Short Stuff: The Bell Witch

Summary

Stuff You Should Know – Short Stuff: The Bell Witch

Date: October 29, 2025
Hosts: Josh & Chuck
Podcast: iHeartPodcasts

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Overview

This “Short Stuff” episode explores the spooky legend of the Bell Witch haunting in early 19th-century Tennessee. Josh and Chuck recount the haunting of the Bell family, discuss historical sources, share the wildest claims, and reflect on the blend of folklore, history, and tourism surrounding the legend.

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Key Discussion Points

The Bell Family and the Beginning of the Haunting

[00:46 - 01:33]

• The Bell family moved from North Carolina to Adams, Tennessee, in 1806, prospered as respected landowners, and lived peacefully—until 1817.
• The patriarch, John “Old Jack” Bell, was the first to encounter a supernatural being: “This large animal had the body of a dog, but the head of a rabbit.” (Josh, 01:35)

Early Encounters and Escalation

[01:35 - 04:23]

• Each family member had disturbing encounters:
  • Drury (or Drewry) Bell saw a “giant bird” that vanished when shot at.
  • Betsy Bell witnessed “a little girl in a green dress hanging from a tree.”
• The harassments escalated to nocturnal pounding on the house’s walls each night—unseen hands, according to the family.
• “This is basically like 1817 ding-dong ditch, I guess. But they never found a trace of anybody.” (Josh, 04:07)

Hauntings Become Physical and Vocal

[04:23 - 05:53]

• The family, especially Betsy and John, experienced physical attacks: sheets pulled off, hair-pulling, slapping (leaving welts), and pinching.
• Most disturbing: The witch began to converse, not just screech or whisper:
  • “Poltergeists don’t talk, everybody. Ask your parents. The witch started speaking. The witch ghost. And at first it was faint… But over time, the voice grew louder, clearer, and would sometimes hold conversations.” (Josh, 05:02)

Community Involvement and Enslaved Witnesses

[05:53 - 07:14]

• Others, including enslaved people on the Bell property, reported supernatural activity.
  • Dean, an enslaved man, faced a “two-headed dog” and was given a “witch ball” by his wife for protection.
• The legend extended beyond the Bell family, involving the wider community.

Lighter Moments & Banter

• “She was like, you know, I know tradition says it’s got to be a ball, but this two-headed dog just wants to get that ball. Can we go with something else?” (Josh/Chuck, 07:04)
• “How about a witch’s dick?” (Josh, 07:14)

The Witch’s Targeting of Betsy and John

[09:14 - 10:49]

• The witch especially tormented Betsy, allegedly interfering with her engagement to Joshua Gardner, which eventually ended.
• John Bell suffered the most: relentless verbal and physical abuse, seizures, declining health.
• “The witch saved the worst for him. She was verbally abusive to him. She was physically abusive to him.” (Josh, 10:03)
• On his deathbed, the witch reportedly gloated: “It’s useless for you to try and relieve old Jack. I’ve got him this time. He will never get up from that bed again. I put it there and gave old Jack a big dose of it last night while he was asleep, which fixed him nice.” (Chuck, 10:57)

The Haunting’s End and Legacy

[12:37 - 16:06]

• After John’s death in December 1820, the haunting reportedly ceased, though the witch interrupted his funeral with singing and mockery.
• The first commercial publication of the story (1849, Saturday Evening Post) accused Betsy of faking it; she threatened to sue and got a retraction.
• Over time, suspicion settled on a neighbor, Kate Batts, as the “witch.” Two primary origin stories emerged:
  • Kate Batts sought revenge for a land deal gone wrong involving her brother-in-law and John Bell.
  • Alternatively, a North Carolina version claims Bell had an affair with Kate, left her to die, and moved to Tennessee, but she “haunted” him across state lines.
• “Oh no, I don’t think you know how ghost witches work. We can travel interstate.” (Chuck, 14:58)

Fact vs. Folklore: Historical Roots

[15:02 - 16:24]

• Census and genealogical records confirm the existence of the Bells and Batts in the time and place described, adding authenticity to the legend.
• “This I think throws it in there with the category of like the Amityville house…these supposed real hauntings that took place for sure.” (Chuck, 16:06)
• Adams, TN, now capitalizes on the legend: locals rebuilt the Bell home, host tours, and encourage “ghost tourism.”
• “If they don’t have some sort of animatronic rabbit-dog, they’re doing it wrong.” (Chuck, 17:03)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “This large animal had the body of a dog, but the head of a rabbit.” (Josh, 01:35)
• “Poltergeists don’t talk, everybody. Ask your parents.” (Josh, 05:02)
• “She was ghost slapped, apparently hard enough to leave welts and bruises.” (Chuck, 04:37)
• “It’s useless for you to try and relieve old Jack. I’ve got him this time. He will never get up from that bed again.” (Chuck, 10:57)
• “This actually happened.” (Josh, 16:06)
• “If they don’t have some sort of animatronic rabbit dog, they’re doing it wrong.” (Chuck, 17:03)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:46] — Introduction to Bell Witch folklore and the Bell family’s background
• [01:35] — John Bell’s first encounter with the “dog-rabbit”
• [02:24] — Subsequent family member encounters (Drury, Betsy)
• [04:37] — Hauntings become physical; Betsy’s injuries
• [05:02] — Witch begins to speak aloud and converse with the family
• [05:53] — Enslaved people’s experiences, especially Dean and the “witch ball”
• [09:14] — Betsy’s engagement sabotaged by the witch
• [10:03] — John Bell’s decline; witch’s cruelty
• [10:57] — Witch’s alleged confession to poisoning John Bell
• [12:37] — The legend’s publication; accusations against Betsy
• [13:18] — Suspicions about Kate Batts, the supposed “witch”
• [15:02] — Folklore meets verifiable history; ongoing impact in Adams, TN
• [16:24] — Modern tourism and haunted attractions

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Closing Thoughts

Josh and Chuck expertly blend spooky storytelling, skepticism, and humor as they outline one of America’s most infamous ghost stories. The Bell Witch legend stands out because of its mix of documented family, local lore, and its profitability as a tourist draw—leaving listeners with the chills, a few laughs, and a sense of how folklore continues to shape culture and place.

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Transcript

[Chuck]

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[Josh]

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. It's Josh and Chuck here in our scary October Rolls On. It's rolling along with the short stuff on the Bell Witch.

[Chuck]

That's right. Rolling along the Red river of Tennessee, because that's where the Bell Witch is now. Adams, Tennessee. But that's where the Bell witch story finds its roots. About an hour north of Nashville. And that was a family, the Bells, that moved from North Carolina in 1806 to Tennessee and did pretty well. They were landowners, they were very respected. They had a pretty good life. And about 9ish years after they moved there, they started to get haunted by a angry ghost witch.

[Josh]

Yeah. And before we get too much deeper into it, I want to shout out a historian named Pat Fitzhugh, who runs Bellwitch.org and wrote the book the Bell Witch. Colon the full account, Legends of America. Victoria Klein, Peter at the Tennessee State Museum. Okay, got it.

[Chuck]

Rocky Top, baby.

[Josh]

So the haunting of the Bell family began in 1817, when John Bell, the patriarch of the family, sometimes called Old Jack Bell. Cause remember, this is 1817 in Tennessee. He was in his fields. He was a huge planter in the area, and he was in one of his fields at one point and he noticed a big animal sitting in his field. So he looked at it a little closer and he found that it was quite disturbing. This large animal had the body of a dog, but the head of a rabbit.

[Chuck]

Okay, red flag.

[Josh]

John Bell was like, did I eat mushrooms this morning? He's like, no, I didn't. And he said, well, I'm going to shoot at this because I'm a homesteader in Tennessee in 1817. And when he did, the animal either vanished or scurried off to the nearby woods, depending on who's telling the story. But either way, John Bell let it be.

[Chuck]

Yeah. So that's dad's first incident. There would also be successive incidents with kids. Dewey, his son, and Betsy, his daughter. Duree saw a. And if you're wondering how that's spelled, it's D, E, W, R, Y. I've never seen that name before, but I think I love it.

[Josh]

I'm glad that you love it. I think I misspelled it. I think it might be Drury because I also saw him referred to as Drew before.

[Chuck]

I like Drewry.

[Josh]

I like Drury more too. So we're gonna rename Drury Bell.

[Chuck]

Yeah. So Drewry was haunted by a giant bird. Supposedly a bird that he had never seen before. It was sitting on a fence post, so of course, he shot at it as well. But it disappeared into thin air. And then daughter Betsy may be the most frightening thing, Although the dog rabbit's pretty frightening. But also, so is a little girl in a green dress hanging from a tree. And I assume that means by a rope and not just by her hands.

[Josh]

I could not get any further information about that.

[Chuck]

Okay. I mean, if it was haunting, it had to be like that girl was hanged there as a child or whatever and came back.

[Josh]

Yes. So these appearances seem to portend all of the haunting that followed. Haunting by the ghost of a witch. Don't forget, that's the worst kind. Because I think the same night after John Bell saw the rabbit dog or the dog rabbit, I guess, depending on your perspective. Yeah. The family was awakened by beating noises on the outside of the walls of their home, like it was being pounded on. And that was just the first night. These things continued night after night after night. Sometimes they would be pounding really hard, sometimes kind of light. But either way, Belle and his sons. He had several sons. They would get out of bed and try to catch the person who was pounding on their house. This is basically like 18, 17, ding dong ditch, I guess. But they never found a trace of anybody. Yeah.

[Chuck]

And the hauntings or the sounds continued, rather. The children I know are haunted by the sounds of what they thought was rats chewing on their bedposts at night, which was probably just rats chewing on their bedpost at night.

[Josh]

Right. But you gotta toss that one in.

[Chuck]

You gotta toss that in because it is scary. The hauntings would turn physical. Sometimes the sheets were pulled off of the kids while they slept. Young Betsy was ghost slapped, apparently hard enough to leave welts and bruises. She was ghost pinched. She was ghost hair pulled. And it became pretty clear that Betsy and old Jack, the dad were the main targets in this family.

[Josh]

Yes. And we'll see why in a few. But I think probably what makes the whole thing the most disturbing is that the witch began to talk. It's one thing for poltergeist activity. Poltergeists don't talk, everybody. Ask your parents. The witch Started speaking the witch ghost. And at first it was faint. They were just barely whispered. You couldn't really make out what the ghost was saying. But over time, the voice grew louder, clearer, and would sometimes hold conversations, like entire conversations with the Bell family in their home. So much so that John Jr. Was known to debate the witch voice.

[Chuck]

Sure.

[Josh]

I don't know. Over what nuclear energy maybe. And whether it was safe or not.

[Chuck]

Probably.

[Josh]

But he later wrote the conversations down that he had with the Bell witch, and he published it, I think, self published in 1934.

[Chuck]

That's right. And if you think maybe just this family had some weird mold in their house that was driving them all to the brinks of sanity. Not true. Because, you know, unfortunately this is 1817 and they had enslaved people on their land. And they also had similar experiences, the most famous of which was an enslaved man there named Dean, who encountered the witch multiple times in the form of a two headed dog man with ostensibly dog heads.

[Josh]

I saw a drawing of it of this Dean being met by a two headed dog, and it actually kind of missed the mark because it looked like it was hopping up to like play with him. Oh, well, maybe it was because in this picture, the drawing, Dean is holding a ball, but it's not supposed to be like a ball that the two headed dog wants him to toss for it. It was a witch ball that Dean's wife made. And that's a real thing. A witch ball is a blown glass sphere, usually kind of colorful, and depending on where you're using this or who you ask, it's either used to trap witches or ward off witches. And Dean's wife made it for him. I think after the first time he saw the bell witch to protect himself.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And he was like, you know, I know tradition says it's got to be a ball, but this two headed dog just wants to get that ball. Can we go with something else?

[Josh]

She's like, sure. How about a witch's dick?

[Chuck]

Right. Exactly. Shall we take a break? All right, we'll come back and finish up with the bell witch right after this.

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[Chuck]

All right, so where we left off, there were two headed dogs wanting to play with that witch ball. Betsy's getting ghost pinched. Dad is getting haunted. The whole family's getting haunted. And it became pretty clear that Betsy was getting haunted because this Bell witch did not like the fact that she was engaged to a guy named Joshua Gardner. Local kid. And she tried to keep this wedding on, but eventually would break it off in 1821 and marry an old guy. So old. How old was he? He was so old that she ended up nursing the man for 11 years before he eventually died.

[Josh]

Yeah, Betsy fell on hardships of her own even after she moved out of her father's house. She had eight children and four of.

[Chuck]

Them in that 11 years with the old sick guy.

[Josh]

I don't know if it was during or before. I don't know how long they were married before he fell ill. I don't know. But yes, they had eight children for sure, but only four made it to adulthood, sadly. So Betsy had her own troubles because of the Joshua Gardner thing, but John Bell, the witch saved the worst for him. She was verbally abusive to him. She was physically abusive to him. Shortly after she appeared, John Bell was afflicted by some unknown illness. And it just kept getting worse and worse over the next few years as the haunting wore on. He would have seizures, sometimes Chuck. And as he came out of the seizures, the Bell witch would slap him around. She was really mean and ruthless toward John Bell. She hated John Bell.

[Chuck]

Can you imagine that? He comes out of a Seizure. And she's like, hey, what do you think of this? Smack, smack, smack.

[Josh]

Have been waiting for you to come out of it.

[Chuck]

Oi. He sadly passed on in December 1820. He believed that the witch had poisoned him. And apparently the witch confirmed this. And the day before he died, said, it's useless for you to try and relieve old Jack. I've got him this time. He will never get up from that bed again. I put it there and gave old Jack a big dose of it last night while he was asleep, which fixed him nice.

[Josh]

There's a nice little preview of our Halloween episode.

[Chuck]

Oh, I hope so. The neighbors found out about this stuff too, right?

[Josh]

Yeah. So he swore his family, John Bell swore his family to secrecy. This is just kind of not the thing that you wanted your fellow Townsfolk in 1817 Tennessee to know about. But it just became such a big deal that it spread and got out. And so some of the townsfolk tried to catch the witch. One guy tried to shoot the witch to no avail. Right. No one could do anything to assuage the Bell witch. They even came up with their own legends, too. The one that stood out to me the most was that at one point, the Bell witch recited two different sermons, verbatim, that were being given, delivered at two different churches at that moment, miles away from one another. And, I mean, if that's not an 1817 Tennessee folk superstition that you'd just be like, damn, when somebody told you that, I don't know what is.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Because that's literally impossible in that time to know exactly what was being said in two different places at once.

[Josh]

There's a lot of holes in that legend for sure.

[Chuck]

Thankfully, after John died, maybe taken care of by the Bell Witch, the hauntings basically stopped. I don't think we mentioned that at his funeral. The witch even haunted him. There was, like, singing, drinking songs and interrupting the wake in the funeral. But much later, in 1849, the Saturday evening Post would publish a story that people basically said, it's like the first commercial publication of this story. And it accused Betsy of being behind the whole thing. And she threatened to sue unless they printed an apology and a retraction, which they did. So I guess they did make that up. And Betsy just, you know, she never wanted to talk about it. As she aged, she never spoke of the Bell witch.

[Josh]

Yes. So the Bell witch, I'm pretty sure even at the time, but certainly shortly afterward in Tennessee, in the parts of Tennessee, it was attributed to a local woman named Kate Batts. And there's a couple different explanations for why Kate Batts would care about the Bell family so much that she would hound them beyond the grave. The first one takes place entirely in Tennessee because we didn't say, but not just Tennessee, but also North Carolina and Mississippi put some claim on the Bell witch, even though it all happened in Tennessee. But in the first explanation, John Bell, remember we said he was one of the bigger planters. He had a 300 plus acre homestead that he built by acquiring land from neighbors. And there was one land deal that he had with the brother in law of Kate Batts, a man by the name of Benjamin. And Bell is said to have taken advantage of Benjamin on the deal and that in her death, Kate hounded John Bell to the grave in revenge for this land deal.

[Chuck]

Why would he do Benjamin Brant like that?

[Josh]

I don't know.

[Chuck]

Such a fine actor.

[Josh]

Yeah.

[Chuck]

The other version, like you said, takes place also in North Carolina because they also do lay claim. And this is that Belle, well, seemingly he had sex with Kate Batts and had an affair with Kate Batts. And that is why he left to go to Tennessee because he had had this affair, broke it off. Kate was really sore at this obviously and threatened to tell everybody, including the family. And so as the legend goes, Belle tied her up in a smokehouse and left her there to die. And she haunted him there. And so they had to pack up and leave to Tennessee. And she was like, oh no, I don't think you know how ghost witches work. We can travel interstate. Tennessee's not that far away.

[Josh]

Yep. The whole way she just kept going. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? So one of the things that makes this story so unsettling, aside from all the details of it, and if you really want to dive into it, check out pat Fitzhugh's website, bellwitch.org like really has a lot of exhaustive research on it. But one of the things that makes it unsettling, like I was saying, is that these people like really did live in North Carolina and Tennessee at the time this legend covers. Like genealogists have found Kate Batts in Edgecombe County. They found Kate Batts in Adams, Tennessee. Apparently Battses still live in Adams, Tennessee. And there's Bells as well. The Bell family graveyard has all these people's headstones from the correct time frame. So the idea that these people really did live and that at the time they believed that this was happening to the Bell family, as did the Bell family, I don't know. I think that makes it even Cooler. It's not like the hitchhiker with the hook hand or something like that. This actually happened.

[Chuck]

Yeah. I mean, this I think throws it in there with the category of like the Amityville house and stuff like that of these supposed real hauntings that took place for sure. But you can still go there. It's like a tourist destination, apparently. The town of 674 people, it's a pretty big boon for their economy.

[Josh]

You'd think.

[Chuck]

So they have rebuilt. The house is gone, but they rebuilt a replica in its place. It must be so popular.

[Josh]

Yeah, you can tour it inside the replica of the house. There's also a cave on John Bell's property that they believe the Bell witch lives in. And you can tour that cave as well. I can't remember how much it was, but it was reasonably priced. It's not going to break you for a family of four. And again, it's just an hour north of Nashville. It looks quite neat. They also offer lantern guided tours in the dark. So if you're really feeling scary, maybe do that one.

[Chuck]

Yeah. And if they don't have some sort of animatronic rabbit dog, they're doing it wrong.

[Josh]

That's right. The whole town's saving up for it. Don't you worry. Tell them, Chuck.

[Chuck]

I think that means short stuff is out. Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.