INDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVEThe Bell Witch
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Robertson County, Tennessee, USA · Anglo-American, Middle Tennessee
The Bell Witch
The Tennessee Ghost · the Bell Ghost
Told, never investigated
AI illustration · imagined scene, not an evidence photograph Tradition holds that from about 1817 an invisible voice tormented the family of John Bell, a farmer in Robertson County, Tennessee, centring on his daughter Betsy and drawing crowds who came to hear it talk. The earliest account verified here, printed in 1856, says the voice was Betsy's own ventriloquism; the full story, in which the spirit boasts of poisoning her father in December 1820, was first published by M. V. Ingram in 1894. Ingram cited an 1849 Saturday Evening Post article that one of his own correspondents said had been lost and could not be found.
Earliest written source: A letter from the Saturday Evening Post reprinted in the Green-Mountain Freeman (Montpelier, Vermont), 7 February 1856, recalling the "Tennessee Ghost" at the house of "an old Mr. Bell" some thirty years earlier
Green-Mountain Freeman, 7 February 1856, reprinting the Saturday Evening Post
Tradition · not evidence