Kith and Kin_ _ The Bell Witch

In 1817, John Bell shot at a dog in his cornfield that vanished into thin air. Four years later he was dead — poisoned by a vial nobody in his family had ever seen — and the thing responsible crashed his own funeral to sing drinking songs over the casket. It called itself Kate. It had two goals, stated out loud for years: kill the father, break up the daughter's engagement. It succeeded at both. This is the Bell Witch — the most famous haunting in American history, and one built almost entirely on the word of a single 19th-century newspaper editor whose "primary source" manuscript no other living person ever saw. We dig into the documented fabrications, the real neighbor whose name got attached to a murder confession, the alternate legend that makes John Bell the villain instead of the victim, and the promise the entity made on her way out the door — a vow to haunt "kith and kin," on a schedule, landing on a return date in 2044. Watch your cornfields.