What do you think about this?
In 1817, on the Bell family farm in Adams, Tennessee, something started knocking on the walls at night.
By the spring of 1818 it had a voice. Sometimes it sounded like an old woman. Sometimes a child. Sometimes a grown man preaching scripture. It would carry on conversations with multiple people in the room at the same time, in different voices. It knew things the family had never spoken aloud.
Neighbors heard it. Visitors heard it. The local pastor heard it and wrote about it.
What it wanted, according to everyone who lived through it, was John Bell dead. It said so out loud. It threw furniture. It pulled the bedclothes off the children. It slapped the youngest girl in front of witnesses. And on December 20, 1820, John Bell died from a vial of dark liquid no one in the household could identify.
Andrew Jackson, then a U.S. general and future president, heard about the case from a Bell family acquaintance. He rode out with a small group of men to spend a night in the house. According to multiple accounts, Jackson left before sunrise the next morning and said he would rather fight the entire British army again than spend another night under that roof.
The Bell Witch case is the only haunting in American history that an official death investigation attributed to a paranormal cause.
Makes you wonder what was actually living in that farmhouse, and whether anything ever really left.
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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