GreenLit: An American Haunting - The Bell Witch by Brent Monahan

GreenLit. It's the fiction that led to the fade-in. These are the "at a theater near you" books — the literature whose adaptations got the greenlight to production and projection on to your neighborhood silver screens.

An American Haunting: The Bell Witch by Brent Monahan

Ah, the obligatory Sacred Indian Burial Ground - the reason all haunted houses are haunted is because they are built upon ancestral and sanctified Native American land, of course. Ho-hum. You don’t even shudder to think it any more, and what should be a frightful story might instead become a tale of misery and no imagination. The reader goes harumph in the night, and rolls his eyes.

I exaggerate for effect, of course, just as An American Haunting may stretch what purports to be the truth - the book is, after all, a gussied-up, ghosted-out memoir that “fell into the hands” of the re-teller, novelist Brent Monahan. But since the legend of the Bell Witch of Tennessee, one of the most famous and heavily documented cases of a violent haunting in American history (though not without its detractors), enticingly entails so many of the supernatural elements we hold so shakily near and dear to us — poltergeists, apparitions, disembodied voices, multiple personalities, witches — it perhaps also calls for a myriad of possible explanations, including the one about disrupted deep-sixed Chickasaw and Cherokee riled and rising up, their hunting grounds become haunting grounds.

I don’t know how such ghoulish opportunities for Central Casting and the Prop Department plays out in the current movie version of the book — lukewarm reviews, poor word of mouth and prohibitive ticket prices are enough to scare me off — but in the book there is the time and cohesive circumstance to fully consider such Indian graves as “had been found in woods on the Bell property when more land was being cleared for crops.”

And who were the Bells? They were the farming family of John Bell, who had settled in the early 19th century in Robertson County, and who had got the upper hand in a land dispute with an eccentric neighbor, Kate Batts. A vengeful Kate vowed upon her deathbed that she would get even with John, and indeed the haunting began on this occasion in 1817.

Starting with “supernatural visitations," such as a large black animal and a girl in a green dress swinging from a tree, events evolved soon enough into poltergeist activity, but not of the merely mischievous kind. Snatching blankets off of sleeping family members and clawing at walls became more intimidating with incoherent choking and strangling noises, loud shrieking and cursing.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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