In 2004, the Bell Witch haunting gained attention once again. The Bell Witch, also known as the Bell Witch haunting or the Bell Witch legend, is a famous American folklore that has been passed down through generations. The haunting is said to have taken place in a rural area of Tennessee during the early 19th century. The story revolves around the Bell family, who claimed to be tormented by an unseen presence. John Bell and his family reported strange occurrences such as knocking sounds, objects being thrown, and physical attacks. The entity even took a particular interest in John Bell's daughter, Betsy, and would often pull her hair or slap her.
Comments from the Producer, Linda Thornton:
The Guidebook for Tennessee , published by the Works Project Administration in 1939, also contains an account that differs from Ingram s on pages 392 393. I have heard a lot of ghost stories and most sound alike, just in a different place with different people involved, but this is the single most unique and mystifying one that I have ever heard.
The entity even took a particular interest in John Bell's daughter, Betsy, and would often pull her hair or slap her. The legend of the Bell Witch haunting spread throughout the region, attracting the attention of curious individuals and skeptics alike. The events were even documented by remarkable figures such as Andrew Jackson, who visited the Bell family and experienced the haunting firsthand.
My experiences with the Bell Witch haunting
I lived in Adams, Tennessee growing up from about ages 14-18 (2004-2008). A couple of weeks after my family and I moved there something unexpected happened.
I was mowing on my dad's tractor (with a big 8 ft wide back-end mower), I was going down a hill when my horizon line violently was thrown around as the tractor tires hit something. I disengaged the mower, pulled the tractor around at the base of the hill I had just gone down.
My blood went cold as I look up through the swathe I had just cut. Like a buzzer going down the middle of someone's head making a lane in the grass. In that lane were 4 native American burial graves. My parents started reaching out to anyone who might be able to help us identify the graves: anthropologists, historians, accredited people, etc. Those people unanimously agreed that these 4 graves were from the Trail of Tears.
They corroborated this from what I remember because of how the graves were laid (very very shallow, with a giant slab of stone where a gravestone would be), the fact that they were interned on a hill side to keep the water from sinking in and raising the bodies since they had to bury them so quickly, and many other reasons.
I consider myself a very logically driven and rationally minded person, basically I let my empirical senses try to explain something before I'll open myself to other possibilities. Yet, there were things that happened to me and my whole family that we weren't able to rationalize with the scientific mindset or anything logical.
Event 1: The activity in our house started shortly after the mowing incident. We heard heavy knocking and pounding on the brick outer wall of the house, encircling the house (no matter where you were in the house you could hear the knocking). Some nights I would hear running footsteps accompanying the pounding. This activity happened nearly every night.
As the nights passed I started feeling a heavy presence in my room, a suffocating one, like a heavy weight sitting on my solar plexus constantly. Whatever was happening decided to latch onto me.
Event 2: Things continued to escalate. One night I was letting my golden retriever out to go pee. We had a ranch-style house overlooking the Red River. The door we were exiting was on the backside of the house facing the river. As I open the door I start hearing faint whispering something akin to leaves being blown/scratching across the ground.
I looked up at the trees to see if the wind was blowing, everything was perfectly still (it was fall in Tennessee, so tons of leaves on the ground, they were not moving either). The scratchy/blowing leave noise continued, but as it continued it grew closer and louder. It sounded like a language of some sort like how'd you imagine an incantation or something nefarious in the tone of the sound.
I looked down at my golden retriever. ALL of the hair on her back was standing up and she was snarling like a rabid wolf, yet not barking just kind of frozen in a fear response. I started getting extremely nauseous and could smell sulfur. I was completely frozen when my dog launches herself through the door's threshold and starts gnashing her teeth mid air snarling and chomping.
The voices were now coming from directly in front of me, I could hear them as if someone was standing there a foot or two away. I grab my dog mid air and pull her quickly inside, slammed the door and threw the dead bolt into place.
The door and frame shook violently as a vicious pounding started hammering on the threshold. I ran with my dog to the center of the house, flipping on every light along the way.
We sat there alone all night until the sun came up. Ginger, my golden retriever laid across my lap the entire night pressing into me while she whimpered for hours.
All I could do was pet her and try to calm her down, which was also helping me down-regulate. This was impossible though, the entire night until sunrise, the back door was thumping.
Event 3: It happened when I was coming home from football practice. I had all my gear in a gym bag over my left shoulder. This is important, because of how I entered the house. As I closed the front door behind me, I began sitting down the gear bag from my left side which caused me to look right.
The room when you first walked in was our "library" where we had a leather couch, chair, piano, book shelves, and a wooden rocking chair. There was something sitting in the rocking chair.
My peripheral vision caught it first, the chair going back and forth. As my vision centered on the chair there was a humanoid looking shape sitting there, head glancing downward at the book it was holding.
Long black hair drawn down over its head and completely void of light. To picture what I saw, imagine the silhouette of a person, but rather a "void" of light.
The light coming in around the edges of it seemed to be eaten up by the presence/void, as the light spilled over the contour edges of the humanoid shape (like how black holes are visualized, almost exactly).
It felt like I had jumped off a bridge into ice cold water, I blasted myself backwards against the door screaming and fell down. As I was falling I saw the "void" blur suddenly as it shot across the walls of the house and out through a huge bay window over looking the river.
My golden retriever was in the next room and she sprinted to chase the shadow across the walls. barking and clawing at the walls. After it left through the window my dog came to me and laid on my lap until my parents got home.
Event 4: I was fishing with my cousin Jack on the river by our house. We were right on the bend of a river, so the moon would be shining on both sides of the river racing out at two lines like a 90 degree angle from the house, super beautiful when you weren't on edge. The reason I bring this up, there was a lot of light on the river that evening. Jack was about 10 or so at the time, he reaches up and taps me, "Does that lady need help?"
I looked to where he was pointing and there was a pale woman dressed in white clothes going back and forth picking up stones just to the left of us across the river. I had seen her many times before around the property, and whenever I would get close she would disappear behind a tree or something similar would happen.
Knowing this, I told Jack as calmly as I could that it was time for dinner and he needed to go up to my Mom immediately (in an attempt to not scare him). When I walked him up and made sure he was on his way I looked back over and she was gone, but I could hear a splashing in the water below.
Event 5: Myself, my dad, his friends, and some other family members were staked out along the river bend on the gravel bar beneath the rise to our house. Nothing out of the ordinary at first, it was July 4th and we were having an actual good time for a change.
We were all spread out about 15 yards from each other. Each man had a low end gas Coleman lantern. As the sun was setting my Dad looks over at me like something was bugging him. He told me later he felt like someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water over him before it began.
The sun had just gone down when this happened. In unison all the lanterns were cranked up full blast, then just as quickly became barely a flame, then the fires roared to life again, down to barely a flame, roared to life, then they went completely out. Right as the flames went out, we heard the most god forsaken scream by some woman across the river.
Whatever it was kept on screaming despite our best attempts to call out to help. As her scream reached a crescendo, it sounded like what I could only imagine a person's throat being cut interrupted her scream. The sound of a dead weight fall of a human body tumbled down the hillside across from us and splashed violently into the water.
At this point all the guys had their flashlights out. That's when something started swimming and splashing around in the water on both sides of the river bend. The splashing receded towards the opposite gravel bar, and whatever it was got out and started pacing back and forth across the rocks there. We were pointing all of our flashlights to where the sound was coming from but we couldn't identify where it was originating. It's safe to say we were running up the hill at this point.
We all got inside the house, locked the doors, then gathered in the central living room. No body wanted to leave for fear of what was outside. We all stayed up that night because the wall pounding was more violent than it had ever been. Bam. Bam. Bam. All night like the ticking of some demonic clock. I didn't sleep for 2 days after this event.
Event 6: Lost time. I was walking through the woods near the Bell Witch Cave. One moment it was completely sunny and blue skies about mid-afternoon. The next moment it was overcast and looked like maybe 4pm.
Event 7: Night terrors. Torture dreams, being held down and brutally drawn & quartered, dreams of walking through the house and the "void" person placing their hand on my chest and "pushing" through my solar plexus, body violently shaking in the dream like a having a seizure.
Event 8: Visited the Bell house/plantation marker in a tobacco field adjacent to my family's property. Brought friends to try and prove that something crazy was happening to my family.
The rite of passage in the area is to go to the stone marker where the paranormal events happened hundreds of years ago, then dance on the stone saying "I don't believe in the Bell Witch!" I got them to promise that they wouldn't do that while we went.
Of course the moment we get there, one guy who doubted the legends in a massive way, jumps up onto the stone marker and starts screaming "I don't believe in the Bell Witch!" as loud as he could. I get so upset at him. I'm the only one that knows the way back, so I said come on guys we're leaving. In this area it's known as the Tennessee River Valley. So there's tons of flowing water etc around these tobacco fields. The reason this is important is because of what happened next.
We're making good time walking back across this crop field, hundreds of yards long. A mist starts rolling in from the river bends and begins to saturate the field. The temperature drops easily 25 degrees or so and we start seeing our breath. I begin to smell sulfur in the breeze. As the mist became a fog it began. I started hearing this wheezy and deeply cavernous sounding breath around us. like being inside a cave that was breathing.
Out of nowhere we started hearing these giant blasting sounds and I realized something was walking on the chopped tobacco stalks. (Side note: when they harvest tobacco they use a machete and cut down at a 45 degree angle leaving about 3.5 feet of brittle stalk poking out of the ground).
When you step on said stalks, they disintegrate in a very loud way as they burst apart. This starts happening all around us like an army of native spirits running around as if we were in a bandwagon battle, the blasts were coming from every single direction in the fog.
That's when I hear it, that deep cavernous noise turns into this giant sniffing sound, like some Lovecraftian beast smelling its prey just out of eye sight. At this point I yell RUN in pure panic mode.
We take off across the field trying not to trip and be skewered on the stalks (they dry out and get really sharp where they harvest them, also Robertson county is the world's largest producer of tobacco per square mile, so these fields are everywhere, fun fact).
As we are exiting the field and our feet hit the gravel road, the lower center part of my back suddenly EXPLODES in agony. I look down and there's a massive rock laying at my feet and I realized that I had just been assaulted. By the time I got to my house and examined my back in a mirror, the bruise was about the size of a basketball and was already turning black.
Event 8: Woke up outside about 3 in the morning. I was laying next to the 4 graves on the property. The night was awfully cold but I woke up soaked in sweat. We lived there for so long that I have many events to share, process, and willing to have discussions about my time there with you all.
It is really hard for me to talk about this stuff without re-traumatizing myself, but my friends and family are encouraging me to share my experiences with like minded people so I can try to find peace surrounding my trauma.
Thank you for reading.
(edit 2: thanks for all the kind words and support this community has shown me, it truly means the world to me, much love to all of you).
(edit 3: per community request, I've written down a few more of the events in the comments below in a chain I started, sort by best to find it easy)
(Edit 4: https://imgur.com/gallery/D0bDdPQ - where I lived https://imgur.com/gallery/3rLBxQb - photos from the cave
Anyone who has been to the cave will tell you that it’s lit with really dim led light strings, at least when I went, and there are no direct paths for the sunlight to come in and create such intense overexposures in the camera lens.)
(Edit 5: trying to reply to all the comments as they come, keep asking questions and I’ll try and get to you as soon as I can.)
(Edit 6: https://imgur.com/gallery/mUg7zeG - one of the scratch marks that left a scar and my left index knuckle is still malformed from where/when it was shattered in event 15)
(Edit 7: https://imgur.com/gallery/rPx9KyA - I'm making layouts of where specific events happened inside the home)
(Edit 8: This is what the thing that was following us in event 8 sounded like. I smoked cigarettes pretty heavy until recently, so it wasn't too hard to remake the sound. I'll never forget it, this sound is scarred into my memory:
After visiting the Bell's home, Andrew Jackson said, "I vow I would rather fight the entire British army single handed than face this witch again!" The haunting is the only known case where a spirit actually took credit for killing someone. John Bell's funeral was one of the largest ever seen in Robertson County, hundreds of people attended; including the gloating Spirit, who cheerfully offered mourners a concert of brawny drinking songs.
In 2004, a group of researchers decided to investigate the Bell Witch haunting once again. They conducted interviews with locals, collected evidence, and explored the historical background of the haunting. Their findings were compiled into a documentary, which shed new light on the eerie events that unfolded in that rural Tennessee community. The researchers concluded that the events were likely a result of a mix of paranormal phenomena and psychological disturbances within the Bell family. Some skeptics argued that the Bell Witch haunting was a hoax concocted by the family for unknown reasons, while others believed in the supernatural aspects of the story. Regardless of one's belief in the Bell Witch haunting, it remains a captivating tale that continues to intrigue people to this day. The 2004 investigation brought renewed attention to the legend and allowed for further speculation and analysis. Whether it was a true haunting or an elaborate fabrication, the Bell Witch legend has left a lasting mark on American folklore..
Reviews for "Unexplained Phenomena: The Bell Witch Haunting of 2004"
1. John Doe - 1/5 stars
I found "Bell witch haunting 2004" to be an extremely boring and unoriginal film. The plot was predictable, the acting was subpar, and the supposed scares were nothing more than cheap jump scares. The characters lacked depth and failed to create any emotional connection. Overall, I was highly disappointed and wouldn't recommend wasting your time on this mediocre horror film.
2. Jane Smith - 2/5 stars
"Bell witch haunting 2004" had some potential with its premise, but unfortunately, it failed to deliver. The pacing was slow and dragged on, making it difficult to stay engaged. The dialogue felt forced and unnatural, while the special effects were poorly executed. The filmmakers attempted to create a creepy atmosphere, but it fell flat due to the lack of originality and reliance on tired horror clichés. Overall, it was a forgettable film that failed to leave any lasting impact.
3. Michael Johnson - 1/5 stars
I regret choosing to watch "Bell witch haunting 2004". The storyline was convoluted and confusing, leaving me with more questions than answers. The acting was wooden and unconvincing, making it hard to invest any emotional attachment to the characters. The scares were minimal and predictable, failing to deliver any genuine fright. The overall production quality was low, with poor lighting and amateurish camera work. I would advise skipping this film and opting for a better-made horror movie.
4. Sarah Thompson - 2/5 stars
Despite my initial excitement, "Bell witch haunting 2004" turned out to be a disappointment. The scares were predictable and lacked intensity, failing to create any real sense of fear. The plot felt disjointed and poorly developed, leaving me confused for most of the film. The acting was average at best, with some performances feeling forced and unnatural. The ending was also unsatisfying and left me wanting more. Overall, it was a mediocre horror film that failed to live up to its potential.