He wanted to shoot at what he thought was a turkey, and was startled when the bird took off, flying over him and revealing that it was an extraordinarily large animal. The animal ran off.Ī few days later another family member spotted a bird on a fence post. The beast stared at Bell, who fired a gun at it. Bell assumed he was looking at some unknown type of large dog. The weird events began in 1817 when a farmer, John Bell, saw a strange creature hunched down in a cornrow. The spirit was persistent and nasty, so much so that it was credited with actually killing the patriarch of the Bell family. One of the most notorious haunting stories in history is that of the Bell Witch, a malicious spirit which first appeared on the farm of the Bell family in northern Tennesse in 1817. The Bell Witch Terrorized a Family and Frightened the Fearless Andrew Jackson There's a malicious spirit that terrorized a Tennessee family, a newly elected president who got a great fright, a headless railroader, and a First Lady obsessed with ghosts. What follows are some examples of spooky, scary, or weird events from the 1800s which became legendary. And it seems that every place on earth has some version of a 19th-century ghost story. Some of them, like legends of silent ghost trains gliding past startled witnesses on dark nights, was so common that it's impossible to pinpoint where or when the stories began.

The 1800s spawned countless tales of ghosts and spirits and spooky events. Or perhaps some really weird things were actually happening and people simply recorded them accurately. Perhaps the 19th-century fascination with the otherworldly was a way to hold on to a superstitious past. Even a new technology was coupled with the public's interest in ghosts as 'spirit photographs,' clever fakes created by using double exposures, became popular novelty items. Yet in a century seemingly built on reason there arose a profound interest in the supernatural. The 19th century is generally remembered as a time of science and technology when the ideas of Charles Darwin and the telegraph of Samuel Morse changed the world forever.

20th century ghosts best stories