The Beginning of My Spiritual Awakening — Fifteen Years Later

 

I arrived in Oklahoma on Thursday, August 10 and returned to Los Angeles on Monday, August 14, 1995.  The circumstances are presented in the nonfiction case study Testament (1997) available to be read in a free Internet edition.
 
In 1995 after researching so-called ‘talking poltergeists,’ I learned about the Mc Wethy family in Centrahoma upon reading an article in the UK magazine Fortean Times.  I still remember my astonishment upon sighting the third headline on the cover mentioning “America’s Talking Poltergeist.”
 

 

My first estimation was that the article probably was just another brief profile of ‘The Bell Witch’ talking poltergeist case and then I was excited to see that the article was about an actual contemporary case.  I contacted the family and many of the following events are chronicled in Testament.  The book is not a creative work where fiction is disguised as nonfiction.  Names of people mentioned in the book have not been altered.
 
In my first telephone conversation with Maxine Mc Wethy, I learned that she had been married to Carlton Bell and members of her immediate family had the Bell surname.  Eventually, I accepted ‘Bell’ as my own pen name after a surprising series of events that are chronicled in the book.
 
M. V. Ingram’s An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch (1894) may now be read without charge in an Internet edition.  In the Bell Witch case, the haunting presence was associated with an amazing variety of unexplained phenomena that included voice manifestations.  This is also true about the Centrahoma case.  A parallel can be found between this voice phenomena and mediumship cases where ‘Direct Voice’ communication has been heard. 
 
The following is the first portion of my planned preface (as written in 1995) of an unpublished manuscript that has been left in a file for fifteen years.  The subject of my manuscript was ‘talking poltergeist’ accounts from previous epochs.
 

Throughout history, there have been accounts of perplexing facets of human existence.  In the early nineteenth century, a profusion of supernatural phenomena were manifested in the lives of the Bell family residing in rural Tennessee.  Eyewitness accounts describe a series of events comparable to what might ensue should mankind's collective subconscious generate an incorporeal yet undeniable entity whose existence was inexorably linked with that of the Bells'.
 
The year was 1804 when John and Lucy Bell and their six children traveled in covered wagons to the wilderness of Tennessee.  John Bell had purchased one thousand acres of land on the south bank of the Red River.  Here his family prospered as farmers with a quantity of slaves.  Twelve years later, hundreds of people would see and hear a startling range of uncanny events and leave eyewitness testimonials of their experiences.  The family's ordeal quickly became the greatest mystery of their time.
 
In 1846 Richard Williams Bell recorded the events of what he referred to as his "family's trouble" with the hope of some day correcting public misconceptions surrounding the occurrences.  When he died several years later, his eldest son, James Allen Bell, inherited the manuscript and preserved it.
 
James Allen Bell was himself near the end of his life when Mr. M. V. Ingram obtained his consent to use the document as a chapter in the anthology of recollections preserving the history of The Bell Witch.  Ingram was a newspaperman of Clarksville, Tennessee and the results of his inquiries and research was published in 1894, along with the corroborative testimony left by men and women who had experienced the wonders firsthand.
 
Those who witnessed the Bells' astonishing experiences signed affidavits to attest to the truth of what they recorded.  Something happened to the Bells that has never been comprehensible, and these events paralleled occurrences in past centuries.

 
Here’s a link to my November 2004 article at http://paranormalnews.com/:
 “Putting Together The Poltergeist Puzzle”.   The article is about the Bell Witch and two other 'talking poltergeist' cases.  This article is a rough draft of information included in a chapter of a new nonfiction book that I've been working on for many years.  I now plan to entitle the book My Unexpected Path of Spiritual Discovery.