So far we have spoken only of “mischievous” spirits that seem to intend no one any harm—as Giraldus Cambrensis says of the Pembrokeshire poltergeist, it seemed to intend “to deride rather than to do bodily injury.” They may occasionally get angry if provoked or treated with contempt—a Mâcon poltergeist of 1612 became irritable when someone tried to exorcise it with the words “depart, thou cursed, into everlasting fire,” and replied: “Thou liest—I am not cursed . . .” The poltergeist in the Enfield case (which will be described in chapter 6) hit a photographer on the forehead with a Lego brick, and caused a bump that was still there a week later. But such damage is rare; more typical is the behavior of the Münchof poltergeist of 1818:[5]
As the three stood conversing . . . a big iron spoon suddenly left the shelf on which it was lying and came straight at Koppbauer’s head. Weighing about a pound and travelling with great velocity, it might have been expected to inflict a serious bruise, but the stricken man declared that he felt only a light touch and the spoon dropped perpendicularly at his feet.
Yet there have been cases where the poltergeist has shown a remarkable degree of malice, and caused injury as well as discomfort—Guy Playfair even mentions a Brazilian case in which the unfortunate girl who acted as the “focus” was driven to suicide.[6] And in one of the most astonishing cases on record, the poltergeist ill-treated its victim until he died, then proclaimed itself delighted at his death. This is the extraordinary case known as the Bell Witch.
The case, as Nandor Fodor[7] points out, took place at an interesting time when Americans had ceased to believe in witchcraft, and had not yet discovered Spiritualism. As a result, there was no proper investigation. It is fortunate that the records that have survived are so detailed.
In 1817, a farmer named John Bell lived with his family in Robertson County, Tennessee, with his wife Lucy and nine children. One of these, Betsy, was a girl of twelve.
At first, the disturbances were so slight that no one paid much attention. There were knocking and scraping noises, and sounds like rats gnawing inside the walls. As usual, nothing could be found to account for these sounds. They seemed to be mostly the kind of noises that might be made by animals, and so did not cause a great deal of excitement. An invisible dog seemed to be clawing at the floor, an invisible bird flapped against the ceiling, then two chained dogs sounded as if they were having a fight. When lamps were lit and people got out of bed to search, the noises stopped—poltergeists seem to have an odd dislike of being observed. Then the entity started pulling the clothes off the beds, and making various “human” noises—choking and gulping sounds followed by a gasping noise as if someone was being strangled. Next, stones were thrown and chairs turned upside down. Slowly, the poltergeist began to get into its stride. The girl Betsy—Elizabeth—seemed to be the focus; things only happened when she was around.
When the disturbances had been going on for roughly a year, the household was in permanent chaos. They seldom got a good night’s sleep; the house often shook with the noises. The thing seemed to be able to be in several places at once—one night, Richard Williams Bell was awakened by something pulling his hair so hard that he thought the top of his head would come off; as he yelled with pain, Betsy, on the floor above, also began to scream as something pulled her hair.
Like the Fox family thirty years later, the Bells decided to ask the advice of neighbors. A friend named James Johnson came to the house. When the “ghost” made a sound like sucking air in through the teeth, he told it to be quiet, and it obeyed him. But poltergeists dislike being given orders (they seem to react best to a friendly approach), and this one redoubled its persecution of Betsy; there would be a sharp slapping noise and her cheek would go red from a blow, or her hair would be grabbed by an invisible hand and pulled. At least, Johnson had discovered that the entity understood English; so he advised Bell to invite in more neighbors. At this stage, he still seems to have entertained the obviously absurd idea that the children might be responsible. They tried sending Elizabeth to stay with a neighbor; the disturbances in the Bell household stopped, but Elizabeth continued to be persecuted with blows and scratches.
Poltergeist phenomena always work their way up from small effects to larger ones—from scratches or raps to flying stones and furniture; it never happens the other way around. The “Bell Witch” seemed to take pleasure in developing new ways of upsetting everybody. Strange lights flitted about the yard after dark. As the children came home from school, stones and chunks of wood were thrown at them. These were usually thrown from a particular thicket, and (as usual in such cases) never hurt anyone; if the children threw them back, they were promptly thrown again. But visitors to the house received stinging slaps—as did the children if they tried to resist when the covers were dragged off their beds.
The next stage was a whistling sound, which gradually changed to a voice. Poltergeist voices—as I have already remarked—do not sound at all like ordinary human voices; at least, not to begin with. It seems as if the entity is having to master a strange medium, to form sounds into words. (Even the rapping noises are probably “manufactured” sounds, not genuine raps made by hard objects.) Most talking ghosts and poltergeists begin in a guttural voice that sounds as if it is made up from grunts or groans; the Bell Witch made gasping, whispering noises more like an asthmatic cough. Gradually, the voice developed until it was a low but audible whisper. It made such remarks as “I can’t stand the smell of a nigger.” And Betsy undoubtedly provided the energy for these demonstrations; she became fatigued and miserable, short of breath, and subject to fainting spells. Whenever she was unconscious, the voice ceased, which led some neighbors to suspect that she was a ventriloquist. But, as Nandor Fodor has pointed out, it sounds much more as if she slipped into mediumistic trance. At the same time, John Bell himself began to suffer. His tongue swelled, and his jaw felt stiff as if someone had pushed a stick inside his mouth, pushing on both sides of the jaw. It gradually became worse, until he was often unable to eat for a day at a time. The “witch” also seemed to direct more and more of its malice toward “old Jack Bell,” declaring that he would be tormented for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, the voice had graduated from a whisper to a normal voice; it used to repeat bits of the sermons of various local parsons. Then it began using bad language—again, a common characteristic of “talking ghosts.” In fact, “it” talked in several voices. One of its earliest utterances in a normal voice was: “I am a spirit who was once very happy, but have been disturbed and am now unhappy.” And it stated that it would torment John Bell and kill him in the end. It identified itself as an Indian whose bones had been scattered, then as a witch called Old Kate Batts. Then four more voices made their appearance—the “family” of the witch; they identified themselves as Blackdog, Mathematics, Cypocryphy and Jerusalem. Blackdog had a harsh, masculine voice, Jerusalem a boy’s voice, while the other two sounded “delicate and feminine.” They apparently indulged in debauches, talking drunkenly and filling the house with the smell of whisky.
As much as the witch detested John Bell, it seemed to have gentler feelings for the rest of the family, especially for John Bell’s wife Lucy. When she fell ill the witch lamented “Luce, poor Luce,” and showered hazel nuts on her. At Betsy’s birthday party, it called “I have a surprise for you,” and materialized a basket of fruit, including oranges and bananas, which it claimed to have brought from the West Indies.
A local “witch doctor” offered to cure Betsy with some revolting medicine which would make her vomit; when she duly retched, her vomit was found to be full of brass pins and needles. Meanwhile the witch screamed with laughter and said that if Betsy could be made to vomit again, she would have enough pins and needles to set up a shop.
One day in winter, as the children were sitting on a sledge, the witch called “Hold tight,” and hauled the sledge at great speed round the house three times.
It was also able to spit; it had a particular aversion to a
negro slave girl called Anky, and one day covered her head with a foam-like white spittle.
It also showed a tendency to interfere in the personal lives of the family. In due course, Betsy became engaged to a youth called Joshua Gardner. As soon as the witch found out, she began to whisper: “Please, Betsy Bell, don’t have Joshua Gardner.” Betsy finally gave in, and returned Joshua’s ring.
Meanwhile, the persecution of John Bell became steadily worse. His sufferings sound like the torments of the possessed nuns and priests of Loudun; but they were of a more physical nature. When he was ill in bed, the witch cursed and raved, using foul language. When he went outside, it followed him and jerked off his shoes. Then he was struck in the face so hard that he was stunned and had to sit down on a log. His face began to jerk and contort—another of the witch’s favorite methods of tormenting him—then his body convulsed. His shoes kept flying off, and every time his son Richard put them on they flew off again. The witch shrieked with laughter and sang derisive songs (many poltergeists have shown themselves to be musical, although their taste seldom rises above popular songs). Finally, the attacks ceased, and the unfortunate man sat there stunned, with the tears rolling down his cheeks. The witch had been tormenting him for more than three years. When they got him back indoors, he took to his bed. On December 19, 1820, he was found to be in a deep stupor. In the medicine cupboard, his son John found a dark bottle one-third full of a smokey-looking liquid. The witch began to exult: “It’s useless for you to try to relieve old Jack—I’ve got him this time.” Asked about the medicine the witch replied: “I put it there, and gave old Jack a dose last night while he was asleep, which fixed him.” When the doctor arrived, they tested the “medicine” by dipping a straw into it and allowing a drop to fall on the cat’s tongue; the cat jumped and whirled around, then died. John Bell himself died the next day, while the witch filled the house with shrieks of triumph, and sang “Row me up some brandy, O.”
As Fodor points out, there is something very odd about this death. The witch had often revealed strength enough to strangle Bell, or kill him by hitting him with some object; yet she never made any such attempt—only, as it were, drove him to despair, then administered some powerful drug when he was probably dying anyway. In most poltergeist cases we may feel that the entity is not particularly malicious, and that this explains the lack of injury—bullying children often threaten their victims with physical damage, and may even seem to be on the point of carrying out their threat; but there is an abyss of difference between the threat—or, perhaps, lashing out with a stick and missing by a hair’s breadth—and actually causing bodily harm. Yet the Bell Witch seems to have been more malicious than most. It leads to the speculation that these entities may not be “allowed” to do actual harm; they are allowed to torment, but not to damage. This, admittedly, explains nothing; but it is certainly an observation that has struck everyone who has studied the poltergeist.
After the death of John Bell, the witch seemed to lose interest. It apparently refused to help John Junior to speak to his dead father, declaring that the dead could not be brought back; but on one occasion, it told John to go to the window, on a snowy day, then made footprints appear in the snow, which it claimed to be identical with those made by his father’s boots—John did not bother to test this claim.
In 1821, four years after the disturbances began (an unusually long period), the family was sitting at supper one evening when there was a tremendous noise in the chimney—as if a cannon ball had rolled down it and out into the room. It burst into a ball of smoke. The witch’s voice called: “I am going, and will be gone for seven years—goodbye to all.” And the disturbances ceased.
Seven years later, only Lucy Bell and two of her sons remained in the homestead; the rest, including Betsy, had married or left. Once again, the manifestations started from the beginning, with scratching noises, then the covers being pulled off the bed. But the family ignored all this, and after two weeks, the manifestations ceased. John Junior claimed that the witch paid him two visits in his new home, and promised to return to one of his descendants in a hundred and seven years; but 1935 passed without any direct descendant of the Bell family being “haunted.”
The case of the Bell Witch was fully documented in a book written in 1846 by Richard Bell, who had been seven when the witch first appeared, and was later the subject of a full length book by M. V. Ingram (1894). Nandor Fodor, who has written extensively on the poltergeist, discusses it fully in his book The Poltergeist Down the Centuries. As well as being a student of the paranormal, Fodor was also a Freudian psychiatrist, and he takes the view that the poltergeist is sexual in origin. Undoubtedly, he is partly correct—the poltergeist seems to be at its best when it can draw on the energies of a girl (or, less often, a boy) who has just reached puberty. But Fodor goes further than this, and suggests that the explanation of the Bell Witch lies in an incestuous attack made on Betsy by her father. This caused Betsy to hate her father, and her repressed hatred expressed itself in the form of “recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis.” He also believes that John Bell felt a deep guilt about the supposed attack, and cites an occasion when Bell went to dinner with neighbors named Dearden, yet said nothing all evening, seeming depressed and confused; the next day he rode over specially to explain, saying that his tongue had been affected as if his mouth had become filled with fungus. This, says Fodor, probably represents “self-aggression.”
But this theory hardly stands up to examination. As we have seen, poltergeists often take a delight in embarrassing people by revealing their most intimate secrets in public—in the Bell Witch case, it hastened the break-up of Betsy and Joshua by embarrassing them with personal revelations. So it is hard to see why it should have failed to state publicly that John Bell had committed—or tried to commit—incest with Betsy. Even if it had said so, we would be justified in treating the accusation with caution: poltergeists are not noted for truthfulness. The fact that it failed to say so weighs heavily against the incest theory. As to the notion that Betsy’s unconscious aggressions caused the disturbances, this fails to explain why Betsy herself was—at first—treated so badly. It also fails to explain how the witch managed to return when Betsy had left home and was married.
Rather more interesting are Fodor’s speculations about the nature of the poltergeist. He thinks that its denial of communication with the dead proves that it was not the spirit of a dead person. He is inclined to feel that the witch was “a fragment of a living personality that has broken free in some mysterious way of some of the three-dimensional limitations of the mind of the main personality.” In other words, poltergeists are explainable as fragments of the “split personality.” But this leaves us exactly where we were before—in complete ignorance of how the split personality performs its paranormal feats.
The truth is that this explanation—about the unconscious mind—sounded far more convincing in the 1930s than it does today, when Freud is no longer regarded as infallible. Moreover, it simply fails to fit the facts of the “haunting.” On the other hand, Kardec’s views fit them like a glove. According to The Spirits’ Book, only a small proportion of the spirits involved in poltergeist cases are those of dead people—there are many other kinds. Besides, it seems clear that in the Bell Witch case, there was not one spirit, but several. So Kardec’s explanation would be that the haunting in the Bell household was the work of a group of rowdy and mischievous spirits or “elementals” of no particular intelligence—the other-worldly equivalent of a cageful of monkeys. A house with nine children, many of them teenagers, would provide plenty of the energy poltergeists find necessary to perform their antics. We must suppose that the Bell household was not a particularly happy one—this deduction arises from the fact that there is no record of a poltergeist haunting taking place in a happy family. No doubt John Bell was a typical nineteenth-century patriarch, dictatorial and bad-tempered; and on a farmstead in a remote rural area, there was no doubt plenty of reason for tension and frustr
ation in the family.
As to why the witch disliked John Bell so much, the reason may lie in an event that took place very early in the case. Before the first scratching noises were heard, John Bell saw one day a strange, dog-like creature sitting between two corn rows, and shot at it. The “witch” stated on a number of occasions that she could assume the shape of an animal. Poltergeists dislike aggression against themselves, and if the strange animal was the witch, then it had a cause for feeling resentment about John Bell. Apart from that, he was the head of the household, the “tyrant.” If the witch was capable of showing generosity and affection toward various members of the family—Lucy, Betsy, young John—then she (they?) would also dislike the bullying paterfamilias. This is, admittedly, speculation; but it fits better than Fodor’s Freudian guesses.