Bell Witch Cave

A roughly 490-foot karst cave outside Adams in Robertson County, on land that was once the John Bell farm. It sits at the center of the haunting Tennessee has retold since the 1820s.

John and Lucy Bell migrated from North Carolina in 1804 and farmed here. John Bell died December 20, 1820, and a state highway marker on US 41 documents the site.

The National Register of Historic Places listed the cave on March 21, 2008, as reference 08000237. The significance area is Entertainment/Recreation: the federal record registers the legend’s draw, not the ghost.

The account goes: an entity the family called the Bell Witch tormented the Bells from 1817 to 1821. The legend blames John Bell’s death on a poison the spirit claimed it gave him.

Visitors and tour guests still report strange photographs, sounds they cannot place, and other unexplained phenomena in and around the cave itself.

Ingram’s 1894 “An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch,” published in Clarksville, is the first full print telling. The cave’s own episodes entered the record decades after the purported events.

Tours run May through November: a 40-minute cave tour plus a 30-minute tour of a hand-hewed replica of the Bell cabin. Tickets are sold on site, and heavy rain closes the cave.