BATTS PARLOR

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The wilderness beyond the Red River had always been a place where sound carried strangely. In the thick summer heat of 1817, when the cicadas screamed their ancient songs and the Tennessee hills seemed to breathe with their own dark life, John Bell first heard the knocking.

It came at dusk, as it always would—three measured raps against the clapboard walls of the farmhouse, deliberate as a funeral march. The cicadas faltered for half a second, as though even they heard the rapping, and in that sudden hush the very air seemed to hold its breath. At first, he blamed the dogs. Then the wind. Then the settling of green timber in the frame.

But the knocking had a patience that nature did not possess.

“Father?” Betsy’s voice drifted down from the loft, thin as morning mist. At twelve, she had already learned to fear the sounds that came after sunset. “Do you hear it?”

John Bell set down his Bible—the same worn King James that had carried his family through the mountain passes from North Carolina—and stepped onto the porch. The August air hung thick as molasses, pregnant with the promise of storm. Beyond the split-rail fence, his tobacco fields stretched into darkness, and beyond that, the ancient woods pressed close like a living wall.

Rap. Rap. Rap.

The sound came from the north wall, where no tree branch could reach, where no animal could climb. John rounded the corner of the house, his boots heavy on the packed earth, and found nothing but weathered wood and the watching darkness.

“Show yourself,” he called into the night, though he could not say why he expected an answer.

The silence that followed was not empty. It was full—full of held breath, of malevolent attention, of something that listened with more than ears.

Inside the house, Lucy Bell continued her evening prayers, her voice a steady murmur of comfort, soon to mean nothing at all. The children—Betsy, John Jr., Joel, Richard—slept fitfully in their beds, not yet knowing that their names were already written in a ledger kept by inhuman hands.

And in the darkness beyond the fence, where the old Chickasaw trails still scarred the earth like half-healed wounds, something that had once been Kate Batts smiled with teeth it no longer possessed.

The Bell Witch had come home.

The manifestations began with whispers.

Not the soft susurrus of wind through leaves, but human voices speaking words just below the threshold of understanding. They seemed to seep from the walls themselves, as if the very timber of the house had learned to speak. Lucy Bell would pause in her churning, her hands stilled on the wooden paddle, listening to conversations that seemed to come from another room—conversations that ceased the moment she went to investigate.

“It’s the slaves,” John told her, though his voice carried no conviction. “Dean and his family, talking late into the night.”

But Dean’s cabin stood a quarter-mile distant, and the voices came from within their own walls.

Young Richard, barely seven, was the first to see her.

He woke in the deep hours before dawn, when the darkness was thickest and most complete, to find a woman standing at the foot of his bed. She wore the rough homespun of a frontier wife, her gray hair hanging loose about her shoulders like Spanish moss. Her face was kind—the face of a grandmother, perhaps, or a favored aunt.

“Who are you?” the boy whispered.

“My name is Kate,” she replied, and her voice was honey over broken glass. “I’ve come to visit.”

When Richard told his parents the next morning, they attributed it to dreams. Children saw all manner of phantoms in the night, after all. But the boy insisted with the fierce certainty of the young that the woman had been real—real as anything, standing there in the pre-dawn gloom, smiling her terrible smile.

“What did she want?” Lucy asked, smoothing her son’s dark hair.

“She wanted to know about Father,” Richard said. “She asked if he was a God-fearing man.”

The words sent ice through Lucy’s veins, though she could not say why. That evening, she insisted they read scripture before supper—Psalm 23, the words falling like stones into the gathering dark: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…

But the shadows were already walking through them.

By September, the knocking had become conversation.

It started as mimicry—the spirit repeating fragments of the family’s daily speech, echoing their prayers, their arguments, their secret fears. But mimicry became dialogue, and dialogue became something far worse: intimate knowledge.

“John Bell,” the voice would call in the night, sometimes from the walls, sometimes from the very air itself. “John Bell, you old devil. I know what you did.”

The accusations came without context, without explanation—fragments of guilt dredged from the darkest corners of memory. The spirit knew about the disputed land boundaries, about the harsh words spoken to neighbors, about the slaves worked too hard in the brutal summer heat. She knew about the private doubts, the moments of faithlessness, the small cruelties that accumulated like dust in the corners of a man’s soul.

“I am Kate Batts,” the voice declared one October night, as the first frost painted the windows silver. “Old Kate, come back to settle accounts.”

Kate Batts had been their neighbor—a widow woman with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue, rumored to practice the old arts that proper Christians denounced. She had died the previous winter, alone in her cabin, found days later by hunters who spoke in whispers of the strange symbols carved into her door frame and the bottles buried beneath her hearth.

“Kate is dead,” John said to the darkness, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands.

“Dead?” The laughter that answered was like breaking glass. “Oh, John Bell, you know so little about death. I am more alive now than I ever was in that withered flesh. I am free now, free to be what I always was—what you and your kind always said I was.”

The temperature in the room plummeted. Breath steamed in the suddenly frigid air, and ice began to form on the interior walls of the house. Outside, the October night was warm and still.

“What do you want?” Lucy whispered from her place beside the fire, clutching her shawl tight around her shoulders.

“Justice,” came the reply, and now the voice seemed to speak from everywhere at once—from the rafters, from the floorboards, from the very stones of the hearth.

“I want justice, and I want John Bell dead.”

The spirit’s attention soon focused on Betsy with an intensity that bordered on obsession. The girl, now thirteen and beginning to bloom into womanhood, became the primary target of the entity’s malevolent affections.

It began with gifts—wildflowers appearing on her pillow, ribbons tied in her hair while she slept, strange tokens that materialized from thin air. But gifts from the dead carry their own corruption, and Betsy’s nights became filled with terrors that left her hollow-eyed and trembling by morning.

“She touches me,” Betsy confided to her mother, her voice barely above a whisper. “When I’m sleeping, I feel cold hands on my face, in my hair. She whispers things—terrible things.”

The whispers were prophecies of doom, visions of death and suffering, promises of delights that no Christian girl should hear. The spirit seemed intent on corrupting Betsy’s innocence, on drawing her into some dark communion that would damn them both. When young Joshua Gardner began calling on Betsy, the voice turned venomous with jealousy.

“That boy is no good for you, Betsy Bell,” Kate would hiss from the shadows. “Send him away, or I’ll make him regret ever laying eyes on you. I’ll pinch him and pull his hair until he runs screaming back to his mother’s skirts.”

True to her word, the spirit tormented Joshua whenever he visited, yanking his hair, slapping his face, and filling his ears with such profanity that the poor boy would flee red-faced and stammering. Soon his visits ceased altogether, and Betsy wept bitter tears for the love that the Bell Witch had stolen from her.

“Come with me, child,” the voice would croon in the deep hours of night. “Come away from this place of judgment and fear. I can show you such wonders—teach you the secrets your father’s God would keep hidden.”

But Betsy, young as she was, possessed a strength that even the Bell Witch had not anticipated. She met each temptation with prayer, each vision with steadfast faith, each promise with the simple, devastating words: “I choose the light.”

This resistance only enraged the spirit further. The gentle touches became violent scratches appeared on Betsy’s arms, bruises on her throat, as if invisible hands had seized her in fury. Her hair was pulled in the night, her blankets torn away, her sleep shattered by screams that seemed to come from the very walls themselves.

“She’s jealous,” Lucy realized one morning as she tended to fresh scratches on her daughter’s neck. “She’s jealous of youth, of life, of everything she can no longer possess.”

The truth was both simpler and more terrible than jealousy. The Bell Witch had found in Betsy Bell the perfect vessel for her return—a young soul, pure and bright, that could be twisted and shaped into something more suited to the spirit’s purposes. The girl’s resistance was merely an obstacle to be worn away, grain by grain, until nothing remained but a hollow shell ready to be filled.

Winter came early to the Red River country in 1820, bringing with it a cold that seemed to seep into the very bones of the Bell farmhouse. The attacks on the family had intensified throughout the autumn, but it was John Bell who bore the worst of the spirit’s wrath.

The man who had once stood six feet tall and commanded respect throughout the Tennessee wilderness was now bent and wasted, aged decades in the span of months. His tongue had swollen until speech became difficult, then impossible. Strange convulsions seized him without warning, leaving him writhing on the floor while the spirit’s laughter echoed through the house.

“I told you I would kill him,” Kate’s voice whispered in the darkness. “Slowly, sweetly, drop by drop. He is drinking my poison now, John Bell is, and there’s not a doctor in all Tennessee who can name what ails him.”

Dr. Hopson came from Springfield, then Dr. Mize from Clarksville, but their ministrations only seemed to hasten John’s decline.

They found no physical cause for his symptoms, no injury or disease that could account for his suffering. In private, they spoke in hushed tones of phenomena beyond their understanding, of forces that medical science had no tools to combat.

“It’s killing him,” Lucy wept to her eldest son. “That thing, that devil—it’s draining the life from him like water from a cracked jar.”

John Jr. could only hold his mother and listen to the spirit’s triumphant crooning from the walls around them. The young man had tried everything—prayers, threats, even attempts at exorcism—but the Bell Witch was beyond such earthly remedies. She had taken root in their lives like a poisonous vine, growing stronger with each passing day while her primary victim grew weaker.

On the morning of December 20, 1820, John Bell was found dead in his bed, his face twisted in a final rictus of pain and terror. Beside his pillow sat a small glass vial filled with a dark liquid that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it—thick as blackstrap molasses, with an odor that made the nostrils burn and the stomach revolt.

The substance defied identification by any physician who dared examine it, and when a single drop was administered to the family cat, the poor creature convulsed and died within minutes, foam speckling its whiskers like snow.

“I gave it to him!” the spirit shrieked in delight as the family gathered around the corpse. “I gave Old John a dose of my medicine, and he won’t need any more of anything in this world!”

The funeral was held three days later, attended by nearly a thousand souls from across Robertson County. But as Reverend Thomas Gunn spoke the words of committal, a sound arose from the very air around the graveside

singing, sweet and clear and utterly profane:

“Row me up some brandy, O!

Row me up some brandy, O!

I’ll row the old man to his grave,

And dance upon his grave, I will!”

The mourners fled in terror, leaving only the immediate family to see John Bell to his rest. Even in death, the patriarch could find no peace from his tormentor.

With John Bell dead and buried, the spirit’s fury began to wane like a fire consuming the last of its fuel. The violent manifestations became sporadic, the voice less frequent, though no less venomous when it chose to speak.

“My work here is finished,” Kate announced one February evening as the family huddled around their fire. “The old devil is dead, and justice is served. But I’ll not be far away—, oh no, not far at all. I have family here now, bonds that death cannot sever.”

The spirit’s attention had never fully left Betsy, and now, with John Bell gone, it seemed torn between departure and the desire to complete whatever dark purpose it had conceived for the girl. Throughout the winter of 1821, the manifestations continued to center on her, though they took on a different character - less violent, more seductive, as if the entity were making one final attempt to claim her soul.

“Come with me,” the voice whispered in dreams that were more real than waking. “Your father is gone, your family scattered to the winds by grief. But I remain constant, eternal. Be my daughter, Betsy Bell, and know pleasures that mortal flesh can never provide.”

But Betsy’s faith had been tempered in the fires of tribulation, and she had learned to recognize the false promises of the damned.

Each night she recited her prayers, each morning she chose the light, until finally, inevitably, the darkness began to withdraw.

“Seven years,” the Bell Witch declared as spring returned to the Tennessee hills. “I’ll be gone for seven years, but then I’ll return. And when I do, the reckoning will be complete.”

The final manifestation came on Easter morning, 1821. As the family prepared for services at Red River Baptist Church, a great wind arose from nowhere, shaking the house to its foundations.

The voice spoke once more, clear and terrible and final:

“I am going, and will be gone for seven years—goodbye everybody!”

Then silence, blessed, complete silence that seemed to ring in their ears like cathedral bells.

The Bell Witch was gone, leaving behind only memories and scars and the promise of return. But promises made by the damned are written in water, and seven years came and went without sign of Kate’s presence.

Some say she found what she was looking for in those years of absence some darker purpose to serve, some greater evil to embrace. Others believe she simply faded away like morning mist, her hold on the world of the living finally severed by time and the prayers of those she had tormented.

But in the deep hollows of the Tennessee hills, where the old trails still wind through forgotten places and the shadows gather thick as black honey, there are those who swear they have heard her voice on the wind patient as stone, hungry as winter, calling out names from a century past:

“Betsy… Betsy Bell… I’m waiting for you, child. I’m waiting still.”

In the years following the departure of the Bell Witch, the Bell family scattered like leaves before an autumn wind.

Betsy married young and moved away from the Red River country, taking with her the secret knowledge of what lurks beyond the veil of mortal understanding.

She never spoke publicly of her experiences, carrying them like stones in her heart until the day she died.

The old farmhouse stood empty for decades, slowly surrendering to the encroaching wilderness. The split-rail fences rotted and fell, the tobacco fields returned to forest, and the civilized world turned its attention to other matters, railroads and industry and the Civil War that would soon tear the nation apart.

But the cave remained.

Carved into the limestone bluffs along the Red River, the Bell Witch Cave had always been part of the story, a place where the temperature never varied, where sounds echoed strangely, where sensitive souls reported feelings of being watched by unseen eyes.

Local folklore claimed it was here that Kate Batts had first learned her dark arts, here that she had made her bargains with forces older than human civilization.

Modern visitors to the cave, for it has become a pilgrimage site of sorts for those who chase after supernatural thrills, report strange phenomena that echo the experiences of the Bell family.

Voices in the darkness, sudden temperature drops, the sensation of invisible hands touching faces and pulling hair.

Photographs emerge from the depths distorted and strange, showing figures that were not there when the shutter clicked.

And always, always, that sound; three measured raps echoing from the deepest chambers, deliberate as a funeral march, patient as stone.

The same rhythm that first announced the Bell Witch’s arrival two centuries ago, now tapping endlessly in the limestone depths where time bends like glass, and the darkness remembers everything.

In its limestone depths, where the laws of time seem to bend like light through water, the echoes of Kate’s presence linger still.

Not the spirit herself for that malevolent intelligence may have passed on to whatever judgment awaits the unquiet dead. But something remains: a residue of her fury, pain, and hunger soaked into the stone like blood into earth.

And sometimes, in the deepest part of the cave where no tourist groups venture and no electric lights penetrate the primordial darkness, a voice can still be heard, faint as a whisper, patient as death:

“My name is Kate. I’ve been waiting for you.”

The Bell Witch is gone, but she is also eternal, a reminder that some hungers cannot be satisfied, some wrongs cannot be righted, and some promises echo through the centuries like calls across a dark and endless valley.

In Tennessee, they still tell the story. They tell it in hushed voices around campfires, in whispered conversations after church, in the long winter nights when the wind howls through the bare branches and every shadow seems to hold a watching presence.

They tell it because it is true.

They tell it because it is not over.

They tell it because somewhere in the darkness, she is listening.

“I am in the room.” The final words of the Bell Witch, as recorded in the journal of Richard Williams Bell

Author’s Note: This novella is based on the documented experiences of the Bell family of Robertson County, Tennessee, between 1817 and 1821.

While certain elements have been dramatized for narrative effect, the core events: the physical manifestations, the spirit’s identification as Kate Batts, the death of John Bell, and the entity’s particular obsession with Betsy Bell are drawn from contemporary accounts and the 1894 book “An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch” by Martin Van Buren Ingram.

The Bell Witch Cave remains a popular tourist destination and site of ongoing paranormal investigation. Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, the story stands as a remarkable piece of American folklore, a gothic tale born from the harsh realities of frontier life and the universal human need to find meaning in suffering.

As for the truth of what happened in that lonely farmhouse on the Red River, each reader must judge for themselves. But perhaps it is worth remembering that some stories survive not because they are comfortable, but because they are necessary reminders of the darkness that lurks at the edges of our illuminated world, patient and hungry and eternal.

The cave remembers.

The darkness endures.

And somewhere in the Tennessee hills, Kate is waiting still.

Ambered Hearth • Ghost Peony • Champagne Whisper

The room remains exactly as she left it. Fire cooled. Curtains still. A bloom pressed between Bible pages. But speak too loud, and you’ll wake her.

Batts Parlor opens with the bright hush of sweet wine and wild florals — soft, inviting, deceitful. Beneath it rises the warmth of a smoldering hearth, old wood steeped in secrets, and a scent like laughter behind the walls.

No one sits in her chair.

No one dares close the door.