From the unexplained to the mundane, join us on our journey to the French.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, like a good old turnip jack-o'-lantern.
We are telling the old and creepy stories as they are meant to be, not those flashy pumpkin boys you see today.
They're lies told to you by Big Pumpkin.
We are your historically accurate podcast host, Taylor and Chelsea, and today we get our annual Halloween creature feature.
We got quite a few to get through, so I think the best way to start this is just get right into it.
Yeah, no fluff. Okay, I just gotta get right into it. We have no time. There's too many monsters, creatures, like correction.
Let me tell you the story of the Flatwoods monster, and with that I hope we've never already told that story.
I think we might have.
I don't think we did.
Does it involve an interrogation?
No.
Okay, then I'm thinking about somebody else.
Okay, the Flatwoods monster, aka the Braxton County monster or the Phantom of the Flatwoods, is an alleged and identified extraterrestrial or cryptid of some sort.
Something's going on with it, that's weird.
Reported to be sighted in the town of Flatwoods in Braxton County, if you didn't already get that from all the names that it has.
And this is in West Virginia.
Something else is in West Virginia.
Mothman.
The Mothman?
Yeah.
This is creepy place. This happened precisely 7.15 p.m. on September 12, 1952 after a bright object crossed the sky.
Seven eyewitnesses claimed to have seen this monster, quote, that was worse than Frankenstein.
So that precise night, three boys named Edward and Fred were brothers, and the third one was their friend Tommy.
So they're trespassing or something on Farmer Bailey Fisher's property.
I don't know that they were trespassing, but I'm here to tell a story and they didn't say they weren't trespassing.
So I'm doing my job.
That sounds like something somebody who was trespassing would neglect to say.
I agree.
Exactly. They would just leave that out.
While they're at that farm, they see a bright light streak across the sky.
And the media at this time, because it does go to the media, spoiler alert, reports it as a flying saucer.
So after seeing that bright light streak across the sky, the boys steal a tractor to go what appears to be their aunt's house to tell her what happened.
Her name's Kathleen May.
Holy, these guys are just committing crimes left and right.
Yeah, I know.
And in this story at least, and they may not have stolen a tractor per se to go tell the aunt about this.
But in all the stories, it doesn't say. So I'm just taking some artistic journey to the fringe liberties here to make the story ours.
Okay, just going in the face of my intro, I get it.
Yeah, exactly.
So they're with the aunt.
They all decide to go back to the farm or Wooded Hills or whatever they're at because it changes in search of this bright object, which seems wrong, but they do it.
And along the way, they find some neighborhood kids who join the search, Neil and Ronnie.
And West Virginia National Guardsmen by the name of Eugene, I believe.
I didn't put that in there. I think it's Eugene.
That might be another artistic liberty. Who knows?
He also goes with them for some reason.
I don't know why. I don't know how a National Guardsman found out, but he's there.
And this story is just really poorly being told at this point.
They're all at the farm, all seven of them, I believe that adds up to.
Just an estimate of my part. It's too high of a number to be specific with.
More than two. You just got to estimate.
Yeah, exactly. It feels like seven.
So Eugene National Guard, he has a dog with him too.
So technically there's eight witnesses.
He runs ahead. He spots something he takes off out of sight and begins barking at something.
And moments later, he runs back to the group with the tail between his legs.
They keep going. They reach the top of a hill on or off the farm.
I assume it's near this light and they see a pulsing red light.
Okay, they are there.
Slash ball of fire, they describe it as.
And it's about 50 feet slash 15 meters to the right.
And they also detect a pungent mist that makes their eyes and nose burn.
You're seeing that light now. You're also seeing to the side of this what Kathleen describes as quote,
a fire breathing monster 10 feet tall with a bright green body and a blood red face that's floating towards them from between the trees.
Backlit by a large pulsating, but it's backlit by another ball of fire.
The creature emits a shrill hissing noise before gliding towards them changing direction and heading back towards the red light.
Eugene says that he initially thought it might be an opossum or a raccoon.
I wouldn't think that's how one would appear to be.
I've never heard of them doing that.
No, neither. Not once until he shone his flashlight on it.
Because then he saw the monster completely and it had a green body that he said seemed to glow.
I guess even with the flashlight being shone on it.
The group stares at the monster in terror for a moment before screaming and running away looking back over their shoulders to make sure it wasn't chasing after them.
Monster, they said, gave off an overpowering metallic odor that the witnesses found nauseating.
According to Kathleen, they vomited for several hours after the encounter.
It could also be shock.
Subsequent investigation turned up little physical evidence, although a local sheriff car and his deputy, Bernal Lawn,
did claim to smell the strange metallic odor still while they were searching the area.
A. Lee Stewart, a co-publisher of the Braxton County Democrat, a local newspaper, returned to the site later that evening with lemon
and also admitted to noticing an odd odor.
The odor was still there, Stewart said.
It was sort of warm and sickening and there were two places about six to eight feet in diameter where the brush was trampled down.
Stewart, for his part, seemed convinced that the group had seen something strange.
Those people were the most scared I've ever seen, he said.
People don't make up that kind of story that quickly.
I hate to say I believe it, but I hate to say I don't believe it, added Stewart.
Those people were scared, badly scared, and I sure smelled something.
A search performed by Stewart the following day discovered two elongated tracks in the mud, along with the thick black liquid,
but the tracks were found to have been made by the truck of a man who had come and searched the monster prior to Stewart's return to the scene.
And the liquid was most likely motor oil.
That seems redundant to put in because you would think he would know tire tracks.
However, in the days after the event, other witnesses came forward.
A mother and her 21-year-old daughter claimed to have encountered a similar creature with the same strange odor a week prior to the original sighting,
which reportedly resulted in the daughter being shaken so badly that she spent three weeks in the Clarksburg Hospital.
Eugene Lemon's mother said that at the approximate time of the saucer sighting, her house had been violently shaken and her radio cut out for 45 minutes.
And the director of the local board of education claimed that he had seen a flying saucer take off at 6.30 am the morning of September 13.
The authorities ultimately decided that the flying saucer the May boys had seen was a meteorite since the sighting took place during a meteor shower.
That was occurring over a three-state area at the time.
And that's pretty specific for a meteor shower.
And the monster sighting itself was reportedly written off as mass hysteria involving a mundane animal, possibly a barn owl.
Despite that, the witnesses did not recant their testimony and the Flatwoods monster is widely considered one of the most fascinating reported encounters with a UFO occupant to emerge from the 1950s.
If you've never seen, you probably have seen this just to describe it really well for you right now.
It kind of reminds me of like a woman wearing an apron and it kind of has a halo around its head.
Yeah.
Just to describe it real quick, we'll probably post it up on the socials for you to take a look at.
Kind of like a robot woman wearing a apron with a halo around her head.
Yeah, like that 1950s style puffy bottom apron.
Exactly.
Or like a ball gown apron.
Yeah.
So that's a Flatwoods monster.
Okay.
It's very spooky.
Chelsea, have you ever heard of the dog boy of Arkansas?
No.
Fairly unbeknownst name, right?
Like doesn't sound that bad.
No, it sounds cute even.
Yeah, definitely viewer discretion advised on this one.
Oh, shit.
Yeah.
So this takes place in Quitman, Arkansas on July 23rd, 1954.
Gerald Bettis was born to Floyd and Alan Bettis.
However, he's not a really ordinary boy.
He's actually very large for his age.
He gets bullied relentlessly. He's really peculiar too.
He's prone to bouts of rage, often in public, and many people feared him.
He was private and solitary as he grew up.
He became even more withdrawn.
Reason he's called dog boy, he collected stray cats and dogs,
kept them in the family house and tortured them.
The neighbors knew him as dog boy because of this,
and they heard animal cries throughout the night.
Not what I was thinking.
That's awful.
And what Gerald left behind of these creatures was inhumane.
The neighbors were terrified of Gerald,
and one woman once said, quote,
if you had ever seen his eyes, they seemed to glow at night, end quote.
He was not human, but something all the more animalistic.
Gerald became increasingly unhinged as he got older.
One day, animals were no longer enough as his subjects of cruelty,
and he soon set his torturous sights on his desperate parents.
They would suffer Gerald's wrath.
They would pay the consequences,
and this once idealic home on Mulberry Street would go down in history
as the stuff of demented, haunted nightmares.
Gerald kept his parents locked in the attic.
He didn't feed them until he decided it was time to feed them.
The abuse was clear to see.
At one point, Gerald threw his father out the second floor window.
Gerald's father died in 1981 amid a cloud of rumors.
Some say he died of pneumonia.
Others a broken heart, some say Gerald pushed him down the stairs
or deliberately snapped his own father's neck.
In 1982, Aline was treated for a broken hip.
Once again, rumors abounded that Gerald was to blame.
A nurse witnessed Gerald mistreating his mother.
Gerald built a sunroom on the back of the house,
and in it he grew marijuana.
He became a dealer and a drug user,
and the police finally arrested him in the late 1980s,
not for the abuse, but for the drugs that he was growing.
He died in May of 1988 of an overdose at the age of 34.
His mother died in 1995,
and a woman named Reba Carter inherited the house.
Not long after this,
the house was sold to a truck driver named Tony Weaver,
and Tony and his wife lived in the house for a few years.
The Weavers did not believe in ghosts,
but strange things started happening in their home.
Weaver's wife would turn off all the lights before leaving
to go work a night shift,
but when she returned, the lights were all back on.
At first she believed it was an intruder,
but over time, stranger things began to happen.
One time, pennies floated down the stairwell from upstairs.
The coins stopped and fell to the floor.
After six months of similar spookinings,
the wife didn't want to live there anymore.
Tony also had his own bizarre incidents.
Quote,
One day I was working on the house,
I saw a man looking through the foyer into the living room.
He looked like a World War I soldier,
complete with a helmet.
He looked so real, Tony said.
He ran after the soldier, but the soldier vanished.
Tony and his wife soon moved out,
but the next couple to live there also had their fair share of strangeness.
In 2003, Quinton White and his wife Stephanie moved in,
and strange things would happen on a regular basis.
The commode would flush on its own,
but there was even more than this.
One day Quinton was working on the house outside
when he heard a crashing noise upstairs.
He went to find out what happened,
and he previously stacked a large pile of 2x4s on the floor.
When he reached upstairs, the boards were standing up straight.
After they saw this, they had had enough and moved out,
though they still owned the house.
They tried to sell it.
At the time of this writing, it was now on sale.
I'm not sure when this was written.
I can't say, I don't know,
I can't say what I would do if I experienced any spookinings with that.
But while it was for sale, buyers that were walking through
would also experience odd things.
Sunglasses and prescription medication going missing,
a recliner in the home flipping back on its own,
dogs refusing to go inside, and eerie feelings of a sneeze.
Yeah, it's probably still for sale.
See, I tried to find it, and I couldn't find it.
So I assume it's been bought, but I couldn't find it.
One woman interested in the house brought her young daughter with her.
She was sensitive, the daughter,
and while the woman was walking through the house,
the daughter stopped on the stairs and felt very sad.
One worker working on the house only worked on the house at night
because too many curious people showed up wanting to see the ghost.
Even he, a skeptic, had experienced many unexplainable incidents.
The worker is quoted as saying,
I'm a rational person, I don't believe in the paranormal,
but since I've been working on that place,
I feel very uncomfortable like someone's watching me.
He also claims to have seen spirit several times,
quote, when I pull up into the driveway of the house at night,
I see a man looking down at me, like from another time period, end quote.
He also claims to have seen Gerald several times,
and he has experienced a cold wind on the back of his neck
and heard slamming noises and footsteps.
Now Gerald, Bettis, was tragically a real person.
What he did was truly despicable.
The absolute truth of the story may be mired in rumors forevermore.
And the strange haunting of the Arkansas dog boy has taken on mythical status.
Ghost hunters from around the world are fascinated by this house,
and the dark secrets lurking within.
Some potential buyers swear that they have seen Gerald running at them screaming to get out.
And that's where I am, the Arkansas dog boy.
Well, that was disturbing. Thank you for that.
That will most certainly haunt my Halloween dreams.
Which is what we're going for.
So with that, you're going on to the dismal Dover demon.
I just feel like it can't follow that.
It's not quite as flashy.
No, it's not. Okay.
It's too bad. It's got demon in the name.
Like you just keep them names and you're like,
objectively Dover demon is going to be more interesting.
I just don't know how you followed that story though.
This one's going April 21st, 1977.
The date that a group of teenagers in Dover, Massachusetts.
I don't understand how that makes that sound, first of all,
but that's neither here nor there.
We are pronunciators, but we're not here to dissect
how you or why you pronounce Massachusetts, Massachusetts,
or why you pronounce Colonel instead of Colinel.
We'll never know. Yeah.
We do know, but we kind of do know.
But it's a secret of the podcast.
Yeah. First encountered the creature that cryptozoologist
Lauren Coleman would eventually dub the Dover demon.
There were three separate sightings of this creature.
The first sighting is the Bartlett sighting.
On the night of April 21st, 1977,
Bill Bartlett was driving in his Volkswagen
with friends Mike, Mike and Andy.
We never going to last names.
I think that should be our thing.
All of whom were 17 years old.
At about 10 30 p.m.
the three young men were headed northward on farm street
when Bartlett spotted what he at first thought
might be a dog or a cat on top of a low stone wall.
He quickly realized that his initial impression was inaccurate
and the VW's headlights illuminated the entity.
Creature Bartlett saw stood there three and a half to four feet tall
and had a large watermelon shaped head with two large round eyes
that shone like two orange marbles.
Its oversized head was supported by a thin net
that led to an oblong torso from which sprouted long spindly limbs.
It was humanoid with two arms and two legs
and unusually large hands and feet I guess as well as the head.
Being skin had an odd texture like wet sandpaper said Bartlett
and was peach colored although it whitened somewhat at the extremities.
Neither Bill nor Andy saw the creature.
Oh no no Andy or the other guy.
There's three of them.
Mike? There's so many Mike's in the car.
Andy and Mike. Andy and Mike.
Bill saw it.
Andy and Mike did not see the creature
both claiming to have been distracted by other things at the time
although they both vouched for the sincerity of their friends emotion at the sighting.
So what?
What had their attention while Bill is probably screaming his ass off
about this weird thing that he's seeing?
What was so important is what I immediately am wondering.
He notices it in a lot of detail
if it was just a quick pass by in his Volkswagen.
Super strange.
That's the first sighting.
That's the Bartlett sighting because Bartlett was with two other people only he saw it.
Next is the Baxter sighting.
Around two hours later, 15 year old John Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend's house
along Millers Hill Road.
After walking for about a mile Baxter said that he noticed a silhouetted figure
approach him on the side of the road.
At first he suspected that it might be a local boy who lived on the street.
Baxter called out to the shadowy being but received no response
when they were approximately 15 feet apart the silhouette stopped.
Baxter again called out and received no response.
When he stepped towards the figure it scurried quickly off the road.
He chased it down the roadside ditch but stopped as he saw it outlined against an open field.
Baxter described roughly the same creature as Bartlett with its oversized head and long spindly limbs.
This time although the being was standing using its long fingers to grasp the trunk of a tree
it was leaning on.
Its weirdly long toes contoured to the rock beneath its feet.
How has he seen this detail?
Baxter didn't report any glowing eyes but the creature made him very uncomfortable all the same
and he backed up the road and quickly walked away.
I would have been fully surprised if he said I wasn't scared at all.
Now had it had glowing eyes I would have been terrified but...
Yeah that's true and it seems to me then that it didn't have eye glow it was just the reflection that it was.
Because they were driving a car in the first one.
Yeah that's what I'm thinking it sounds like.
The last sighting is the Brabham Tranter sighting.
This is the next night.
Abby Brabham 15 was being driven home by Will Tranter 18 and he spotted something in the road.
Brabham 2 described a strange creature with a large ovoid head and long spindly limbs.
Yeah ovoid like egg shaped.
Okay she said that the being was missing all facial features except for its eyes.
It's creepy which around and glowed bright green a color which she steadfastly insisted on to investigators despite its idiosyncrasy.
Painter caught only a fleeting glimpse of the creature and said he saw something with a large head and tan body crouched in the road.
So that's that sighting all three sightings people who saw them drew sketches of the alleged creature.
Bartlett wrote on his sketch famously in regards to the Dover Demon.
Which is like general famous but in regards to the specific cryptid famous quote.
I Bill Bartlett swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature and quote.
According to the Boston Globe the locations of the sightings plotted on a map laying a straight line over two miles.
Investigators Lauren Coleman where it gets its name.
Walter Webb, Joseph Nyman and Ed Fogg were unanimously impressed by the witnesses especially Bartlett and Brabham.
The Dover police chief Carl Sheridan went so far as to describe Bartlett as an outstanding artist and reliable witness.
Parents, teachers and other community members came out in support of the teenagers and it was generally agreed that they were ordinary kids who had witnessed something extraordinary.
Explanations for the Dover Demon range from an escaped monkey to a baby moose to a fox with mange.
Although those mundane conclusions never held much water with investigators, a paranormal hypothesis was equally difficult to present since as Webb wrote in his report on the case.
Nor does it fit the known patterns of ghost fairies or UFO knots.
A snowy owl based on size and plumage which would have reflected the yellow headlights of older cars as the peach color described by Bartlett.
In addition, the long spindly arms and fingers of the supposed creature could be the partially open wings and the splayed feathers of the wing tips of a snow owl.
Police told the Associated Press that creatures reported by the teenagers quote were probably nothing more than a school vacation house end quote.
Skeptic Ben Radford had suggested the sighting may have been influenced by the pop culture at the time.
1977 was the year for big headed client type creatures end quote.
That's weird.
The Dover Demon is a true enigma.
Wrote Webb an animat, an animate, an anomaly.
Ananamal- this is a tongue twister.
An animate ananamal- anomaly.
Geez, I know this word anomaly.
I can't say those two at the same time.
That intersect the lives of four credible young people that lonely week in April 1977.
What a poetic way to put that.
The thing with these cryptids and it's always the same if there's multiple witnesses that are seeing the same weird thing.
You would think one of them would know what an owl would look like.
Yeah, and particularly it doesn't sound like these guys actually knew each other or would have been able to talk to each other prior to their sightings.
So it is interesting that they're all basically saying the same thing independently.
Yeah, it's kind of cool.
And like you see that with like mothmen too.
Like people are reporting the same weird thing.
And so for people to be basically describing the exact same creature,
you would think they would come closer to putting together a portrait of an owl if it's actually an owl.
And you know, this weird-
Or somebody would have described feathers.
Yeah, somebody would have given, you know, they all would have given a little bit different pieces of information to be like,
okay, like that's clearly an owl.
Just one person misinterpreted as something else.
But for them all to misinterpret something for the same creature is just weird to me.
And the exact same way too as well.
Yeah, so I think that always gives credence when there's multiple reportings of the same creature.
In the same region too.
It's not like it was all over the county.
It's one stretch of road.
Yeah, like a two mile stretch of road.
Yeah, so that's the Dover demon.
Okay, now next up Chelsea, I'm not sure if we've ever talked about this.
I just want to make sure before I talk about it, the bell witch.
Okay, well, there's a bell witch.org website.
They have the entire history of this phenomenon.
And I'm just, they tell it very well.
So I just edited it a little bit to make it a little more readable.
In the early 1800s, John Bell moved his family from North Carolina to what's present day Adams, Tennessee.
Bell purchased some land in a large house for his family.
Over the years, he acquired more land, increasing his holdings to 328 acres and cleared a number of fields for planting.
He also became an elder of the Red River Baptist Church.
One day in 1817, John Bell was inspecting his cornfield when he encountered a strange looking animal sitting in the middle of a cornrow,
shocked by the appearance of this animal, which had the body of a dog in the head of a rabbit.
Bell shot it several times. The animal then vanished.
This was the first documented manifestation of this entity.
Bell thought nothing more of the incident, at least not until after dinner.
That evening, the family began hearing quote, beating sounds and quote, on the outside of their log home.
The mysterious sounds continued with increased frequency and force each night.
Bell and his sons often hurried outside to catch the culprit, but always returned empty-handed.
In the weeks that followed, the Bell children began waking up frightened,
complaining that rats were gnawing at their bed posts.
Not long after that, the children began complaining of having their bed covers pulled from them
and their pillows tossed onto the floor by a seemingly invisible entity.
As time went on, the Bells began hearing faint whispering voices,
which were too weak to understand but sounded like a feeble old woman singing hymns.
The encounters escalated and the Bell's youngest daughter, Betsy Bell,
began experiencing brutal encounters with the invisible entity.
It would pull her hair and slap her relentlessly, often leaving welts and handprints on her face and body.
The disturbances about which John Bell had vowed his family to secret,
finally escalated to the point that he shared his family trouble with the closest friend and neighbor, James Johnston.
Skeptical at first, Johnston and his wife spent the night at the Bell home.
Things began peacefully, but once they were tired for the evening,
they were subjected to the same terrifying disturbances that the Bells had been experiencing.
After their bed covers were yanked off and James was slapped, he sprang out a bed explaining,
quote, in the name of the Lord, who are you, and what do you want, end quote.
The entity did not respond. The rest of the night was peaceful,
and the next morning, Mr. Johnston explained to the Bells that the culprit was likely a evil spirit,
the kind that the Bible talks about.
The entity's voice strengthened over time and became loud and unmistakable.
It sang hymns, quoted scripture, carried on intelligent conversation,
and once even quoted word for word, two sermons that were preached at the same time on the same day, 13 miles apart.
Word of the supernatural phenomena soon spread outside the settlement,
even in Nashville, where then Major General Andrew Jackson became interested in the so-called Bell Witch.
John Bell Jr., alongside with his brother Drewry Bell and Jesse Bell, had fought under General Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans.
A few years later in 1819, Jackson heard about the disturbance at the Bell Home and decided to pay it a visit and investigate.
As Jackson's entourage, consisting of several men, well-grouped horses, and large wagons approached the Bell property,
the wagon jolted to a sudden stop. It had become stuck in the muddy creek bed, and the horses weren't able to pull it.
At least that's what the men thought.
After several minutes of cursing and coaxing the horses into pulling the wagon, Jackson proclaimed,
by the eternal boys, that must be the Bell Witch.
Then suddenly a disembodied female voice told Jackson that they could proceed and that she would see them again later that evening.
They were then able to proceed across the property, up the lane, and to the Bell Home.
That evening, Jackson told old war stories while his entourage set up their tents in John and Lucy Bell's yard.
One of the men claimed to be a witch tamer, and after several uneventful hours, he pulled out a shiny pistol
and proclaimed that its silver bullets would kill any spirit that came into contact with.
He went on to say that the reason nothing had happened to them was because whatever had been haunting the Bells was scared of his silver bullets.
Immediately, the man screamed and began jerking his body in different directions,
complaining that he was being stuck with pins and beaten severely.
A strong swift kick to the man's posterior region from an invisible foot sent him to the front door.
Angry, the entity spoke up and announced that there was yet another fraud in Jackson's party and that she would identify him the following evening.
Now terrified, Jackson's men begged to leave the Bell Farm.
Jackson insisted on saying he wanted to know who the other fraud was,
and the men eventually went outside to sleep in their tents while continuously begging Jackson to leave.
What happened next is not clear, but Jackson and his entourage were spotted in nearby Springfield early the next morning, going back to Nashville.
Some alleged that Jackson later proclaimed, quote,
I would rather fight the British at New Orleans than fight the Bell Witch, end quote.
The disturbances decreased, but the entity continued to express disdain for John Bell, relentlessly vowing to kill him.
Bell had been experiencing episodes of twitching in his face and difficulty swallowing for almost a year, and the malady grew worse with time.
By the fall of 1820, his declining health had confined him to the house,
where the malicious entity continuously removed his shoes when he tried to walk,
and slapped his face when he recovered from his numerous seizures.
Her shrill voice was heard all over the farm, cursing and chastising old Jack Bell, the nickname she had given him.
John Bell breathed his last breath on the morning of December 20th, 1820, after slipping into a coma a day earlier.
Immediately after his death, the family found a vial of strange black liquid in the cupboard.
John Jr. sprinkled two drops on the cat's tongue.
Weird way to test something, and the cat jumped in the air, rolled over in midair, and then was dead when it hit the floor.
The entity exclaimed,
I give old Jack a big dose of that last night, which fixed him.
John Jr. tossed in the series vial into the fireplace. It burst into a bright blue flame and shot up the chimney.
What?
John Bell's funeral was one of the largest ever held in Robertson County, Tennessee.
People attended from miles away, and three creatures eulogized him.
As the crowd of mourners began leaving the graveyard, the Bell Witch entity laughed and sang a song about a bottle of brandy.
Her fervent singing didn't stop until the last mourner had left the graveyard.
The entity's presence was almost non-existent after John's Bell's demise, as though it had fulfilled its purpose.
Over time, Betsy Bell became interested in Joshua Gardner, a young man who lived nearby with the blessing of the parents they decided to marry.
Everyone was happy about their engagement.
Except, of course, the mysterious entity became furious and repeatedly ordered Betsy to not marry Joshua.
Betsy and Joshua's former schoolteacher, Richard Powell, had been noticeably interested in Betsy for some time,
and expressed interest in marrying her when she became older.
That's really gross.
By some accounts, Powell was eleven years Betsy senior and was a student of the occult, ventriloquism and mathematical genius,
and well-versed in horticulture and geology.
He was secretly married to a woman in nearby Nashville, Esther Scott, during the time he lived in Taut Goulette Red River,
and expressed his unwavering fondness for Betsy Bell.
According to early accounts, Powell politely expressed his disappointment with Betsy's engagement to Joshua.
In April of 1821, shortly after Betsy Bell had broken her engagement, the entity visited John Bell's widow, Lucy Bell,
and told her that it was leaving but would return in seven years.
The entity returned in 1828, as promised.
Most of the return visits centered on John Bell Jr., with whom the entity discussed the origin of life,
civilization, Christianity, and the need for a major spiritual awakening.
A particular significance was his prediction of the Civil War and other major events, some of which she missed.
The entity bade farewell after three weeks, promising to visit John Bell's most direct descendant in 107 years.
The year would be 1935, and the closest living relative at the time was Nashville physician Dr. Charles Bailey Bell,
a neurologist and John Bell's senior's great-grandson.
In 1934, Dr. Bell published a book about the Bell Witch, likely to raise awareness of the spirit's impending return.
The book contains the first-ever account of the alleged confessions between the entity and John Bell Jr. in 1828.
The author's father, Dr. Joel Thomas Bell, had allegedly taken notes during the conference, and upon his death passed them down to him.
Dr. Bell published no follow-up to his 1934 book, and he died in 1945 and is buried at the Bellwood Cemetery in Adam, Tennessee.
We don't know if the Bell Witch ever returned to him at that time.
The entity that tormented the Bell family in the Red River Sellment almost 200 years ago is often blamed for unexplained manifestations that occur near the old Bell Farm today.
And the faint sounds of people talking and children playing come sometimes be heard in the area,
and it's not uncommon to see candle lights dance through the dark fields late at night.
Photography is especially difficult. Some pictures taken in the area show mist, orbs of light, and other phenomena, including human-like figures who were not present when the pictures were taken.
The cause of the Bell family's torment 200 years ago, along with today's continued phenomenon in the area, although to a lesser extent,
remains a mystery and numerous theories have been put forth, but all have been debunked.
However, most researchers agree that something had to have caused the incident at Red River in the early 1800s that gave rise to the Bell Witch legend as we know it today.
I just thought that was a creepy story.
That is a creepy story. I think the creepiest thing about it, I mean, I can't imagine having the blinkers pulled off of me personally,
but that weird creature at the beginning.
Yeah, half dog, half rabbit.
Yeah, it's like a skinwalker.
It did remind me of the Skinwalker Ranch story at the beginning.
Yeah, which is creepy. Good story. I like that we had a haunting in there.
Yeah, somewhat possession too, because of the hitting and whatnot and seizures.
It also hit on mystery fluid.
Yeah, often overlooked.
Very much so in the very normal community.
Well, that is our creature feature. I hope you guys are ready for your Halloween, where the veil between the world is at its weakest.
You have a truly creepy time. Get into the spirits.
And I have been Taylor here with Chelsea. We are Journey to the Fringe. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
Bye. P.S. Stay away from crossroads on Halloween.
Yes.
I'm going to be back with another video for new episodes or tell us that we're wrong and terrible either way.
Please send us an email at JourneyToTheFringe at gmail.com.
I'll see you in the next episode.