Bell Witch Cave

The Bell Witch case rests on one book, and that book is the problem. Martin Van Buren Ingram (1832-1909) was a Clarksville newspaperman, editor of the Progress-Democrat. He published An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch in 1894, seventy-three years after the end of the period the story covers. The word "authenticated" in the title is Ingram's own and reports no examination by anyone else. Its central document is Our Family Trouble, which Ingram presents as the account of Richard Williams Bell, a son of the family. By Ingram's own dating it was written "during the Fall and Winter of 1846", by a man born in 1811 who died in 1857: a boy of six to ten when the disturbances began, writing about twenty-five years later. Taken at Ingram's word, then, it is a recollection. Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2014, went further. He found that the manuscript "has no proven existence before about 1891", that nobody has produced it for an examination of paper, ink or handwriting, and that the text has a character introduce himself as "a professional detective" although the earliest known American use of that noun is from about 1853. The same readability formula put both texts at 14.3 and 14.4 years of schooling, and Nickell concluded that Ingram wrote the narrative he attributed to Bell. Andrew Jackson's visit reaches the book through a story told by a Tennessee lawyer, on pages 229 to 238, and Nickell found no historical source that supports it. The National Register nomination for the cave, prepared in 2007, calls it a "well documented legend" on the strength of an e-mail from The Hermitage, and prints two different sayings for Jackson: one from an 1894 New Orleans review of Ingram's book, the other from Harriet Parks Miller's later pamphlet and a 2006 rack card for the cave. The cave enters the record later still. The scanned 1894 edition on the Internet Archive, about 131,000 words, does not contain the word cave, against 804 occurrences of witch, 137 of Betsy and 12 of Jackson (counted on 1 October 2026). Goodspeed's county history of 1886 tells a haunted-cave story in the paragraph just before its Bell Witch, about another farm and another cave, and gives the Bell story without one. The National Register nomination states that "there is no known date for opening the Bell Witch Cave", and the earliest dated items it lists for the cave are postcards of 1908-1909. What the record does support is a tradition older than Ingram. Eight years before his book, Goodspeed's History of Tennessee described an invisible spirit "having the voice and attributes of a woman" that held conversations, shook hands, took the sugar from the bowls and slapped and pinched the children, and that drew people "from hundreds of miles around"; its author printed the story "merely ... as an example of superstition". Ingram himself mentions "the story set afloat by parties failing in their investigations, charging her with the authorship of the mystery", meaning Betsy Bell. Between that local story and a talking entity that killed John Bell stands one author, writing in 1894.