Laura Wright 
Bell Witch
Long before paranormal investigators carried electronic equipment into supposedly haunted houses, a family living in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee told of something extraordinary in their home.
It knocked on walls.
It scratched and rapped.
It hid household objects, ruined food, struck the children, insulted visitors, disrupted prayer meetings, and revealed embarrassing secrets about people in the community.
Eventually, it began to speak.
The unseen presence claimed to be an old woman and became known as Old Nance.
She particularly despised the father of the family, Bill Beaver, whom she nicknamed Old Leatherhead. A visiting minister received another peculiar name.
She called him Old Sugarmouth.
The story would be remarkable enough on its own.
But Old Nance bears an uncanny resemblance to Tennessee’s most famous supernatural legend, the Bell Witch.
Both were invisible, intelligent, apparently female entities. Both tormented one particular man while occasionally showing kindness toward other members of the household. Both disrupted religious gatherings, exposed people’s secrets, verbally abused visitors, and appeared capable of physical violence.
And both supposedly contributed to the death of the man they hated.
Yet while the Bell Witch became one of America’s most famous supernatural legends, Old Nance was nearly forgotten. The Beaver family’s strange story survives largely because Appalachian writer Emma Bell Miles preserved it in her 1905 book The Spirit of the Mountains.
The Beaver Family
The Beaver family lived in the Cumberland Mountains of eastern Tennessee during the nineteenth century.
Bill Beaver shared his home with his wife, Sarah, and their children. Their eldest daughter, Rose Ann, was already married and living in Arkansas with her husband.
Precisely when the haunting began is uncertain.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the story was already old folklore.
And according to the surviving account, the trouble began with noises.
Old Nance Arrives
At first, there was no voice.
The family heard unexplained knocking, scratching, and rapping around the house.
Such noises are common in haunting stories. Houses settle. Animals get into walls. Wood expands and contracts.
But whatever was troubling the Beaver family did not remain an unexplained noise for long.
The activity became increasingly interactive.
Objects moved.
Practical jokes were played.
Eventually, the unseen presence began communicating with the family.
It possessed a sharp, cackling laugh and an even sharper tongue.
Nobody actually saw Old Nance.
Bill Beaver, however, claimed that he dreamed about the old woman repeatedly.
Who Was Old Nance?
That was something Bill desperately wanted to know.
The spirit claimed to be an angry old woman, but she couldn’t seem to provide a consistent explanation for why she was haunting the Beaver family.
Instead, she offered one accusation after another.
At one point, Old Nance claimed Bill had plowed up her bones.
Bill knew of no such event.
Then she accused him of cheating or mistreating her in a dispute involving land.
Again, Bill insisted it wasn’t true.
She suggested some sort of business grievance.
That explanation went nowhere either.
Eventually, Old Nance abandoned elaborate explanations altogether.
She said she tormented Bill because he was a “mean man.”
Apparently that was reason enough.
Old Leatherhead
Nance reserved a special contempt for Bill Beaver.
She nicknamed him Old Leatherhead.
The spirit reportedly promised that she would follow him to the ends of the earth and remain with him until the end of his days.
Sarah Beaver didn’t find any of this amusing.
She despised the presence in her home.
And with good reason.
Old Nance didn’t limit her abuse to Bill.
She tormented the entire household.
The Terrible Smell
One of Nance’s favorite tricks was particularly unpleasant.
She could supposedly produce an overpowering smell of decay.
The stench became so terrible that the family sometimes had to abandon the cabin.
Even food could be affected.
Freshly prepared meals suddenly smelled spoiled.
On one occasion, Sarah baked fresh bread.
When it came from the oven, nobody could eat it.
The family offered the warm bread to their dog.
The dog wouldn’t touch it either.
The implication was obvious to the Beavers.
Whatever Old Nance could do wasn’t limited to frightening people.
She could somehow affect the physical world around them.
Nance Attacks the Children
The spirit’s behavior could become cruel.
Old Nance reportedly slapped and struck the Beaver children.
Not even the youngest was exempt.
One of the children was only two years old.
One evening, the baby’s crying particularly irritated Nance.
The entity warned the family that if they didn’t make the child stop crying, she would.
The family tried unsuccessfully to quiet the baby.
Nance responded by spanking the child.
For Sarah, incidents like these removed any possibility of viewing the spirit as harmless entertainment.
Whatever Nance was, it was tormenting her children.
Ashes in the Butter Churn
Old Nance also interfered relentlessly with Sarah’s housework.
Small objects disappeared and turned up in unexpected places.
Nothing could safely be left unattended.
One evening, Sarah stepped away from the butter churn while preparing supper.
When she returned, the cream had been ruined.
Someone had dumped a shovel full of ashes into the churn.
There was no visible culprit.
The family blamed Nance.
Everyone’s Secrets
Physical attacks weren’t necessarily Nance’s most effective weapon.
She talked.
And apparently she knew things.
The spirit began revealing private information about the Beavers and their neighbors. Old misdeeds were announced publicly. Secrets people believed were safely hidden became entertainment for an invisible gossip with no concern whatsoever for anyone’s reputation.
Eventually, the situation damaged Bill Beaver’s relationships with members of his own family.
Neighbors began avoiding the house.
Relatives stayed away.
Even people who had to visit reportedly preferred not to come any farther than the front porch.
The haunting had accomplished something particularly destructive.
It isolated the family.
Unlike the Bell Witch
That represents one of the striking differences between Old Nance and Tennessee’s better-known Bell Witch.
The Bell family haunting eventually attracted enormous attention. People supposedly traveled to the Bell farm hoping to hear the mysterious entity for themselves.
Old Nance produced almost the opposite result.
People avoided the Beaver home.
There were no crowds gathering to witness the phenomenon.
The family’s reputation and relationships deteriorated.
Whatever Old Nance was doing, she seemed determined to separate Bill Beaver from everyone around him.
Yet the similarities between the two stories are difficult to miss.
And one of the strangest involved a minister.
Old Sugarmouth
Religious visitors particularly infuriated Old Nance.
One minister attempted to stay with the Beaver family.
Nance responded by pulling the covers from his bed.
Then she gave him a nickname:
Old Sugarmouth.
That detail is particularly intriguing because the Bell Witch legend contains a remarkably similar episode involving Methodist minister James Johnson.
The resemblance extends far beyond a single nickname.
Both entities displayed hostility toward religious efforts intended to drive them away.
Both mocked ministers.
Both interrupted prayers.
Both appeared to know embarrassing details about the people confronting them.
Whether those parallels indicate borrowing between the traditions, a common folkloric source, or something else is difficult to determine.
Ministers Against Old Nance
Attempts were made to drive the spirit away.
Ministers visited the Beaver home and prayed.
Old Nance wasn’t impressed.
She interrupted them with foul odors, insults, profanity, and other disturbances.
Prayer meetings were particularly offensive to her.
When people gathered in the house to pray, Nance sometimes began revealing humiliating information about those attending.
The entity seemed capable of recounting wrongdoings committed years earlier.
During one particularly chaotic prayer meeting, something apparently sent Nance into a rage.
She cursed.
She whistled.
She sang.
The disturbance became so unbearable that everyone fled the house.
Nance followed them outside.
Getting away from the building didn’t mean getting away from the haunting.
The Witch Doctors Arrive
Ministers weren’t the only people who attempted to confront Nance.
So-called witch doctors also came to the Beaver property.
They hoped to destroy the spirit with a silver bullet.
They never received the opportunity.
Nance mocked them just as relentlessly as she mocked everyone else.
Visitors attempting to challenge her might find themselves escorted from the property by bawdy songs, whistles, profanity, and an assortment of inexplicable noises.
If Old Nance feared exorcism, prayer, or folk magic, she gave little indication of it.
Then Nance Did Something Kind
The story becomes considerably stranger because Old Nance wasn’t consistently malicious.
Very rarely, she showed what appeared to be genuine compassion.
Sarah Beaver once became seriously ill and was unable to eat.
Instead of tormenting her, Nance repeatedly asked what she would like.
The spirit even kept flies and bees away from Sarah’s sickroom.
That is an extraordinarily peculiar detail.
The entity that struck Sarah’s children and ruined the family’s food was now apparently protecting her while she was ill.
Then came the strawberries.
The Mysterious Strawberries
Several visitors came to see Sarah while she remained bedridden.
During their conversation, someone mentioned how wonderful fresh strawberries would be.
A few hours later, a bowl of strawberries appeared before Sarah.
Nobody had brought them.
Old Nance apparently had.
Sarah was too sick to eat.
So the strawberries disappeared again.
Where they supposedly came from is never explained.
Nor is why an entity capable of such tenderness toward Sarah spent so much of its time making her life miserable.
Old Nance was contradictory.
That may be one of the most interesting things about her.
Nance Protects the Women
Another incident suggests that Nance regarded herself as having some peculiar responsibility toward the family.
One night, Bill and his sons were away from home.
A drunken neighbor entered the Beaver house and announced that he intended to spend the night.
The women were frightened.
Old Nance apparently was not.
The spirit attacked the drunken intruder.
She slapped him repeatedly.
Then, according to the story, she dragged him from the house by his nose.
The man never returned.
For once, the Beaver family probably didn’t object to their invisible houseguest.
Was Old Nance a Poltergeist?
In modern paranormal terminology, much of the Beaver activity would probably be described as poltergeist phenomena.
There were unexplained knocks and raps.
Objects were moved.
Food was tampered with.
People were struck.
The entity apparently interacted physically with its surroundings.
But Old Nance differs from the stereotypical poltergeist in one important respect.
She possessed an extraordinarily developed personality.
She spoke.
She joked.
She lied.
She remembered things.
She held grudges.
She showed preferences among individual people.
She could be cruel one day and compassionate the next.
In the surviving story, Nance behaves less like a mysterious force and more like an invisible member of the household.
A particularly disagreeable one.
Old Nance and the Bell Witch
The similarities between the Beaver haunting and the Bell Witch legend deserve attention.
The Bell Witch supposedly tormented John Bell and his family in Robertson County, Tennessee, during the early nineteenth century.
The entity eventually became known as Kate.
Old Nance and Kate share an unusual number of characteristics.
Both were invisible female personalities.
Both communicated through speech.
Both physically attacked members of a family.
Both focused particular hostility upon the father.
Both occasionally demonstrated kindness.
Both revealed private information.
Both mocked religious figures.
Both interfered with prayers.
Both offered uncertain or contradictory explanations for their identities.
And both were ultimately blamed for the death of the man they had selected as their principal victim.
The resemblance is extraordinary.
Did One Story Influence the Other?
That question is almost impossible to answer without more documentation concerning when individual elements entered each tradition.
Folklore travels.
Stories are told between communities.
Details migrate from one legend to another.
A memorable incident can become attached to a completely different family within a generation or two.
It is therefore possible that elements of the Bell Witch story influenced the Beaver tradition.
The reverse is also possible for individual details if the Old Nance tradition proves older than surviving documentation suggests.
A third possibility is that both stories developed from common Appalachian supernatural traditions.
And then there is the interpretation believers in the paranormal might find irresistible.
What if they weren’t merely similar stories?
What if they described the same kind of phenomenon?
The surviving evidence cannot answer that question.
Two Families, One Entity?
The geography makes the comparison even more intriguing.
Both stories arose in Tennessee.
The Bell family lived in the western portion of Middle Tennessee near the Kentucky line.
The Beaver story belonged to the Cumberland Mountains much farther east.
They were separated geographically but existed within overlapping traditions of nineteenth-century Tennessee folklore.
Could the Bell Witch and Old Nance represent different regional versions of a common story?
Could storytellers have adapted one haunting to another family?
Or did two Tennessee households independently report remarkably similar invisible personalities?
There isn’t enough surviving evidence to know.
And that uncertainty is precisely what makes Old Nance so interesting.
The Death of Bill Beaver
As the years passed, Nance’s hatred of Bill reportedly intensified.
She had promised Old Leatherhead that she would remain with him until the end of his days.
Eventually, those days ended.
One morning, the family found Bill dead.
Nothing during the previous night had suggested that he was in immediate danger. The household apparently believed he had gone peacefully to sleep.
He never woke.
The Beaver family blamed Old Nance.
They believed the witch had finally killed him.
There was no way to prove such a thing.
But what happened afterward undoubtedly strengthened their belief.
Old Nance Disappears
Once Bill Beaver was dead, the haunting ended.
Old Nance disappeared.
As far as surviving accounts indicate, she never returned to torment Sarah or the children.
That ending seems to give the haunting a purpose.
Whatever Nance claimed to be, Bill had always been her primary target.
She called him Old Leatherhead.
She accused him of unspecified wrongs.
She promised to remain until his death.
Then he died.
And she left.
If the story is taken literally, Old Nance had accomplished whatever she had come to do.
Who Was Old Nance?
More than a century later, there is probably no way to answer that question.
She claimed Bill had disturbed her remains.
Then she apparently contradicted herself.
She accused him of disputes involving land and business.
Those accusations went nowhere.
Finally, she simply called him mean.
She never provided a coherent biography.
No grave was identified.
No murdered woman was connected convincingly with the property.
There was no forgotten Nance whose history neatly explained everything.
Perhaps that absence is important.
Folklore often becomes tidier with age.
Ghosts acquire names.
Names acquire biographies.
Biographies acquire murders.
Eventually, every apparition has a complete origin story.
Old Nance never quite received one.
She remains irritatingly unexplained.
The Forgotten Witch of Tennessee
The Bell Witch became a cultural phenomenon.
Old Nance did not.
That may have had nothing to do with the quality of the story.
The Bell family was better positioned socially, the legend attracted influential visitors, and generations of writers continued developing and publishing the account.
The Beaver family haunting remained obscure.
By 1905, Emma Bell Miles was preserving something that might otherwise have disappeared completely.
That makes Old Nance valuable for another reason.
Whether the haunting happened exactly as described is impossible to establish.
But the story preserves a piece of Appalachian supernatural tradition that never became polished into a major tourist legend.
It remained strange.
Crude.
Contradictory.
And deeply local.
Old Nance, Old Leatherhead, and Old Sugarmouth
Perhaps Old Nance was simply folklore.
Perhaps the Beaver story absorbed details from the Bell Witch.
Perhaps both legends descended from older oral traditions now impossible to reconstruct.
Or perhaps something genuinely inexplicable happened to a family living in the Cumberland Mountains.
Whatever the answer, the similarities remain.
Two Tennessee families.
Two invisible female entities.
Two tormented fathers.
Two spirits capable of cruelty and unexpected kindness.
Two entities that mocked ministers, revealed secrets, disrupted prayers, and seemingly knew things they should not have known.
The Bell Witch became famous.
Old Nance almost disappeared.
But thanks in part to Emma Bell Miles, Old Leatherhead’s tormentor was not entirely forgotten.
More than a century later, she can still do what she apparently did best.
Make people talk about her.
About the Author
