William Gay - Little Sister Death

“That’s where I heard the scream coming from,” Chris says. “Not any kind of animal, but a woman screaming. That’s what that Tennessean camera crew heard, too.”

We fall silent and listen, but all you can hear is the gurgling of underground water. If you listen intently enough, it becomes voices, a man and a woman in conversation, a cyclic rising and falling in which you can hear timbre and cadence but not the words, and in the end it’s just moving water.

Outside in the hot sunlight you’re jerked into another century. Inside it was easy to feel that all these events were layered together and happening simultaneously: the haunting, a wall smoked black by Native American fires, the crypt of bones, the laughter of young lovers exploring the cave. Outside it’s just Adams, Tennessee, circa 2000, and a vague nostalgia for a place and time you’ve never been and can never go.

Chris is locking up the cave. “Some people might talk to you,” she says. “But a lot of people won’t talk about it at all. After that Blair Witch movie came out, this place was sort of overrun with reporters and writers. But some people around here don’t think it’s anything to joke about. Some of them have seen things and heard things and feel the whole business should just be left alone.”

“I don’t really know what to think,” Tim Henson tells me. “I know something happened, but I’ve never really seen anything myself. I’ve talked to a lot of people who say they have. A friend of mine was fishing down in front of the cave and swears he saw a figure, a human figure, that just disappeared. And people say they see lights around that property. But I’m particular about finding an explanation for things I see and hear. And so far I’ve always been able to find an explanation that satisfies me.”

Henson’s the superintendent of the water department in Adams, but he’s also the town’s unofficial historian, a walking encyclopedia on the Bell family and their troubles, who can quote courthouse records and church rolls from the nineteenth century without having to look them up. He’s the man that people come looking for when they’re doing a book or a documentary about the Bell Witch. Most recently, he spent some time being interviewed for the Learning Channel. Henson comes across as a shrewd and intelligent man, and his take on the legend makes as much sense as any other I’ve heard

“It doesn’t matter to me if it’s true or not,” he says. “I guess something happened. There’s about forty books now about it, and you don’t write forty books about nothing. There’s been three in the last year or so, and just the other day a fellow gave me a piece on the witch from an old 1968 Playboy . But I keep an open mind on all that. What I’m interested in is the story and the history, the Bells themselves and the way they interacted with their neighbors. There was a bunch of students down at Mississippi State University who tried to prove it was all a hoax, that Joshua Gardner hoaxed the whole county just to marry Betsy. But it’s hard to say.”

“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.