The Bell Witch

March 3, 1997
Demonstrating an exceptional aptitude for literary pastiche, Monahan (Blood of the Covenant) invites a willing suspension of disbelief by presenting this tale of supernatural horror as an unpublished manuscript written during the early years of the American republic. The putative author, schoolteacher Richard Powell, recounts how, between 1819 and 1822, he witnessed the torments inflicted upon John Bell, his wife and their four children by a mischievous poltergeist dubbed "the Bell witch" by the citizens of Adams, Tenn. In the carefully measured words of someone who knows he is describing the unbelievable, Powell recalls a succession of phenomena that evolve from annoying nocturnal disturbances to injurious pranks played on the family by an incorporeal being who eventually develops a voice and a full personality. So notorious do this creature's antics become that they attract the attention of a cross-section of frontier types who help give the story the weight of historical credibility, among them quack exorcists, amateur psychic detectives and even a pre-presidential Andrew Jackson. Monahan excels in his sympathetic depictions of these homely rustics, whose ignorance and superstition show "how little we had advanced since the days of Cotton Mather and the Salem witch trials." Only in the closing pages, when he indulges in pop psychology to explain why the witch reserved its cruelest jests for 13-year-old Betsy Bell, does a contemporary mindset break the novel's carefully wrought spell of historical romance. (Mar.) FYI: Contemporary line drawings in this volume are taken from An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch, published in 1894 by M.V. Ingram.