling and scuttling around the room. Gen. Jackson laughed, rolled on the ground and swore: “By the eternal, boys, this is better than fighting the British! I never had so much fun in my life.” Round an round, out of doors, up the lane went the seer, the witch still pelting him until he howled aloud. Presently the unseen voice called: “General, is that fun enough for to-night? I will come to-morrow, and show you another rascal in your crowd.”

One morning in early fall, when Mr. Bell went out, his shoes were snatched from his feet as fast as they were tied on. He was beaten and twisted until there came upon him a seizure so violent that when at last he got home he had to take to his bed. He was never outdoors again. His seizure had been accompanied by demonic singing in the air above him, that at last died to blood-curdling shrieks of triumph.

For two months he had the tenderest care. In December the crisis came. The witch said: “You need not try to wake Old Jack. I have got him this time. He has had his dose, and will never wake again.” She had given the dying man a dose from a dark vial in the medicine closet.

A straw dipped in the same liquid was drawn over a cat’s tongue. Within three minutes the creature had died in sharp convulsions. Mr. Bell lay in stupor, breathing heavily. The scent of the stuff in the bottle was distinguishable in his breath. The vial and its contents were thrown in the fire, where they blazed up into sulphurous flame. The next morning Bell died. The Witch kept silence until the clods were falling over him. Those nearest the grave heard high in the air the weird voice singing:

Row me up some brandy, O!

Row! row! row! row!

Row me up some brandy, O!

Row me up some more!

For three weeks the spirit lingered, mild and harmless. Then it left, but promised to return each seven years to some descendant of John Bell. It came earlier. After a year Betsy plighted herself to Joshua Gardner. It was at a fishing party upon Red River, just beyond her home. Soon a monster fish began to play pranks with the lines and poles. It dragged several into the stream and made the other fish leap so high every one knew some unusual thing was happening. As Betsy sat with her lover on the bank, the old cry sounded in her ear, “Please, please, Betsy, don’t marry Joshua Gardner.”

Betsy broke the engagement at once. After a time she married Schoolmaster Powell, whom the negroes had all along suspected of bringing on the trouble with that end in view. “Dat dar Marse Powell, he strak de flint an’ ketch de fier in he eye,” they said.

These marvelous stories of the Bell Witch are still current in Robertson county, Tenn., which was populated, as was the Blue Grass region of Kentucky, with emigrant yeomanry and gentry from Virginia and the Carolinas. They devoutly believe all that is here set down and much more besides. Now for almost three generations the Bell Witch has been a most fascinating history and mystery. Stories are current there of its reappearance as last as 1866.

“Historic Oddity Headlines” showcases actual articles written about truly odd occurrences that took place and were published within United States newspapers back in the 1800s-1900s. The articles posted here are written exactly as they appeared during their original publishing date.

-The Pine Barrens Institute

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