The spirit had vowed to put John Bell in his grave, and on a December morning in 1820 a coma, a smoky vial of black poison, and a dead barn cat proved she meant every word.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/bellwitchfinallaugh
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yfpsnbfw
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Did a malevolent spirit cause the death of John Bell, or was it something else that brought his demise? (The Death of John Bell) *** A man is awoken in the middle of the night by a piano – being played by no one. (Rock Isn’t Dead) *** Is it possible that ancient human skulls are conscious? (Cult of Human Skulls) *** Did the Watergate scandal hide a secret agenda? (Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors)
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:00:51.735 = Show Open
00:02:11.866 = The Death of John Bell
00:09:41.045 = Rock Isn’t Dead ***
00:13:58.971 = Cult of Human Skulls
00:20:31.984 = Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors ***
00:43:34.192 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS:
Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps
*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Watergate: Wilderness of Mirrors” posted at The Unredacted: http://bit.ly/2JjZ0pr
“Rock Isn’t Dead” by UnQuiet: http://bit.ly/2HfOZax
“The Death of John Bell” by Troy Taylor: http://bit.ly/2HgkJwq
“Cult of Human Skulls” by A. Sutherland: http://bit.ly/2Q1WbtT
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: December, 2021
Weird Darkness gathers four accounts of the inexplicable across this episode — a frontier farmer poisoned by a spirit, a midnight keyboard played by no one, the worldwide superstitions surrounding human skulls, and a hidden reading of the Watergate burglary.It opens with the death of John Bell, the Tennessee gentleman farmer remembered as the only man ever murdered by a spirit. For nearly four years the entity known as the Bell Witch had tormented his household with attacks, flying objects, and a disembodied voice, singling out Bell and his daughter Elizabeth, called Betsy, for the worst of it. On the morning of December 19, 1820, Bell could not be roused from a deep stupor, and his son John Jr. found the cupboard of prescribed medicines emptied and replaced by a smoky-looking vial holding a dark, nearly black liquid. The witch laughed over his bed and admitted she had dosed "Old Jack" the night before; when Alex Gunn brought in a barn cat and a straw of the liquid was drawn across its tongue, the animal screeched, whirled, and dropped dead. Dr. Hopson confirmed Bell had swallowed the contents, Frank Miles hurled the vial into the fire where it flared blue up the chimney, and Bell died early on December 20, 1820, never having woken.From there the episode turns to a quieter haunting, recounted by a father awakened at 1:14 a.m. on March 9, 2018 by a few composed notes from his twelve-year-old son's electronic keyboard. He found the boy sound asleep and the cat sitting upright on the bed, staring at the instrument, and when he pressed the keys himself no sound came because the power was switched off. The next morning he woke his son for school and recognized the boy's shirt, worn for the first time, as one that had belonged to his late brother, who died suddenly in 2015 and whose lifelong dream had been to play in his band, called Ghost Of. The shirt read "Rock Isn't Dead… it's just played by Ghost Of," and the brothers had shared a love of ghost stories and a standing joke that he would return to visit after death.Next comes a survey of the human skull as an object of dread and reverence stretching back through cultures on every continent, rooted in the old belief that the head housed the soul and offered a channel to the Other World. The segment weighs the disputed Celtic "Cult of the Head," with historian Ronald Hutton arguing the recurring head motif on Celtic metalwork reflects artistic fashion rather than worship, and moves through the 1612 trial of Lancashire witch Anne Chattox, hanged after she was accused of robbing graves for skulls and teeth. It gathers the screaming-skull legends of England, including Anne Griffiths of Burton Agnes Hall in Yorkshire, whose exhumed head was bricked into a staircase wall to quiet the slamming and crashing, and the skull at Bettiscombe Manor in Dorset, said to belong to an enslaved man brought from Nevis by the Pinney family and denied his promised burial in the Caribbean.The episode closes with a long, skeptical reexamination of Watergate that treats the official account as a fabrication. It returns to the June 17, 1972 arrest of five burglars inside the Democratic National Committee offices and the address book linking E. Howard Hunt to Nixon's White House, then argues, following journalist Jim Hougan's 1984 book Secret Agenda, that the men never actually bugged the building at all. James McCord, a senior figure in the CIA's Office of Security rather than the low-level technician he claimed, rented a line-of-sight surveillance room facing the wrong side of the complex, paid an employee to transcribe conversations from nonexistent wiretaps, and twice taped the stairwell locks horizontally across the door face so guards could not miss them. A key found on burglar Eugenio Martinez fit the desk of DNC secretary Ida Wells and pointed toward a suspected call-girl ring run out of the adjacent Columbia Plaza apartments, raising the possibility that Hunt and McCord, both career CIA men who lied about a decade-long association, sabotaged the break-in to shield a clandestine operation, to topple a president who had sidelined the agency, or both, taking the full truth with them to their graves.
Italia