by Adam Selzer
But it’s also difficult not to notice that all of the ghost hunting of the last century has failed to turn up anything conclusive. If ghosts are conscious entities, floating around with thoughts and agendas of their own, and possessing any means to communicate, they sure as hell must not want anyone to know about it.
On the other hand, what about all of the firsthand accounts that one hears of hauntings and phenomena that can only be classified as supernatural?
For instance, my great-grandma Eloise wrote about an experience her father, my great-great-grandpa Harry, had one day. He was a skeptic himself—he would chuckle whenever people talked about séances or ghosts—but one wintry day he was stoking the fire in a stove in a soda fountain that he ran when he dropped the coal bucket and walked over to his wife, saying, “I have just seen a young man in uniform fall in a battle!” Skeptical though he was, he took note of the date. A few weeks later, word came that on that day, his nephew, Delmar, had been killed in France, where he was fighting in World War I.
This is similar to so many of the stories I heard during breaks in the tour. People claimed that, along with other witnesses, they had seen recently departed friends walking down the road or that their young children reported encounters with people who turned out to fit the description of a long-dead previous owner of their house, including information that the kids couldn’t have possibly known but turned out to be accurate.
To believe all of these people, I’d have to be a little bit gullible. But in order to believe that all of them were lying to me, I’d have to be a total dick.
There are some things that can’t simply be brushed off.
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1. One theory popularized by television movies is that the “witch” was the result of mental anguish within Betsy caused by her father sexually abusing her, but there’s absolutely no evidence that John Bell was an abusive father. There’s no proof that he wasn’t, but I feel like I ought to mention this, since so many people seem to accept the theory as fact.
2. Today, the Bell Witch Cave is something of a tourist attraction. Troy takes groups out there from time to time.
3. Though not exclusively British, the “former monastery” stories are sort of the English equivalent of the American “Indian burial ground” stories.