by Colin Wilson
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 materialised 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 favourite 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 smoky-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 Jnr 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 identifical 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 Jnr claimed that the witch paid him two visits in his new home, and promised to return to one of his descendants in 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 neighbours 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 othe
r 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 19th 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 frustration 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 towards 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.
Thirty years after the Bell Witch, there occurred in Stratford, Connecticut, a case that has seems to demonstrate beyond all doubt the inadequacies of Fodor’s Freudian theories.
The Stratford minister, the Rev. Eliakim Phelps, had married a widow with four children. He was interested in clairvoyance, and attempted to treat illnesses by means of mesmerism. He was understandably excited by the news of the strange events at the home of the Fox family in 1849. And in March 1850, when he entertained a visitor from New York, the two of them arranged some kind of amateur seance, which was not particularly successful, although they managed to obtain a few raps.
A few days later, on Sunday March 10, the family returned from church to find the front door wide open and the place in disorder. Their first assumption was that they had been burgled; but inspection showed that nothing had been taken, and a gold watch left on a table was untouched. That afternoon, the family went off to church again, but this time the Reverend Phelps stayed behind to keep watch. He may well have dozed; at all events, nothing disturbed him. But when the family returned from church, the place again showed signs of an intruder. Furniture was scattered, and in the main bedroom, a nightgown and chemise had been laid out on the bed, with the arms folded across the breast, and a pair of stockings placed to make it look like a corpse laid out for burial. In another room, clothing and cushions had been used to make various dummies, which were arranged in a tableau, ‘in attitudes of extreme devotion, some with their foreheads nearly touching the floor’, and with open Bibles in front of them. Clearly, the poltergeist had a sense of ironic humour.
From then on, the Phelps poltergeist practised its skill as a designer of tableaux. The astonishing thing was that these were done so quickly. One observer, a Dr Webster, remarked that it would have taken half a dozen women several hours to construct the ‘dummies’ that the poltergeist made within minutes. One figure was so life-like that when the 3-year-old boy went into the room, he thought his mother was kneeling in prayer, and that she whispered ‘Be still . . .’
That it was a poltergeist became clear the following day, when objects began to fly through the air. A bucket flew downstairs, an umbrella leapt through the air, and spoons, bits of tin and keys were thrown around. A candlestick jumped off the mantelpiece, then beat the floor violently until it broke. There were loud pounding noises as if someone was trying to demolish the house with an axe, and loud screams.
The poltergeist probably derived its strength from the fact that it had two ‘focuses’ in the house—Harry, aged 12, and Anna, who was 16. Harry was persecuted by the ‘spirit’. When he went for a drive in the carriage with his stepfather, twenty stones were flung into the carriage. On one occasion he was snatched up into the air so that his head nearly struck the ceiling; he was thrown into a cistern of water, and tied up and suspended from a tree. In front of a visiting clergyman, the legs of his trousers were violently torn open from the bottom to above the knee.
After this, the poltergeist started to break glass; it smashed seventy-one window panes and various glass articles. Another of its favourite tricks was to write on sheets of paper; when the Reverend Phelps turned his back on his writing table, he heard the scratching of the pen, and found written on the paper: ‘Very nice paper and nice ink for the devil.’ (Typically, poltergeists seem to object to being watched while they do things like this; they wait until no one is looking.)
Phelps tried communicating with the ‘spirit’ by means of raps, and found that it would answer his questions. There seemed to be more than one spirit present; but the author of most of the mischief seemed to be a French clerk, who had handled a settlement for Mrs Phelps, and who had since died; he now claimed to be in hell because he had cheated Mrs Phelps. Her husband investigated this claim, and found that there had been a minor fraud; but it had hardly been as serious as the ‘spirit’ seemed to believe. On another occasion the raps told Phelps to put his hand under the table; when he did this his hand was grasped by another hand, warm and human.
The well-known psychic Andrew Jackson Davis visited the Phelps home, and put forward a theory very similar to that of Mrs Crowe. He said that the phenomena were caused by ‘magnetism’ and by ‘electricity’, the magnetism attracting objects towards the boy and girl, the electricity causing them to fly in the opposite direction. But Davis—the author of the bestselling work of ‘spirit dictation’ called The Principles of Nature—also agreed that there were spirits present—he claimed to have seen five of them.
The poltergeist—or poltergeists—became increasingly destructive. Pieces of paper burst into flame, although always where they could be seen; sometimes, the ashes of burnt papers were found in drawers. All kinds of objects were smashed—Phelps estimated that the poltergeist had done about two hundred dollars’ worth of damage. And the poltergeist also attacked the eldest girl, Anna. A reporter was sitting with the mother and daughter when the girl shouted that someone had pinched her; they rolled up her sleeve and found a severe fresh pinch mark on her arm. On another occasion, there was a loud smacking noise, and a red mark appeared on her face.
In October 1851, more than a year after the disturbances began, the mother and children went off to Pennsylvania and stayed there until the following spring. The poltergeist did not follow them, and when they returned to Stratford, nothing more happened.
What seems very clear is that the poltergeist haunting would never have taken place if the Rev. Phelps had not made the mistake of dabbling in an amateur seance. Presumably this attracted the attention of some juvenile delinquents of the spirit world, who discovered that there were two excellent mediums in the house, and proceeded to make use of their energies. When Mrs Phelps took the children away, the poltergeist was starved of energy and went away. Here it seems obvious that the ‘Freudian’ explanation is both unnecessary and irrelevant.
The Phelps case has been described as ‘one of the most amazing poltergeist dramas of which we have record’.1 In fact, most students of the paranormal would agree that this distinction should go to the case that has become known as ‘the Amherst mystery’, which took place in Nova Scotia in 1878.
A shoe worker named Daniel Teed lived in a two-storey house with his wife and two sons, his wife’s two unmarried sisters, Ja
ne and Esther Cox, who were aged 22 and 18, his wife’s brother William, and his own brother, John. (The house must have been grossly overcrowded.) All were Methodists. Jane, the elder sister, was pretty; Esther was short and rather stout. Nevertheless, Esther had a boyfriend, a local factory worker named Bob MacNeal.
In late August, Daniel Teed complained that someone had been milking the cow; Esther was a suspect as she was unusually fond of milk. Esther was suffering from nervous tensions, and ran up from the cellar one night screaming that a rat had run over her leg. Her troubles were probably sexual in origin, as seems to be revealed by a dream she had at the time: hundreds of black bulls with bright blue eyes and blood dripping from their mouths tried to break into the house, while Esther frantically locked the doors . . .
The following evening, Esther and Bob MacNeal went out for a drive. Bob, who had a bad reputation locally, tried to persuade Esther to go into the woods with him, but she refused. He pulled out a gun and ordered her to get down from the buggy; he looked as if he might fire when the sound of an approaching vehicle distracted him. He leapt on to the buggy, drove back at a dangerous speed, let Esther off, then left Amherst for good. Esther cried herself to sleep, and for the next few days had red eyes.
On September 4, a damp, misty evening, Jane heard Esther sobbing in bed. Then Esther screamed that there was a mouse in bed with her. They searched, but no mouse was found. The following night, both heard a rustling noise, and made a search. It seemed to be coming from a cardboard box containing patchwork, so Jane stood it in the middle of the room, expecting a mouse to run out. Instead the box jumped into the air and fell over. She stood it up, and it jumped again.
Daniel Teed came in to see what the noise was about, pushed the box under the bed, and told them to go to sleep.
The next night, Esther went to bed early. Soon after the light went out, she leapt out of bed shouting: ‘Jane, I’m dying.’ Jane lit the lamp and saw that Esther’s face was bright red, and her hair was standing on end. Daniel Teed came in, together with the other two men. Esther got back into bed, but began to scream. Her body appeared to be swelling like a balloon. Suddenly, there was a loud report like a clap of thunder. The men rushed out to search the house, but found nothing. When they came back, Esther was back to normal and fast asleep.
