“But folks still believe in it here?” I asked.
“Oh yes. Some do. And they figure it’s not too smart to make fun of it or to get into it too deep. There was a couple here, a descendant of John Bell and one from Joshua Gardner. They fell in love and courted all their lives, but they were afraid to marry because of the Bell Witch.”
When I was kid I read an issue of Life magazine about the seven greatest American ghost stories, and that was the first time I heard of the Bell Witch. Later my uncle, who was a great storyteller and had read the early books, fleshed out the tale. I found the books and read them myself, and for my money it’s the quintessential ghost story. I figured that someday I’d go to Robertson County and see the Bell farm, which seemed to me an almost mythic place existing only in its own strange fairytale geography.
It was years before I made my first visit, more years still before I made my second.
The first I made with my uncle, whom I held in great esteem. I was beginning to read Steinbeck and Algren, and he seemed to be one of their characters come to life. He was sort of a restless-footed hard drinker, hard traveler, barroom brawler. Plus he had a tattoo on his bicep: a dagger with a drop of blood at its tip, a scroll wound round the blade that read DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. He had lied about his age to get into World War II, then crouched seasick and heartsick in the prow of a landing craft while the beaches at Normandy swam toward him like something out of a bad dream. He fought yard by yard across France and was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He was a hero, and he had the medals to prove it, though he didn’t think they amounted to much.
After the war he bummed around the country, working where he could and riding freight trains, sleeping sometimes in places you don’t normally want to associate with sleeping: jails, boxcars, graveyards. He was an honest and an honorable man, but he’d been down the road and back. He was what they used to call “a man with the bark on.”
By the time we rode out to the Bell farm, a lot of time had passed, and he had settled down, quit drinking, and become a respectable family man.
At the time the cave was private property (it still is, but it’s set up as a tourist attraction), and we weren’t allowed to see it, let alone go inside. So we talked to a few locals, went looking for the graveyard and whatever remnants of Bell’s old log home might remain. The graveyard is in a cedar grove a mile or so off US 41, and it’s not easy to find. But it’s been found time and again by vandals, who stole Bell’s original tombstone and even dug up some of the graves. All that remains of the house are a few of the stones it used to stand on.
It was dark before we found our way out of the woods, and though we were trying to maintain a degree of detached curiosity, it was undeniable that this was an eerie place.
A few months later my uncle and his wife turned up at my house in the middle of the night with a strange tale. He looked nervous and haggard, far from the cool and collected man I was accustomed to. Something had jarred him, and he didn’t take long getting around to it.
“That thing has followed me home,” he said.
Life had gone on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. “What thing?”
“That Bell Witch, or whatever it is. We keep hearing things, seeing things. It’s about to drive us crazy.”
“What kind of things?” I asked.
“We’ve heard voices. People mumbling, but you can’t hear what they’re saying. A hell of a racket that sounded like you’d dropped a chest of drawers from the ceiling and smashed it on the floor. You go look and there’s nothing there. The other night I looked out the kitchen window and saw this ball of blue light just rise up from the ground and move ofF into the woods.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“We want you to sleep in that bedroom where we hear that stuff,” he said. “If you hear something, at least we’ll know we’re not going crazy.”
There was no way I wanted to do that. But by now I was trying to get down the road and back myself, and I had a reputation to maintain. I was also hoping this would turn out to be his idea of a practical joke.
“All right,” I said.
This is what I heard, or think I heard:
I couldn’t sleep, and I kept a light on. At about three in the morning I was reading an old copy of Reader’s Digest when I heard a chuckle, a soft, malicious chuckle of just a few seconds’ duration. It seemed to come from no particular point in the room.
I thought it was a joke. I jerked open the bedroom door. There was no one there. I went through the house. Everyone was asleep.
It was a long time until daylight.
What did I hear? I don’t know. Did I really hear it at all? I don’t know that, either, and I wouldn’t argue it either way. It doesn’t seem to matter. You hear what you believe you hear.
My uncle lives in West Tennessee near a town named after Joshua Gardner’s brother, and I called him the other night.
“Did you really hear all that stuff in that house, or were you just pulling my leg?” I asked him.
“We heard things right up until we sold the place and moved,” he said. “It sort of died down, but every now and then we’d hear something. You’ll notice nobody lives too long in that house. It’s changed hands several times since we sold it.”
I told him I had been back to Robertson County and that I was writing an article about the Bell Witch.
“It might be best to leave that stuff alone,” he said.
I don’t know if there’s any truth in all this business. Because almost two hundred years have passed since the original haunting supposedly occurred, I don’t suppose anyone else will know. But I do know that the world is a strange and wondrous place. There are mysteries on every side if you care to look. I also know that I don’t know nearly as much now as I thought I did at twenty-five. If I stacked the things I know next to the ones I don’t, I wouldn’t have a very tall stack.
Every question is multiple choice, and truth depends on your frame of reference. It sometimes seems an act of hubris to even form a conjecture.
I’d leave that stuff alone, I heard time after time from one source or another, and it might be worth remembering that the Bell Witch saved her strongest malice for scoffers and debunkers. It might be wise to keep one’s disbelief to oneself.
On the other hand, she was clairvoyant. So it might be best not to think about that stuff at all.
A Note from the Publisher
Steven Gillis, publisher of Dzanc Books, wishes to acknowledge the many people who have helped make this book possible. Little Sister Death was found among William Gay’s literary archive after his death. A team of William’s friends, including J. M. White, Shelia Kennedy, Susan McDonald, Lamont Ingalls, and Paul Nitsche, compiled and transcribed William’s remaining works from his handwritten notebooks and a typescript found among his papers. Little Sister Death, the first of several planned posthumous releases, was then passed to Guy Intoci and Michelle Dotter at Dzanc Books. The original papers can be found at the Sewanee University Library Special Collections.
William Gay, Little Sister Death
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