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The Bell Witch or Bell Witch Haunting is a legend from Southern United States folklore, centered on the 19th-century Bell family of northwest Robertson County, Tennessee. Farmer John Bell Sr. resided with his family along the Red River in an area currently near the town of Adams. According to legend, from 1817 to 1821, his family and the local area came under attack by a mostly invisible entity that was able to speak, affect the physical environment, and shapeshift. Some accounts record the spirit also to have been clairvoyant and capable of crossing long distances with superhuman speed (and/or of being in more than one place at a time).
In 1894, newspaper editor Martin V. Ingram published his Authenticated History of the Bell Witch. The book is widely regarded as the first full-length record of the legend and a primary source for subsequent treatments. The individuals recorded in the work were known historical personalities. In modern times, some skeptics have regarded Ingram's efforts as a work of historical fiction or fraud. Other researchers consider Ingram's work a nascent folklore study and an accurate reflection of belief in the region during the 19th century.
While not a fundamental element of the original recorded legend, the Bell Witch Cave in the 20th century became a source of continuing interest, belief, and generation of lore. Contemporary artistic interpretations such as in film and music have expanded the reach of the legend beyond the regional confines of the Southern United States.
The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Most reputable sources dismiss the idea that there is any mystery.[1][2][3]
The vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle is amongst the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world, with ships frequently crossing through it for ports in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean islands. Cruise ships and pleasure craft regularly sail through the region, and commercial and private aircraft routinely fly over it.
Popular culture has attributed various disappearances to the paranormal or activity by extraterrestrial beings. Documented evidence indicates that a significant percentage of the incidents were spurious, inaccurately reported, or embellished by later authors. Origins The earliest suggestion of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 17, 1950, article published in The Miami Herald (Associated Press) by Edward Van Winkle Jones.[4] Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door",[5][6] a short article by George Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five US Navy Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place, as well as the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine.[7] In it, author Allan W. Eckert wrote that the flight leader had been heard saying, "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white." He also wrote that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars."[8]
In February 1964, Vincent Gaddis wrote an article called "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" in the pulp magazine Argosy saying Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region.[9] The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book, Invisible Horizons.[10]
Other writers elaborated on Gaddis' ideas: John Wallace Spencer (Limbo of the Lost, 1969, repr. 1973);[11] Charles Berlitz (The Bermuda Triangle, 1974);[12] Richard Winer (The Devil's Triangle, 1974),[13] and many others, all keeping to some of the same supernatural elements outlined by Eckert.[14]
In Balinese mythology, Bhoma is the son of Dewa Wisnu and Dewi Pertiwi, the god of rain and the goddess of earth. One day, when Wisnu was digging the earth in the form of Varaha, his avatar in the form of a wild boar, he encountered a beautiful earth goddess named Dewi Pertiwi. The encounter leads to a union between Wisnu and Pertiwi, which produce a terrifying son named Bhoma.
The story of Wisnu as a wild boar digging up to the bottom of the earth to meet Pertiwi symbolizes torrents of stormy rainwater entering the earth. The figure of Bhoma that was produced by this union is seen as the growth of vegetation or forest (Vanaspati) as a result of the earth receiving the (rain) water. In Javanese and Balinese culture, Vanaspati is the king of the plant, not different with the European Green Man. The word Bhoma came from the Sanskrit word bhaumá, which means something that grows or is born from earth or something related to the earth.