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
Page 4
Glass found that Ingram was a well-known skeptic on spiritualist matters and had even waged an anti-spiritualism campaign in his newspaper during the 1870s. During autumn 1874, Ingram even investigated a poltergeist outbreak at the W. B. Settle residence in Clarksville involving the mysterious movement of crockery and a butter stand. The episode caused a stir among the local spiritualist community. The brief bubble of excitement soon burst when the cause was discovered to have been “a beetle of unusual strength under the stand.”109 Ingram used the opportunity to ridicule spiritualists.110
Glass found that Clarksville newspapers of the late nineteenth century had developed their own literary style, especially Ingram’s Tobacco Leaf, and that readers had become accustomed to his tongue-in-cheek stories. He is certain that locals would have recognized these stories as tall tales encouraged by the existence of the local Liar’s Club.111 The influence of such clubs has received scant attention from academics, yet they were pervasive in parts of rural America as popular entertainment in an era without TV or radio, and no doubt they were responsible for some famous hoaxes of the period. Glass observes, “To modern readers, the most puzzling part of these hoaxes was the apparent willingness of judges, preachers, professors and other people of note in the community to participate by giving testimonials vouching for the reality of the hoax.” As an example, he cites the claims made in 1897 by a Kansas farmer, who reported that one of his cows had been snatched by a mysterious airship. The Kansas cow-napping caper took place during a wave of airship sightings, amid rumors that an American had perfected the world’s first heavier-than-air flying machine.112 Many prominent citizens of Woodson County signed an affidavit attesting to having witnessed the incident, which was later uncovered as a tall tale created by a local Liar’s Club.113 In a similar vein, Bell Witch researchers have long been baffled by the lack of historical documentation for the Witch, outside of the testimonials written by leading citizens from the greater Adams-Clarksville region, which appeared in Ingram’s book. The key point is that none of Ingram’s testimonials existed prior to the early 1890s. Glass’s hypothesis could explain Ingram’s many letters from locals, the existence of which has been challenged by Bell Witch researchers for decades. If correct, contemporary researchers have been guilty of viewing latter-nineteenth-century events using an early-twenty-first-century prism.
Ingram’s book appeared at a time when sensationalist or yellow journalism was at its peak. Is it possible that the community played along in perpetrating a collective deception? Adams was a small, isolated, close-knit community in the early nineteenth century. In 1820, less than ten thousand people resided in Robertson County. Is it possible the locals were in on the deception in order to draw visitors to the area or as a joke? After all, the 1890s were the heyday of spiritualism, with an estimated eight million adherents in the United States and Europe.114 At the same time, yellow journalism was being used to boost newspaper circulation by exaggerating or fabricating stories. After all, if Ingram and “Bell” are one and the same, the entire story is a fabrication weaved into a real historical backdrop. In 1887, Matthew Arnold coined the term “new journalism” to describe the novel approach that many papers were taking in describing the news by blending fact and fiction. Newspaper historian Karen Roggenkamp states that this journalism “was much more closely tied to American fiction than scholars have traditionally recognized or than most readers would assume today. The dramatic presentation of news defined the industry” and focused on selling a story around a central plot.115 Roggenkamp writes that the new journalism created a unique atmosphere in which fictions and hoaxes were perpetrated. “Reporters and editors rewrote current events into stories laced with the familiar motifs of hoaxes, scientific and travel adventures, mystery and detective tales . . . resurrecting these popular fictional forms as news items.” The result of these manufactured news items “was something that looked a lot like fiction, read like fiction, and entertained like fiction but was ultimately, they argued, better than fiction, because it was, after all, ‘real.’”116 Not surprisingly, the 1890s featured many literary hoaxes. In 1895, Scientific American even published a picture of a man in Loveland, Colorado, holding a potato weighing 86 pounds, 10 ounces. In reality, the prestigious magazine had been duped. The giant spud was a hoax created by the editor of the local Loveland Reporter, W. L. Thorndyke.117
Jack Cook believes that a community deception is a possibility. “The simplest explanation is that everyone knew what he (Ingram) was doing and supported the effort for whatever reasons, giving him the freedom to use real names and situations with no consequence to his good reputation.” Cook points out several possible motives, the root of which was money. “Ingram was in need of the money—the community of Adams needed the publicity” for both their railroad and the promotion of local businesses.118
It cannot be overemphasized that Ingram’s book, “Bell’s” diary, and the Goodspeed reference each notes that the haunting attracted a considerable audience, yet there is not one early mention of these crowds. Even the Jackson visit cannot be corroborated. While the Witch narrative contains many classic poltergeist elements, from mysterious rapping and stones flying through the air to the strange happenings following Betsy Bell when she stayed with neighbors, the story as told by Ingram and “Bell” lacks logical consistency. Why is there no attempt by clergy to exorcise the Witch? Where are the visits by learned people or journalists? Where are the accounts that were said to have been written in the papers of the time or in The Saturday Evening Post? Where are the church records, court documents, letters, and diaries? The story of the Bell Witch defies logic and common sense. A restless spirit attacks a family over several years, pinching, slapping, pulling hair, disturbing sleep, pelting them with pieces of wood and stones, and even poisoning the patriarch of the family, yet they remain in the house! The scenario is absurd, especially if we consider that a young girl was the subject of the Witch’s wrath. If, as was asserted, the spirit followed Betsy wherever she went, why not take her to a university and have doctors examine her—or to a church and attempt to have her exorcised? Where are the accounts from the families with whom Betsy had supposedly taken refuge in hope of getting away from the Witch, only to be followed wherever she went? Both the “Bell” diary and the Goodspeed passage report that numerous visitors heard and sometimes conversed with the Witch. If the haunting persisted for years and was as widely known at the time as we are led to believe, it certainly would have attracted scientists. After all, the documentation of these happenings would be considered one of the greatest events in the history of science: studying and proving the existence of a disembodied voice and proof of life after death.119
Conclusion: A Legend in Search of a History
Time and again, Ingram teases readers by bringing them tantalizingly close to confirmation that the original story as reported by Richard Bell was a real historical event. He tells of a lengthy article on the Witch in an 1849 issue of The Saturday Evening Post yet fails to mention the author, and the issue cannot be located. Even the vial of poison that was supposedly used to kill John Bell could have been examined for toxins, but it was tossed into a fire. Richard Bell’s original handwritten diary, Our Family Trouble, cannot be found despite being a precious family heirloom.
When taken as a whole, the absence of documentation for the Bell Witch is just too incredible. All of the letters confirming the story come from Ingram, supposedly in response to the impending publication of his book on the Bell Witch.120 Yet many of the names in the letters that Ingram cites were real people. This is a conundrum, unless we are dealing with collusion among the letter writers. The answer may lie in a recent find by Dr. Glass. On July 15, 1892, a year and a half before Ingram’s book was published, a curious article appeared in the Tobacco Leaf, describing a series of visits by Ingram to several county residents, who were interviewed about “intensely thrilling events” from seventy-five years earlier. The events, we are told, had created “a wide-spread sensa
tion which continued for several years, and induced people to travel hundreds of miles to witness the strange freaks that were then of daily occurrence.”121 A week later, in a second article, he again mentioned “the stirring events of that vicinity seventy-five years ago.”122 He is clearly referring to the Witch. Even more intriguing, several of those interviewed would later give testimonials in Ingram’s book, including Mahalia Darden, Nancy Ayers, Joshua W. Featherston, and John Allen Gunn. Ingram knew these people well. He grew up with them, and he appears to have stayed with them during his extended visit. Could these testimonials have come from residents who had subscribed to Ingram’s book in exchange for including their names?123 Was it an attempt to boost tourism or to have some fun by being part of a local conspiracy? Soon after the book appeared, it did not seem to be taken too seriously. A reference to it in the Hopkinsville News of March 12, 1895, is buried near the end of a local news column; it says, “Reading ‘The Bell Witch’ is quite the custom here now and the whole community is full of witches, two-headed dogs and graveyard rabbits after dark.”124
In the final analysis, the story of the Bell Witch is best viewed as historical fiction, because it is an event without a history. Much of the online literature is written by people with emotional investments, to the point where their position is no longer an objective research project intending to locate new discoveries but instead an ideology to be defended. All sorts of unsubstantiated claims have been spread in books and on the Internet, causing some people to think they are dealing with a real event. For instance, in December 1937, a journalist for the Arizona Independent Republican reported the standard tale of the Witch and then noted, “The intensity with which the Bell Witch story gripped Robertson County is indicated by the fact that in 1875—many years after the specter’s disappearance—two men residing near Cedar Hill, Tenn., murdered a farmhand named Smith and were freed by a jury on their plea that they thought Smith was a reincarnation of the Bell Witch.”125 Not surprisingly, there is no evidence of such a trial.126
In December 1955, a reporter for the Rocky Mount Evening Telegram in South Carolina recounted the story of “The Old Bell Witch” by writing that he was “prepared to submit a list of at least ten printed sources to support the account that follows.”127 One would feel confident in presuming that none of these unnamed sources appeared prior to the 1890s. In 1986, the Maryland-based Frederick Post reported on modern-day encounters with the Bell spirit: “Many visitors to the cave have reported seeing the figure of a dark-haired woman floating through the cave’s passageways. Several people have said they were touched by something. Others have heard footsteps, and sounds like chains dragging along the cave floor. One boy had a cap snatched from his head and deposited on a ledge 30 ft. up.”128 But compared to the mayhem of the early nineteenth century, these shenanigans are tame and could easily have a naturalistic explanation, including the hat, which could have been thrown there by a mischievous young boy! If the original Bell Witch story is fiction, the happenings at the Witch Cave stand as a testament to the human imagination and our propensity for self-deception. The Frederick Post article also included an interview with a resident of Adams, Tennessee, “Bims” Eden, who said that he’d had several run-ins with the Witch. In one incident, he stated, “I heard somebody knocking at my front door. I looked through the window and saw the image of a figure I didn’t recognize walking away from the house. I saw it walk behind a tree, but it didn’t come out on the other side of the tree. I got my shotgun . . . but when I got to the tree, there was no one there. There were no footprints in that fresh snow either.”129 As it turns out, Mr. Eden had a vested interest in perpetuating the story: he was part owner of the old Bell Farmland where the Bell Cave is situated. It is the same cave that draws over one hundred thousand tourists annually. At the end of this full-length article on the Witch were the following words: “Story and pictures provided by the Tennessee Tourist Development.”130 The story appeared in the travel section and was essentially an advertisement.
The Bell Witch legend serves many functions. For locals, it is a source of regional identity and pride, as community members gather each year to watch theatrical performances that form a part of their shared history. For believers in the paranormal, it is evidence for life after death. For area shop owners and businesspeople, it is a means of attracting tourists and boosting the regional economy. To those who adhere to scientific principles and rules of evidence, the story is almost certainly a hoax. Whether it was based on an existing legend, we cannot say, but there is no evidence that it was. This is why it is best described as a legend in search of a history. In either case, while there is no evidence that anything of a paranormal nature took place, it is a formidable detective story.
CHAPTER 2
The Exorcist: Diary of a Demonic Possession
“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes . . . “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle1
Few films have left such a lasting impression on American popular culture as The Exorcist, which tells the story of twelve-year-old Regan MacNeil (played by Linda Blair), who becomes possessed by a demon. Set in Georgetown in northwest Washington, D.C., the story centers on elderly archeologist and exorcist Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) and his attempts to free Regan of the evil force controlling her. For decades The Exorcist has been the standard by which all other “based on a true story” supernatural thrillers have been compared. At the time of its release in December 1973, some theater-goers became so distressed that they either vomited or fainted; several suffered psychotic breakdowns. Writing in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Dr. James Buzzuto of the Cincinnati General Hospital reported on four cases of psychosis triggered by the film.2 Psychiatrist Louis Schlan treated two cases in the Chicago suburb of Forest Park.3 Similar reactions were recorded across the country.4 Most of those who exhibited psychotic reactions were devout Christians with preexisting psychiatric conditions that were aggravated by the stress of watching the film and the recent loss of a loved one. Psychiatrists have even come up with a term for such trauma: cinematic neurosis. Claims that the film was based on a true story and that people can become possessed by demonic entities gave the storyline a powerful backdrop. Based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling book by the same name, the story was widely claimed to have been inspired by the real-life diary of Father Frank Bishop, who documented the exorcism of a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1949.5 It would become one of the most-watched horror films of its generation. The original release in 1973 earned two Academy Awards and over $300 million in box office receipts—an enormous sum for its time. When it was rereleased in 2000 with eleven extra minutes and billed as “The Version You’ve Never Seen,” it ranked among the highest grossing reissues of all time.6
But just how accurate is the real-life story that gave inspiration to The Exorcist? To be able to make this assessment, we need to examine the events of 1949 as recorded by the people who were there. On Friday, August 20, 1949, an unusual article appeared on the front page of the Washington Post. Written by reporter Bill Brinkley under the title “Ritual of Exorcism Repeated: Priest Frees Mount Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip,” it caught the eye of a young student at Georgetown University: William Peter Blatty, who became fascinated by the case.
In what is perhaps one of the most remarkable experiences of its kind in recent religious history, a 14-year-old Mount Rainier boy has been freed by a Catholic priest of possession by the devil, Catholic sources reported yesterday. Only after between 20 and 30 performances of the ancient ritual of exorcism, here and in St. Louis, was the devil finally cast out of the boy, it was said. In all except the last of these, the boy broke into a violent tantrum of screaming, cursing and voicing of Latin phrases—a language he had never studied—whenever the priest reached the climactic point of the ritual, “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I cast thee (the devil) out.”
Blatty’s novel chronicles the possession of a young girl and the attempts by Catholic priests to exorcise her. In real life, the possessed subject was a boy. The “true story” aspect is a major reason for the remarkable success of both the film and book. English professor and paranormal expert Alan Brown observes that The Exorcist “is not only one of the most frightening films ever made, but it is generally considered to be a fairly accurate depiction of an actual exorcism.”9 The late Father Francis Cleary, a bible scholar at St. Louis University, also praised the realism of the story, telling the National Catholic Register, “This is the one case of which we have the best record.”10 The exorcism not only was witnessed by doctors and nurses but also by Frank Bubb Sr., who worked on the top-secret Manhattan Project, which culminated in the creation of the world’s first atomic bomb. At the time of the exorcism, he was a professor of physics and mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis. Bubb was left shaken when a small table in the boy’s room appeared to levitate, leading him to comment later that “there is much we have yet to discover concerning the nature of electromagnetism.”11