Then after gaining vocal strength to the point of being able to converse, the spirit confirmed suspicions and announced herself as "Kate Batts' Witch." She also took her haunting up a few more notches, slapping and pinching people, mostly those she took a disliking to. By this time "Kate" had branched out beyond the Bell family, also targeting neighbors and visitors (including future President Andrew Jackson).

Indeed, Kate could travel for miles around, and haunt and taunt two people at the same time - an ability facilitated by the "fact" that a "family" of spirits emerged, calling themselves Black Dog, Jerusalem, Mathematics, and Cypocraphy, each with a different personality.

All of these episodes, though often presented matter-of-factly, as befits a detailed documentation, are eerily evocative and make for a solid — if not supreme — scare, mostly from being ostensibly rooted in events at least believed real. There are some goofs and gaffes, such as an occasion where there was a diversion set up "whilst the 'witch' was busy entertaining strangers" - this distraction made despite the evidence previously established for Kate's ubiquity and omniscience.

The most successful parts of An American Haunting — effective perhaps for its dichotomous clash — concerns the latter years of the haunting into 1821 when the bizarre multiple personalities had diminished from the scene. Kate emerges more as a fully realized lone spirit, one that could discourse about theology but who also, like a psychotic housewife, in hum-drum dreary tones "droned on with its usual prattle, alternating gossip with vicious verbal barbs at John."

Indeed, it's a contradictory development that could be the antithesis of a spooky story if it were not for some increased torments, physical and mental. These assaults rained down increasingly upon John — by this time Kate has reiterated and spelled out her death bed threat that she will "get even" by killing him — and upon, almost inexplicably, his adolescent daughter Betsy.

The ending, not to be divulged here, is a mixed affair. A startling development, but one that seems attuned more to modern insights, neatly but nonetheless disturbingly ties up the loose ends, wrapping up in almost anachronistic fashion the disjointed parts of a haunting whole.