The Real Story Behind 10 "Based On A True Story" Horror Films

8. An American Haunting

The pitch: Framed by a modern ghost story, but primarily set in the early 1800s, this 2005 film features Donald Sutherland as a landowner who believes a vengeful local witch has sought revenge on him by causing spirits to harm his daughter (Rachel Hurd-Wood). It purports to tell the definitive real story of one of America's most documented and discussed supernatural happenings: the story of the Bell Witch. The real story: An American Haunting is based on a novel, Brent Monahan's The Bell Witch: An American Haunting, which should instantly give a hint that it is only "true" in the loosest sense of the word. However, both book and film do claim at least to be based in the real story of the Bell Witch (also part of the inspiration for The Blair Witch Project and a handful of other films). The Bell Witch was Kate Batts, a local woman in early 1800s Tennessee, who reputedly cursed farmer John Bell (Sutherland in the film), which was followed by poltergeist activity centred around Bell's daughter Betsy (Hurd-Wood). These events are dramatised pretty faithfully in the film, but that does not make it an accurate version of a "true story". Principally this is because none of the story is true in the first place. People have claimed that the child Betsy probably faked the haunting, but even that is probably assuming a bit too much truth in the tale. As it is, there are no written sources for the Bell Witch story before 1886, around 70 years after the events are supposed to have happened. Most of the story's details, meanwhile, are taken from An Authenticated Account of the Bell Witch written by Martin Van Buren Ingram in 1894. Ingram claimed his account was based on the diary of Richard Bell (James D'Arcy in the film), but apparently only written decades later during Bell's 30s. Nobody has ever seen this diary and it is doubtful it exists at all.