CAVE OF THE BELL WITCH

Near where the Bell Farm once stood, not far from the old family cemetery, on land that the Bell family once owned, lies a wide-mouthed cave. Many in Robertson County believe that this is the cave is the place to which the apparition that haunted the Bell family fled—so it is known as the Bell Witch Cave.

The cave is in the center of a large bluff that overlooks the river. It is accessible only through a fairly long tunnel that opens onto a large room. This in turn opens into another tunnel and an overhead passageway. There's another large room farther back but from that point on, the tunnels become smaller, narrower, and much more dangerous.

The Bell Witch Cave became an attraction thanks to a man named Bill Eden, who owned the property for a number of years. Although he was mainly a farmer, Eden became a wealth of information about the place and added electrical light to the cave. Despite being pretty much underdeveloped, the cave attracted hundreds of visitors every year. Bill always obliged by showing them around and telling stories of the witch and his own weird experiences at the place.

The main story goes that Betsy Bell and some of her friends were exploring the cave, using candles as a source of light. One of the boys came to a place where he had to get down on his belly and wriggle through. When he got stuck, he twisted around trying to get free and dropped his candle. His friends could hear his cries for help but could not find him in the total blackness of the cave. Suddenly the boy heard the witch's voice coming out of the darkness behind him. "I'll get you out," Kate assured him, and sure enough, he was dragged through the muddy cave all the way back to the entrance and was left in a small pool of water.

But there were many other stories, some of which Bill Eden himself experienced. One time a group of fifteen people followed Eden down the treacherous path to the cave's entrance; then all at once the woman in charge of the group abruptly sat down in the middle of the path. She claimed that a heavy weight, which felt like a ton of lead, was pressing her down to the ground and she couldn't get up. Several members of the group managed to get the lady to her feet and got her back up the hill to her car.

Bill Eden also tells of encounters of his own in the cave. "You can hear footsteps in there all the time," he said "I saw one thing...it looked like a person with its back turned to you. Looked like it was built out of real white-looking fog or snow, or something real solid white. You couldn't see through it. It wasn't touching the floor at all. It was just drifting...bouncing along."

On another occasion Eden was leading a man, his wife, and grown son on a tour of the cave when the woman looked up over some rock formations and began to scream. "Look at that woman!" she screamed. "She's not walking! She's floating through the air!"

The man looked to where she pointed, but none of them saw anything. The woman's knees buckled, and she fell to the floor of the cave, so they helped her up and started walking her toward the front of the cave. As they approached a limestone outcropping near the entrance, they heard loud and raspy breathing coming from the rock itself. Eden would say later that it was like the hard and labored breathing of a person, which became more labored until it was finally the struggling breath of someone dying.

In the early summer of 1977 several soldiers from Fort Campbell came over to visit the cave. Eden took the young men on a tour and ended up in the back room, where all of them sat around talking and Eden told his stories of the odd events on the farm. One of the men politely expressed some doubts about the validity of the story, and when they got up to leave, that soldier was unable to move. Eden assumed that he was joking, until he took a good look at the man. HIs face was drenched so badly with sweat that it looked like someone had poured a bucket of water over him."

CONTINUED