Welcome to American hauntings, the podcast dedicated to the history, hauntings, legends, lore,

and the dark side of American history. And welcome to the promised bonus episode for season

nine about the Bell Witch Cave in Tennessee. If you're listening to this and haven't listened to

episode 182 yet, pause your podcast app and go back and listen to that episode about an American haunting and get up to date on the story of the bellwitch.

As we mentioned in that episode, the story of the bellwitch Cave was too complicated to try and include in that

episode. And also, even though the cave has the name of the Bell Witch and is located on land

owned by the Bell family in the early 19th century, it's hard to know if the strange happenings

that fill the history of the cave are directly related to the bell witch haunting.

But whether they are or not, there are some very weird and unsettling things happening in this cave.

So it's not hard to understand why many who live in the region believe that when the bell witch left the family, it took up residence

in the cave. You can decide for yourself in the bonus episode that follows.

The history of the cave that was located on the Bell Farm in the early 1800s dates back millions of years to when it was formed from an inland ocean that's once covered the region.

The water that flowed through the limestone eventually created the cave, which is several miles long today, weaving under a large area of Robertson County, Tennessee.

As the water receded, the cavern was left behind, and today is considered a dry cave,

which means that new formations are no longer being created. And yet the cool,

damp conditions of the cave have persisted for centuries. And this led to the first historical

mention of it in the chronicles of the Bell Witch haunting. The Bell family used the cave for

a cool storage of perishable foods, but that was about all.

It was more than a century later when the cave began to be associated with the Bell Witch,

and it became a tourist attraction.

This was thanks to a man named Bill Eden, a farmer who lived on the property. He took an interest in the cave and in the

middle 1960s, he started making some improvements to it to attract visitors. Even though the cave

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