[HN Gopher] Who was the Bell Witch?
___________________________________________________________________
Who was the Bell Witch?
Author : gus_leonel
Score : 46 points
Date : 2023-08-03 08:33 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| 1st wave black metal band Mercyful Fate wrote a song about it.
| Worth the click for the intro riff alone:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VrK-wQxuTXQ&pp=ygUYbWVyY3lmdWw...
| mecsred wrote:
| There's also a doom metal band called Bell Witch[1]. I can't
| say I know this event is the inspiration for the name but I'd
| be surprised if it was just coincidence.
|
| [1]https://www.bellwitchdoom.net/
| flobosg wrote:
| In 2018, at the Roadburn festival, I got the chance to see
| them play their single-song, 80+ minute album "Mirror
| Reaper"[1] live. It was quite an experience; at some points
| both the band and the audience were so quiet that you could
| have heard a pin drop in the venue.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10q1ZJyLXFk
| runjake wrote:
| From the second paragraph of the article: The
| legend has inspired all manner of music, from Charles
| Faulkner Bryant's classical cantata to the Seattle-
| based doom metal band that took Bell Witch as its
| name.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Despite what the Wikipedia article's [1] reference say to
| support their characterisation as "first wave of black metal",
| Mercyful Fate are nothing like early or late Black Metal bands.
| Encyclopedia Metallum lists them simply as "Heavy Metal" [2].
| It is known.
|
| The Wikipedia article on the "first wave" bands and the
| articles it lists as references are all making the same mistake
| that music journos have always made, about Black Metal, the
| genre, and about the bands that played it before and after the
| '90s. To be clear, before the '90s there was only one band that
| played recognisable Black Metal and that therefore makes any
| sense to be classed as "first wave of black metal", and that
| was Bathory; and then primarily for "Under the Sign of the
| Black Mark" and "Blood Fire Death", both classic Black albums
| that stand with the best of future bands [3].
|
| Other bands, for example in this list of "Essential Black Metal
| albums" (used as a reference in the Wikipedia article on
| Mercyful Fate):
|
| https://heavymusichq.com/essential-black-metal-albums/
|
| fall into two categories: either they are not black, but some
| kind of combination of speed (Venom), thrash (Celtic Frost),
| death (Sarcofago) and heavy (Mercyful Fate), or they started
| playing after the '90s (Burzum, Mayhem, Emperor... wtf are
| Marduk doing in a list of "early black metal" albums?).
|
| Of course, defining a genre, especially when it comes to Metal,
| is a frought affair. Are Death, Death Metal, or Progressive
| Thrash? Are Slayer, Thrash, or are they Speed Metal? Well, OK,
| but grouping together bands as diverse as Celtic Frost, Bathory
| and Merciful bloody Fate, is just reckless. More to the point,
| the only thing such bands share are the themes of their lyrics
| and album covers. For example, Venom, who never played Black
| Metal, have been associated with Black Metal because they have
| a song titled... Black Metal. Except of course that song sounds
| more like Motorhead [4]. Black Metal, the song, has a lyric
| that says "lay down your souls to the gods' Rock and Roll". As
| far as I can tell, after the 1950's, nobody called their music
| "Rock and Roll" except a) AC/DC, b) Motorhead, and, c) Venom.
| The latter, of course, used to open for Fats Domino and Neil
| Sedaka.
|
| I know, I know. King Diamond wears facial make up that looks a
| biiit like corpse paint, if you squint. But, by that token,
| KISS are Black Metal also.
|
| ... Knights in Satan's Service \m/:P\m/
|
| _______________
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercyful_Fate, pointing to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_metal#First_wave
|
| [2] https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Mercyful_Fate/182
|
| [3] It should be obvious that I'm a fan. I won't bother to tell
| you all about how every band that played Black Metal in the
| '90s sounded exactly like Bathory sounded in the '80s. Oh,
| oops!
|
| [4] Yeah, here's your umlauts, they fell over and I can't put
| them back :
| mistrial9 wrote:
| really disappointing to be repeatedly interrupted in this long-
| form journal article, with modern PC interpretations of context
| 200 years ago.
|
| "Of course he really meant a White Man.. " is injected without
| any hint of self-reflection.. go away
| GoofballJones wrote:
| Someone gave me a book about the Bell Witch in the 1970s and I
| just remember it scaring the hell out of me. I usually don't get
| scared easily, even back then. But things like that did for some
| reason.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Who was the Bell Witch?_
|
| > _Eventually, in the Post story it is revealed that Betsey had
| been using ventriloquism to simulate a haunting, and the ghost,
| so exposed, "vanished into thin air."_
|
| Almost everything else sounds like a fiction made up by Ingram,
| who wrote the "definitive" book 70+ years after the events took
| place, loosely based on the facts he was able to gather.
|
| The article is still interesting, especially the part about the
| societal issues at the time that influenced Ingram, but the
| mystery of the Bell Witch seems to be a teenager who wanted to
| marry a boy, and didn't much like her dad.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Some of the descriptions on Wikipedia of what happened in the
| Bell house seem similar to reports of demonic vexation and
| infestation [0].
|
| [0 https://catholicexchange.com/vexation-obsession-
| possession-t...
| uhtred wrote:
| that catholicexhange site is incredibly fast- all those excess
| church dollars going to good use!
| debatem1 wrote:
| > which remains enduringly popular despite having only the most
| tenable connection to the legend itself.
|
| Newly discovered pet peeve: using the word tenable in place of
| tenuous.
| krapp wrote:
| I recommend the Astonishing Legends podcast on the Bell Witch:
|
| [0]https://astonishinglegends.com/al-
| podcasts/2017/10/08/ep-85-...
|
| [1]https://astonishinglegends.com/al-
| podcasts/2017/10/15/ep-86-...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-03 23:01 UTC)