American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood's Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring

by Robert Bartholomew

  Before we finish examining the link between the Bell Witch and the Masons, it is worth looking at another account from Ingram’s book: that of General Andrew Jackson, war hero and future president, having visited the Bell farm at the time of the haunting, as recounted by a neighbor of the Bells.53 According to the story, as General Jackson’s party approached the farmstead, men on horseback were following behind a wagon when the wheels froze, even though the roadway was smooth and level. The driver “whooped and shouted” at the team of horses, but the wagon would not budge. Each wheel was removed and examined, found to be in good working order, and reattached. Again the wagon would not budge. General Jackson then “threw up his hands” and blamed the witch, at which point a metallic voice from the bushes called out, “‘All right General, let the wagon move on, I will see you again to-night.’ . . . The horses then started unexpectedly of their own accord, and the wagon rolled along as light and smoothly as ever.”54 Jackson brought with him a “witch layer” or hunter, intent on casting the spirit from the house. He and his party spent the night in a candlelit room with the witch layer, who sat confidently in a chair, cradling a gun loaded with a silver bullet and boasting of his previous exploits and what he would do if the Witch appeared. Suddenly there were footsteps and a metallic voice: “All right, General, I am on hand ready for business.” The voice then addressed the witch layer: “Now, Mr. Smarty, here I am, shoot.” The witch layer was unable to fire his pistol. An unseen force struck him, knocking him to the floor. He quickly rose to his feet but immediately began crying out that something was grabbing his nose, before he ran off in fright—or so the story goes.55

  Jackson’s diary for the period makes no mention of such a visit.56 The story is almost certainly fictional, yet writers continue to promote it without qualification. In “The Strange, True Story of the Bell Witch,” journalist Don Wick writes that the Witch “is unique because of the large number of people who had direct experiences with it. Many of these people, General Andrew Jackson among them, were of unimpeachable reputation and unquestionable reliability.” Wick recounts the story of Jackson as if it were historical fact.57 Other writers also treat the account with little skepticism.58 In 1828, Andrew Jackson fought a bitter campaign for president against John Quincy Adams, in what has been termed the dirtiest presidential election in U.S.history.59 If the story had been true, it certainly would have been used against him in a campaign that saw Jackson accused of being anti-Christian, a gambler, a drunkard, a womanizer, and even a mass murderer.60 But why include a visit by the seventh president of the United States? Jackson was a prominent Tennessee Mason, and he once served as the grand master of the Tennessee Masons.61

  The parallels to Masonry appear too numerous and specific to be mere coincidence. Ingram was a longstanding Freemason who was buried in 1909 “under Masonic auspices.”62 There is also evidence that Ingram wrote the narrative attributed to Bell, as Our Family Trouble has no proven existence before the 1890s. Curiously, the “Bell” narrative—which was purportedly written in 1846 “from memory”—contains anachronisms: words, objects, or events that are mistakenly placed in the wrong time sequence. For example, the diary seems written in the context of modern spiritualism—which did not flourish until the decades after 1848 when the Fox Sisters sparked new interest in spirit communication. There are references to private detectives, as in “a professional detective” and “the detective business.”63 The word detective did not originate until about 1840 and then in England as an adjective; the earliest known use of the noun in America is 1853. It was not until 1852 that Alan Pinkerton, a Chicago deputy sheriff, created America’s first agency of private detectives, called the Pinkerton Detective Agency.64 This suggests that the “Bell” narrative is of later vintage.

  Ingram as “Bell”

  Joe Nickell holds a doctorate in English literature and has compared Bell’s supposed diary with Ingram’s writing; he concludes that Ingram is the author of Our Family Trouble, not Richard Bell.65 He notes that Bell and Ingram use the same distinctive expressions—such as referring to the events as “high carnivals.”66 “Bell” refers to the occurrences as representing “the greatest of all secrets,”67 and Ingram calls it “this greatest of all mysteries” and “the greatest mystery.”68 Both refer to facial features as “physiognomy” and characterize the elder John Bell in the same words. For instance, the “Bell” text states that he “was always forehanded, paid as he went.”69 Ingram writes, “He paid as he went. . . . He was always forehanded.”70 Both “Bell” and Ingram have a penchant for being long-winded and use multi-page paragraphs71 and sentences of more than a hundred words.72 These are certainly not common features of most writers. While Bell was a farmer, the text attributed to him is filled with learned words like personation, declamation, vociferator, beneficence, and felicity,73 just like Ingram, who uses lodgement, unregenerated, indomitable, mordacity, and alacrity.74

  “Bell” frequently promotes the bible and Christianity,75 as does Ingram.76 Both use literary allusions. For instance, “Bell” refers to evil spirits driven “out of the man into the swine”—a reference to Mark 5:13.77 Ingram refers to a spirit “from the vasty deep”—an allusion to Shakespeare’s Henry IV.78 “Bell” writes about old John Bell, “[I]f there was any hidden or unknown cause why he should have thus suffered,”79 evoking the Book of Job (Job 10: 2–18). Ingram’s imperative to “observe the warning on the wall, whether it be written by the hand of the spectre, or indicted by the finger of conscience”80 clearly alludes to Belshazzar’s feast and the famous story of the handwriting on the wall, from the biblical passage Daniel 5.

  When we apply a standard readability formula to both texts, it shows that “Bell” and Ingram had nearly identical reading levels: 14.3 and 14.4, indicating the number of years of education required to read the passage easily and presumably to write it.81 The levels are high, placing each at the sophomore level of college. This is not surprising for journalist Ingram, but for rural farmer Bell, it would seem unlikely. There are many similarities, suggesting that the same person wrote both texts. Both occasionally use myself for I82 and that for who83 and are guilty of comma-splicing84 and incorrect use of the question mark85 and the semicolon.86 Both also commit subject-verb agreement errors.87

  Another English scholar, Jesse Glass, believes that it is unlikely that Ingram was the sole author of Our Family Trouble. He says that Nickell’s work lacks a clearly identifiable, extended sample of Ingram’s text in order to get an accurate baseline and that Nickell mistakenly assumes that Ingram wrote the Bell diary. Glass speculates that two of Ingram’s colleagues collaborated on The Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, including the supposed diary, Our Family Trouble. The first suspect is Henry Melville Doak, who wrote with Ingram on the Tobacco Leaf. Glass found that Ingram and Doak wrote a supernatural serial in 1874, “The Spirit of Croly Place,” which contained key themes that coincidentally would appear in Ingram’s book. Glass observes that “The Spirit of Croly Place” involves a thwarted romance and the family patriarch’s death by a vengeful spirit. Another suspect is James Rice, a city reporter for the Tobacco Leaf during the early 1890s. Glass says the writing style is overblown and emotive and borrows heavily from yellow journalism and the sensational dime novel genre of the time. This is the very same style of Our Family Trouble, and it stands in sharp contrast with Ingram’s sober style.88

  Nickell rejects Glass’s argument, noting that “writers write in different styles” and that themes, of which all authors have several, are not linguistic evidence. He finds Glass’s approach to be subjective, vague, and unnecessarily complicated—a violation of the principle of Occam’s razor, which holds that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred as most likely correct. Using Glass’s approach, Nickell says, one could find any number of “suspects,” when Ingram alone is clearly capable of having written every word of the Bell diary. Nickell, an accomplished literary detective and author of the book Detecting Forgery, has
uncovered a series of similar Masonic tall tales written during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Doing so appears to have been a common pastime of Masons during the period.89

  Folklore or Fakelore?

  Let us look more closely on the one known published account of the Bell Witch prior to the appearance of Ingram’s book in 1894 and at a few press reports heralding its imminent release the previous year. That reference is Goodspeed’s 1886 History of Tennessee. It states the following:

  A remarkable occurrence, which attracted wide-spread interest, was connected with the family of John Bell, who settled near what is now Adams Station about 1804. So great was the excitement that people came from hundreds of miles around to witness the manifestations of what was popularly known as the “Bell Witch.” This witch was supposed to be some spiritual being having the voice and attributes of a woman. It was invisible to the eye, yet it would hold conversation and even shake hands with certain individuals. The freaks it performed were wonderful and seemingly designed to annoy the family. It would take the sugar from the bowls, spill the milk, take the quilts from beds, slap and pinch the children, and then laugh at the discomfiture of its victims. At first it was supposed to be a good spirit, but its subsequent acts, together with the curses with which it supplemented its remarks, proved the contrary.90

  This passage seems to validate Ingram’s story, yet there are red flags. Two of the most significant elements of the story do not appear in Goodspeed’s account: the poisoning of John Bell and the visit by Andrew Jackson. Imagine—a soon-to-be president of the United States investigates a spirit haunting, and a prominent community figure is poisoned, yet these key events do not appear in a story produced by local historians. For a supposedly well-known event that persisted over years, there is not one additional reference to it predating the influence of Ingram’s book. If, as Goodspeed asserts, excitement was so great that “people came from hundreds of miles around to witness the manifestations,” there should be numerous newspaper references. Even after Ingram’s book appeared in 1894, not a single local letter to a newspaper editor affirming the events is known to have appeared, yet Ingram claims that he was deluged by letters after mentioning that his book was forthcoming. A search of Tennessee newspapers prior to 1893, when Bell began promoting his forthcoming book, failed to turn up any mention of the Bell Witch.91 This is puzzling, as it was common for nineteenth-century papers to reprint articles from other papers, so long as they gave credit. Books on the history of Tennessee are also devoid of references to the Witch.92 While Ingram claims that an 1849 issue of The Saturday Evening Post contains a lengthy article on the Witch, no one can locate a copy. Microfilm for this year no longer exists, but searches for the years before and after 1849 failed to turn up any reference to the article.93 If the article existed, it almost certainly would have been reprinted in the American press, given its sensational nature.94 Ingram writes that the article in the Post resulted in a lawsuit against the magazine by Betsy Bell (then Betsy Powell). Ingram says that the issue was settled out of court, “the paper retracting the charges” in a later edition.95 There is no record of any retraction in the magazine, nor are there any press reports discussing what likely would have been a newsworthy story: a threatened lawsuit involving a poltergeist.

  Creating History

  Given that the only reference to the Witch before Ingram’s book is the Goodspeed passage, it should be treated with great skepticism. It is worth examining how many nineteenth-century county histories were created. Goodspeed was essentially a vanity publication, where people paid to have material inserted and contributors like Ingram could pay their way into its pages. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many county history books were published by subscription. This is why there are more histories of northern U.S. counties than those in southern states, as during this period, the North was more affluent and urban. While useful and comprehensive in documenting local people and events, county histories were also business ventures by publishers who relied on subscribers, who were known to influence the content.96 “Mug book” publishing coexisted with subscription sales, where publishers offered biographical sketches with line drawings and photos of “noteworthy residents” who just so happened to be early subscribers to the book. Once a guaranteed subscription level was achieved, the history would go to press.97 It is for this reason that historian Harold Way cautions that the use of “county histories for research needs to be taken with a grain of salt”; and they were often filled with misspelled names, incorrect dates, and misinformation about local indigenous people. Way writes that other issues included “population errors (possibly done on purpose to exaggerate and aggrandize an area or region), causes of death (lack of information that could negatively affect the impression of an area, especially information on communicable disease outbreaks), boundary demarcation errors and land ownership misstatements have been found to exist in several county histories.”98

  Ingram was a respected newspaperman in Robertson County during the 1880s and could have presented the Bell Witch story to those involved in compiling the various town histories. Given the sheer size of the task of creating a county history, there would certainly be a reliance on prominent local figures in recounting tales from each community. The compilers would be none the wiser. Tennessee resident Jack Cook, who has researched the Bell Witch legend for decades, observes that “it would not be uncommon for a man of Ingram’s influence to relate the entire county history under his own pen. There was certainly a big push to bring the South back into national prominence at the end of the 1800’s. Something like this might have been perceived as a means of attracting attention or business for Robertson or Montgomery County.”99 Historian Fred Rolater has studied the Goodspeed county histories, and he notes that they continued to be compiled by local citizens, with little editing.100 This means that Ingram easily could have planted the information on the Bell Witch with minimal suspicion. As he was a journalist, there would be little reason to edit his submission or question its veracity. Ingram was well known in the area. In 1866, he cofounded The Robertson Register.101 Rolater writes that when local records are missing, county histories are very useful, but “the veracity of the stories contained in the histories depends entirely on the author and his intentions . . . Sometimes they are correct. Often they are wrong. To your specific question, could Martin Ingram have included a story that he . . . had enhanced for the reader? Yes, that is entirely possible. It certainly happened often in these histories.”102 While we cannot say with certainty whether the Goodspeed passage was planted by Ingram, it is worth asking what is more probable—that the Goodspeed reference is fictional, or that there is not one reference to the Bell Witch in print prior to 1886? This situation is even more far-fetched if we consider that people were supposedly flocking from hundreds of miles away to visit the house and that the events supposedly endured over several years.

  What Really Happened?

  Ingram’s manuscript on the Bell Witch is undoubtedly a hoax, but what is not known is whether it is based on a preexisting legend. In his book, Ingram presents numerous “Citizens Whose Statements Authenticate the History of the Bell Witch.” But the 43 signers from Cedar Hill are only stating that several men mentioned by Ingram were trustworthy early settlers; their collective statement makes no mention of the Bell Witch claims.103 It is curious that Ingram would cite such a list to give credence to the Witch if it was so well known. Also, not one of the accounts given in this section of the book is from a direct witness to the events; everyone is conveniently dead. Ingram cites letters from numerous persons, supposedly between 1891 and 1894, all claiming to have heard stories about the Bell Witch directly from reliable persons now deceased.104 At least one, John A. Gunn, claims to have recently seen the alleged Richard Williams Bell manuscript, Our Family Trouble; others relate incidents that supposedly confirm the accuracy of the manuscript. However, Ingram has never produced any of these letters for examination.

  In
his testimonials, Ingram cites real people who say that they heard about the legend from their ancestors. If so many residents were involved in the conspiracy, it seems implausible that no one ever tattled to the papers or to others. Given the absence of confirming evidence, we cannot be sure if Ingram’s story has a historical foundation, but recent research by Dr. Glass sheds new light on this part of the mystery.105 Glass has painstakingly examined every reel of newspaper microfilm held by the Tennessee State Archives for Clarksville, the city closest to the Bell homestead, up to the year 1896. He could not find a single reference to the Witch prior to the 1890s.106 He believes that the story is a hoax concocted by Ingram, who followed a tradition of Clarksville newspaper editors and journalists who took delight in fabricating and embellishing claims. He believes that readers would have immediately recognized the story for what it was.

  Glass found the local papers of the period filled with accounts of the marvelous and the supernatural yet silent on the Witch. Why, he asks, “would the Bell Witch have escaped all historical references when even the smallest and most oblique references survive to attest to similar ‘unexplained’ sensations like the Cock Lane Ghost, and the Fox Sisters at Hydesville, New York?” One story to receive heavy local press coverage was a poltergeist outbreak on the John Livingston farmstead in Smithfield, West Virginia, during the 1890s. Glass believes that it served as the foundation for the Bell Witch story. He summarizes the parallels: “A disembodied voice begins to talk to Mr. Livingston and his wife while poltergeistic activity happens in the house. Hundreds of people visit the Livingston home to ‘test’ the spirit. . . . One feature of the haunting is an ‘invisible rope’ stretched across the road in front of Livingston’s house that keeps horse and wagons standing still.”107 He believes that a second element of the Bell Witch story, that of the poisoning “witch” Katy Batts, was likely taken from the most sensational murder trial in the region of that period, in 1890, when George Avant poisoned his wife Kate with a strychnine-laced toddy. (A toddy was a common drink of the period and contained a mixture of liquor, sugar and spices.) The murder trial received intense press coverage. Sensationally, Avant was freed after a hung jury.108