Wicked Women

Wicked Women
The ladies behind the legends

Aahhh, the forlorn female. She is the ubiquitous ghost story martyr: the mother searching for her long lost child, the lover searching for her long lost man, the queen searching for her long lost head, you get the idea.

But what if some of these stories have a darker female protagonist? Why are they so pissed off that they feel the need to haunt the living?

Let’s take a deeper look at a few of these legends, you may just find that their life stories draw an eerie parallel to our own.

The Bell Witch:

This one is near and dear to my heart, because she lives about forty miles up the road from me in a small rural community called Adams, Tennessee. It’s said one Kate Batts still haunts the landscape as the Bell Witch. Also, apparently, Kate was the town weirdo.

Her behaviors gained her the reputation of being a witch, and while there’s no definitive proof that Kate actually ever practiced black magic, she was rumored to do some pretty odd stuff.

One account says that she had a weird habit of asking for pins from the women of the town. Superstition ran deep in that day and age, and it was said that giving a pin to a witch gave them power over the giver.

She and her husband, Frederick were very poor, even by 1700s standards. Rumor around the town (other than that she was a witch) was that she was a pretty raging drunk, and liked to wander around yelling and singing at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night.

She was uneducated, but often tried to use big words to make people think otherwise. Problem was, she usually misused or mispronounced them, drawing even more mockery and ridicule from the townspeople.

Kate’s link with the identity of the Bell witch came because of her supposed run-ins with John Bell, the Bell family patriarch. There are a couple of stories about why Kate chose to terrorize the Bell family specifically.

One claims she was a spurned lover, actually involved with Mr. Bell all the way back in North Carolina, before they both migrated to Tennessee. The other claims that she and Bell got into a nasty land dispute after moving to Tennessee. By all accounts, neither of these can be fully verified or nullified.

Was Kate Batts the Bell Witch? No one knows for sure, but as far as I can tell, the people of Adams during the peak of the paranormal activity on the Bell farm really thought she was, it’s even said during one haunting it called itself “Ol’ Kate Batts’ Witch”. Whatever the case, Ol’ Kate did some mean stuff to the Bell family.

Slapping, pushing, pulling hair, and general all around terrorism caused by an invisible entity plagued the Bell household. Horrifying disembodied voices threatened bodily harm and death to various members of the family.

The witch seemed to have a special place in her hellish heart for John Bell and one of his daughters, Elizabeth. These two were to bear the brunt of the abuse, culminating in John’s death by poisoning (for which Kate took credit) and Elizabeth being bullied out of marrying her true love. (Seriously, Kate harassed Elizabeth and her fiancé, Joshua Gardner so badly, they had to break up.)

So many accounts of the Bell Witch story exist today, from books, to movies, to documentaries, (my favorite is here) and many of them just don’t agree on what actually happened and what the Bell Witch is. It seems that whatever she is, at her core she’s just a misfit standing up to a bunch of bullies… at least that’s what I like to think.

Bloody Mary

Dolley Madison

First Lady Dolley Madison played an influential role in making the White House the social center of politics in early America. Legend has it that she continues to take her duties as First Lady seriously to this day—her ghost reportedly frightened gardeners away when they were trying to make changes to a rose garden Dolley had planted.






Biblio: Bell Witch- http://www.bellwitch.org/story.htm, http://www.mtnlaurel.com/ghost-stories/1166-the-strange-true-story-of-the-bell-w...

White Lady- https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-ghost-stories-white-lady-st... https://goldengatepark.com/stow-lake-ghost.html

Bloody Mary- https://www.biography.com/royalty/mary-tudor, https://allthatsinteresting.com/bloody-mary

Kate Morgan-