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Parr 2 The Bell Witch is the most common name for a well-known haunting that occurred in Red River, Tennessee, which is now known as Adams. The Witch is also known as “Old Kate” or “Kate Batts’s ghost” due to the belief that the Bell family was targeted after Batts laid a curse upon his family. She is described as a woman that “possessed no greater height than most average women but certainly greater girth. The flesh of her upper arms were as thick as a young man’s thighs. She also possessed enormous quantities of bright red hair and freckles.” Batts was a hardworking person that took on the many responsibilities of her family farm after her husband was involved in an accident which crushed his legs. It was believed by a small group in the …show more content…
First, she owned a horse, but never rode it. The more superstitious people in the town believed that horses would not let a witch mount them. Second, Batts went around to local farms seeking pins and needles for her slave that spent her days spinning extra wool, cotton, and flax that Batts had bought from other wives in Red River. Many of the older generation of wives believed that a pin that was freely give could be used with voodoo dolls. The third and final reason was an event that took place in Red River Baptist Church. Joe Edwards, who came forward to proclaim his repentance, suddenly dropped to all fours and began to scream. At this time, Kate Batts made her predictably late entrance. Although it is still a mystery as to what motivated her to do this, she broke the circle of faith that had been formed around him as the reverend was claiming Edwards’s soul for Jesus and “threw her great riding skirt over his back and head, and plop her mass fully upon him, belling with a noise that made Mr. Edwards’s howls sound like …show more content…
She ensured that Bell barely got any rest and he eventually was unable to even get out of bed. On December 12, 1820, the witch told the family that John Bell would not live through the night, but he did. The witch claimed that she lied to the family in order to “wear the old bastard out with worry” (Monahan 142). A couple of days later, a bottle was found near his bed with a strange black liquid in it. Apparently, John Bell’s breath smelled like the liquid, and the family decided to test the substance on the cat. Once a drop was placed on the cat’s tongue, the cat immediately died. On December 20, 1820 John Bell passed away, at which time the witch could be heard screaming in triumph (Prairie Ghosts and Bell Witch Cave). The haunting continued for a short time after Bell’s death. She threatened Betsy to not marry Joshua Gardner, but did eventually allow her to marry Richard Powell. She gave the family a break for seven years. After those seven years were up, she came back for two weeks before permanently leaving the family alone (Prairie Ghosts). While the most prominent belief is that that the spirit was Kate Batts, each time a person asked the spirit who and what it was, it would always have a different answer (Bell Witch Cave). It, however, could not possibly be the real Kate Batts. She was still alive when the haunting started, when John Bell died, and all the way to the time the haunting
Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 by Richard Godbeer. This book was published in 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Richard Godbeer examines the witch trials in the seventeenth century. When a young girl Katherine Branch of Stamford, Connecticut is stricken with unexplainable convulsions, her master and mistress begin to think it is caused by something supernatural. Godbeer follows the incident without any bias and looks into how the accusations and trials are handled by the townspeople and the people in charge of handling the trails. Godbeer’s purpose of writing this book is to prove that Salem was not the norm. Godbeer’s approach of only one using one case, slightly weakens his effectiveness that Salem was not the norm.
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft is a concise, 231 page informational text by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. Published in 1974, it explores the economic and social conditions present in the Salem village during the 1600s that led to the hysteria surrounding witchcraft. Multiple graphs and illustrations are present, as well as an average sized font, an abundance of footnotes typically on the left page, and a prominent voice from the authors. The book was written to serve as a more comprehensive informational piece on the Salem witch trials due to the authors finding other pieces written about the same topic to be inaccurate. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum wanted to create something that utilized
Billy Holcombe’s wife Amy has her experience with the witch. A story that was told by her grandmother many years ago: “There had been many another story about her I’d heard growing up. How once Lindsey Kilgore saw her rise out of a trout pool he’d been fishing, her body forming itself out of the water” (Rash 68). The author uses those such words to describe the witch to try and induce in the reader a fear of the supernatural and magical powers possessed by the witch
In Exodus 22:18, it says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” It was chaos In Salem, Massachusetts, during 1692, 19 people were accused and hanged and one brutally pressed. this is because the puritans believed almost everything the bible said. One subject that the bible covers, is that the Devil is real and really clever, and is able to enter a normal person's body and turn them into a witch. There are three interconnected causes that might have caused the drama, and panic that was the Salem witch trial hysteria, which are: age, gender, and marital status, lying girls and they’re folk tales they made up, and a divided town.
On January 20th, 1692, a nine-year-old girl, Elizabeth “Betty” Parris, and an eleven-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, decided to play a game of magic out of boredom. Abigail Williams, niece of the village reverend, was always envious of her cousin “Betty,” and decided to take the game of illusion to the extreme. The mysterious Ouija board, given to her by an indian slave by the name of Tituba, was removed from a secret hiding place, and she began to pretend to call on the Spirit of Death. Suddenly, Abigail and her cousin began to exhibit sudden, strange behaviors. Abigail and “Betty” screamed blasphemous statements, had horrific convulsions, went into motionless catatonic states, and murmured strange conjurations, and, like clockwork, spread the craze of the game to other children in the village. The Salem children began to evoke the same cryptic behaviors in the puritan village. The game of two girls, due to personal resentments and
Hysteria took over the town and caused them to believe that their neighbors were practicing witchcraft. If there was a wind storm and a fence was knocked down, people believed that their neighbors used witchcraft to do it. Everyone from ordinary people to the governor’s wife was accused of witchcraft. Even a pregnant woman and the most perfect puritan woman were accused. No one in the small town was safe.
In the modern day it’s hard to believe there’s even still ‘’witch hunts’’ as you can say where a group of people are stereotyped as something without them doing the actual stereotypical thing. We live in a world where blacks are getting shot for no reason when they were just walking down the street unarmed and not harming anyone. Blacks and Latinos are always looked down upon in any shape or form. They could be driving a nice car they get pulled over for suspicion of a stolen car, they can get pulled over in an old broken car and they will get pulled over for suspicion of ‘’criminal activity’’. But if it’s a white person the cops will NOT bat a single eye at them despite being in the same situations as the black. And you know what the problem
Rebecca Nurse is a pillar of the community, a devoutly religious woman in her seventies. When she is accused of witchcraft, it makes the Reverend Hale pause and reconsider whether the proceedings are just and fair. "Pray, John, be calm. Pause.This will set us all to arguin' again in the society, and we thought to have peace this year. I think we ought rely on the doctor now, and good prayer. Rebecca, the doctor's baffled! There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits. I fear it, I fear it. With a growing edge of sarcasm: But I m...
“Simon Beamon testifies, that about the time the witches were apprehended to be sent to Boston, Mr. Moxon's children were taken ill in their fits… and at the same time was Mary Parsons, the wife of Joseph Parsons, and others taken with the like fits, so that they were all carried out of the meeting it being Sabbath day, as Mr. Moxon's children acted so did Mary Parsons the wife of Joseph Parsons, just all one … and I could discern no difference in their fits[.] And once I carried Mary Parsons home to the Long M...
One of the games was for them to crack a raw egg into a glass of water and see what shape it made in the glass. One night Ann saw the shape of a coffin from the egg trick, that's where it all started. Soon after that happened, Ann Putman, Abigail Williams, and Betty Parris started acting weirdly. They started babbling, convulsing, or simply staring blankly. Once they were identified as victims of witchcraft, they were asked to point out their tormentors.
The setting for this ghost story was at Sturdivant Hall, in Selma, Alabama in the 1860’s.
In order to understand the outbreak of the witchcraft hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, authors of Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, explore the social and economic divisions and tensions within Salem and the surrounding communities. Both Boyer and Nissenbaum have a strong background in history. Paul Boyer (1935-2012) was the Merle Curti Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as a cultural and intellectual historian who authored several other books. Stephen Nissenbaum was a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst who authored several other books as well. In Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of
In the book Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem, Rosalyn Schanzer describes what happens all because two girls fell ill. When Betty and Abigail started having fits, a doctor diagnosed them as bewitched. Almost immediately they accused the first witch, their slave Tituba. From there all the accusations started pouring out, Ann Putnam Jr., a friend of Betty and Abigail, became “afflicted” as well as multiple others, and soon the jails were overflowing. The first “witch” was hanged on June 10, and the last “witches/wizards” were hanged on September 22. The most likely reasons for the accusations were a thirst for revenge, boredom, and peer/parental pressure.
...tion was given by the spirit that was only conversed between her and another person at the time if her life. The spirit appeared and sounded like Nelly Butler as she did when she was alive and even allowed the witnesses to get as close as they wanted allowing them the opportunity to find evidence of foul play. Where the idea of fraud breaks down is when the apparition shapeshifts, there is no evidence strong enough to give a reasonable argument that it was something other than the spirit of Nelly Butler caused it to happen. The evidence given by George Butler has to be the strongest evidence available; he actually was able to put his hand through the apparition and conversed on a topic only he and Nelly discussed when she was alive. With all the evidence composed, a strong case has been built that the spirit haunting Sullivan really was the spirit of Nelly Butler.
What do you think when someone calls someone a witch? What comes to mind? Do you think of the movie, ‘Hocus Pocus’ or do you think of the black pointed hats and the long black, slit ended dresses? What about witchcraft? Does the term “Devil worshiper” ever cross your mind? Do you think of potions and spells? For many, many generations, we have underestimated what the true meaning of a witch and what witchcraft really is. What is the history that hides behind it? Witches and witchcraft have been in our history since the ancient times. There is a little bit more than the ghost stories told on Halloween, the movies shown on TV and dressing up on Halloween.