🕯️ The Nightly Storyteller Presents: “Marked — The Bell Witch’s Return”

🎙️ Intro — A Different Kind of Curse

> Not every curse begins with a coin.

Some are written in the dirt of old caves… whispered through bloodlines that never asked to be chosen.

Tonight’s tale isn’t from The Gold Coin Chronicles.

This one comes from deeper down — beneath the limestone heart of Tennessee.

A story about homecomings, unfinished business… and a witch that doesn’t forgive.

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The Marked: The Bell Witch’s Return

Mara had always said she’d never come back to Tennessee.

Not after leaving for college, not after getting engaged in Chicago.

But heartbreak has a way of driving you home — and when she pulled into her parents’ gravel driveway at dusk, the night air tasted sweeter than she remembered. Honeysuckle and humidity. Lightning bugs blinking their ancient Morse code.

She’d been back three days when her childhood friends came over — Jess with her nervous laugh, Tyler still wearing his high school letterman jacket, and Cody, whose grin hadn’t changed since sixth grade. They sat on the back porch drinking cheap beer that tasted like aluminum and regret.

“Y’all remember Bell’s Cave?” Cody said, crushing his third can. “Still sayin’ people hear her voice down there. The Bell Witch.”

Mara rolled her eyes. “Really? We’re twenty-eight, not eight.”

But the thing about small towns is that boredom makes believers of us all.

And nostalgia? Nostalgia can be just as dangerous as curiosity.

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The cave mouth yawned black against the hillside, exhaling air that smelled like wet stone and something else — something organic and wrong, like flowers left too long in a tomb.

Their flashlight beams carved useless circles in the dark. The limestone walls wept constant moisture, making everything slick. Each drop echoed wrong — not the clean plink of water on stone, but something thicker, almost like whispered syllables.

“Used to come here in high school,” Tyler said, but his voice came back different from the walls — older, angrier.

Twenty feet in, where the ceiling dropped low enough to make them duck, Jess’s beam caught something in the dirt.

“What’s that?”

A scarab necklace, its green glass eye too bright for something half-buried in cave mud. The metal was tarnished black except where the beetle’s shell caught the light.

“Maybe someone dropped it hiking,” Tyler muttered, but his hand stayed in his pocket.

When Mara picked it up, the metal burned cold — that particular cold that feels like heat, that makes your nerves confused. An oily residue clung to her palm even after she’d pocketed it, leaving a faint outline of the beetle on her skin.

The temperature dropped. Not gradually — suddenly, like stepping into a freezer.

Their breath clouded. In July. In Tennessee.

No one spoke for a moment. The cave exhaled again, colder this time. Then, without agreeing, they followed Cody’s light.

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The passage narrowed, then opened into a chamber that shouldn’t exist — too perfectly round, too deliberately carved. In the exact center, on a flat stone that looked almost like an altar, lay a gold coin.

Clean. Pristine. Warm.

Mara crouched to look closer. The face on the coin wasn’t any president — it was a woman, her mouth open in either laughter or screaming.

That’s when the whisper came.

> “Welcome home, blood of mine…”

Not from any direction. From inside her skull.

The flashlights died simultaneously. In the perfect dark, something moved — not footsteps but a sliding, wet sound, like raw meat dragged across stone.

Tyler screamed. It cut off too quickly.

Then came the laughter. Not human laughter — the sound a throat would make if it were turned inside out, if vocal cords were played like violin strings.

Jess’s flashlight flickered back on for one second — long enough to see that Tyler wasn’t Tyler anymore. His face was… wrong. Older. His mouth moving in words that weren’t his:

> “She’s been waiting for you, Mara Bell.”

Bell. Her mother’s maiden name. The one she never used.

They ran.

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The next three days brought a special kind of hell.

Footsteps circled Mara’s bed at night — always clockwise, always stopping just before dawn. Her phone would ring with no number, only breathing that formed almost-words. Jess called crying, saying her reflection had started moving independently, mouthing “help me” when she brushed her teeth.

Tyler hadn’t come home. His mother called asking if they’d seen him.

Then came the night Mara was alone.

She’d walked to her parents’ barn to check on the horses — a normal task made terrifying by the weight of watching she felt with every step. The scarab necklace, which she’d thrown away twice, was back in her pocket. Burning cold.

Halfway back to the house, she heard it.

Footsteps in the corn.

But corn doesn’t grow in neat rows in the wild. And these footsteps came from all directions.

> “Blood of mine… time to pay what’s owed…”

She ran.

The woods that had been her childhood playground became a maze of reaching branches and shifting shadows. Something cold and impossibly strong tangled in her hair, yanking her backward. Not hands — something else. Like frozen wind given form.

She hit the ground hard, palm slicing deep on a broken bottle some teenager had left years ago. The cut was brutal — a diagonal gash from thumb to wrist, immediately gushing blood that looked black in the moonlight.

The blood hit the air and steamed.

Then the shriek came.

Not just sound — force. Her ears rang, then bled. Every piece of glass in a fifty-foot radius shattered — windows, her phone screen, even her watch face. The thing holding her hair released, and she scrambled backward, her blood spattering the leaves.

Where each drop landed, the witch’s form became visible — and where the blood touched her, she dissolved.

Not cleanly. Like acid eating through an old photograph, revealing something worse underneath. Not shadow anymore but meat and bone and hate so old it had fossilized into almost-flesh.

The witch recoiled, her form twisting, smoking where Mara’s blood had touched.

> “We share the same name, child,” she hissed, the words like wasps in Mara’s ears. “My blood runs in your veins. But it runs… wrong. Diluted. Changed.”

Her face flickered — not just Kate Batts’, but dozens of others. Ancestors Mara had seen in faded photos. All screaming through her bloodline.

More blood dripped from Mara’s palm. The witch backed away, her face cycling through ages: young woman, matron, crone, skeletal thing.

> “Your blood burns because you’ve forgotten. But blood remembers. Blood always remembers.”

She vanished like smoke fleeing fire, leaving only the smell of sulfur and burned flesh and something sweeter — honeysuckle, rotting.

---

The scar wouldn’t heal right.

Three weeks later, it still wept clear fluid that smelled like cave water. Sometimes, when Mara looked at it in certain light, the wound spelled out letters — old ones. Names she didn’t recognize but that felt familiar on her tongue.

At night, she could hear the wound drip in her sleep. Not blood — something heavier. Like cave water hitting stone.

Jess moved to Nashville without saying goodbye. Her last text was just: “I can’t stop seeing her in mirrors.”

Tyler was found two towns over, working at a gas station. He claimed he’d always worked there. Didn’t remember any cave. Didn’t remember Mara at all.

But sometimes, late at night, Mara felt it — that presence, circling her house. Waiting.

The scarab necklace appeared on her nightstand no matter how many times she burned it, buried it, or threw it in the river.

And once, just before dawn, the wound on her palm pulsed — and a single drop of dark water fell from it, hissing when it hit the floor.

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🎙️ Outro — Bloodlines

> Curses don’t die. They wait.

Some run through coins, others through names…

And if the Bell Witch’s blood still flows through her kin — what happens when the blood calls her back?

Keep your lights on, dear listeners.

Because home isn’t always where the heart is.

Sometimes, it’s where the haunting begins.

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We’re just getting started — and things are about to get dark.

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