The Thing in the Corn

There are places in this country where the dark feels older than night ought to be.

You know the kind. The road narrows, the trees lean in, and the fields stretch out with a patience that seems almost human. The air hangs still, listening. Even in daylight those places carry a suggestion—small as a splinter under the skin—that if you stop your wagon, or your car, or simply your own breathing for long enough, you might hear something moving just beyond the edge of sight. Something that has been there all along.

Adams, Tennessee, was one of those places.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, when the land still felt half-won from wilderness and every homestead stood as a thin little candle against the enormous dark, John Bell worked his farm the way decent men did: by sweat, routine, prayer, and a plain belief that if a man kept his fences mended and his word clean, the Lord would see him through another season. He was not a fool, nor was he the sort to go hunting after superstitions. Men like Bell didn’t have time for such things. Corn had to be brought in, livestock tended, daughters watched over, sons taught the hard arithmetic of weather and labor. If there were stories told by firelight about witches and wandering spirits, they were stories to make children scoot closer to their mothers and old women cross themselves before bed.

Then one evening John Bell saw something in the fields that didn’t belong to God’s ordinary creation.

The light was going out of the day, that yellow-brown light of autumn that makes every fencepost seem farther away than it is. Bell was out near the corn, checking the rows, maybe thinking of harvest, maybe of debts, maybe of nothing at all. Farmers learn to think and not-think at once. Then he looked up and saw a shape standing still among the stalks.

At first he took it for a dog.

Then for a large one.

Then for no dog he had ever seen.

It had the body of some rangy animal, low and tense, but the head—that was wrong. The head seemed too broad, too unnatural, carrying an expression not of a beast caught trespassing but of something waiting to be recognized. It looked at him with the kind of stillness that sends a cold wire down a man’s back. Bell raised his gun and fired. The creature sprang away, not running so much as vanishing through the rows, taking the last light with it.

He stood there listening to the corn whisper.

Later, he saw something else: a bird perched where no bird should have been, too large by half, its shape malformed in the dusk. Another time, some beast with a rabbit’s body and a dog’s face. Out on lonely land, with the sun gone and the mind eager to finish what shadow begins, a man can tell himself many things. He can call oddity a trick of the eye. He can say the wilderness still keeps species no one has named. He can come home, wash up, eat supper, and leave the strange outside with the boots.

But strange does not always stay outside.

It began with knocks.

A little thing, if you heard it once. A nuisance, if you heard it nightly. Tapping in the walls. A rap at the door when no one stood there. Scratching along the bedposts. The dry rustle of something moving over the floorboards in the dark, just beyond the range of the hearth. There are sounds a house makes in settling, particularly the old houses. Timber contracts. Wind nudges a shutter. Rats carry on in the crawlspace. Yet this was not the speech of wood and weather. This was a deliberate noise. The sort that says, in its own dumb language: I am here.

The Bell household tried reason first. Families always do.

Candles were carried room to room. Doors checked. Floorboards examined. The children questioned. John Bell listened at the walls with a frown deep enough to split stone. His wife, Lucy, prayed harder. Maybe one of the boys was playing tricks. Maybe some drifter had taken up sport with them from outside. Maybe—though no one liked to say it aloud—John Bell’s mind had got hold of that thing in the corn and now heard patterns where none existed.

But the noises grew bolder.

Knocks became poundings. Chains rattled through empty rooms where no chains were kept. Covers were tugged from beds. The children woke screaming that unseen hands had yanked their hair, slapped their faces, pinched their flesh black-and-blue. Candles guttered for no reason. Voices whispered just past the ear, too low to make out at first, like strangers speaking behind a closed church door.

And always, always, the house seemed to know when fear had ripened enough to be harvested.

Of all the Bells, it fixed itself most cruelly on Betsy.

She was young then, on the narrow and treacherous bridge between childhood and womanhood, when the world begins to turn from story into fate. Whatever lived in that house—or around it, or under it, or in the very ground itself—took to her with a kind of ugly fascination. Night after night she was assaulted by what no one could see. Her hair was jerked as if by fists. She was slapped, scratched, stuck with pins that appeared from nowhere. Her cries brought the family running, but all they found was the aftermath: a shaken girl, tangled bedclothes, the room alive with a pressure like thunder trapped indoors.

You can imagine the effect of such things on a family in that time and place.

A haunting is bad enough when it remains private, because private fear can still dress itself as shame. But once neighbors hear, once whispers begin on the road and after church, once visitors come not to help but to witness, then misery changes shape. It becomes spectacle. The Bell farm turned slowly, terribly into a theater no one had built and no one could close.

The neighbors came, first skeptical, then shaken.

Some sat up through the night waiting for fraud to reveal itself, only to hear the blows on the walls, the clink and drag of invisible chains, the mutter of voices in empty air. Others claimed to feel hands brush them where no one stood. Some heard laughter. Some heard scripture recited. A few heard singing—hymns, no less—raised in tones that were by turns mocking, sweet, and blasphemous. It was as if the thing plaguing the Bells understood not only language, but performance. It knew the power of timing. It knew that evil announced plainly is dreadful, yes, but evil that jokes, imitates, and sings is something worse. That is corruption with personality. That is malice educated enough to entertain itself.

Before long the unseen presence began to speak clearly.

It was not at first a full voice, not in the way you hear your wife ask for the salt or your father call from the porch. It emerged from whispers and mutters, from syllables teased out of the dark until they became words. Then sentences. Then arguments. Then commentary. It addressed members of the household by name. It answered questions no one had asked aloud. It repeated conversations after hearing them once. It mocked prayers while quoting scripture. It sang hymns in the dead of night with perfect recall and poisonous intention, as if sacred music itself were a toy it could take apart and rebuild with rotten fingers.

And in time, when pressed as to what it was, it gave itself a name.

Kate.

Not a grand infernal title. Not the roaring declaration of some demon prince. Just Kate. Which somehow made it worse. Something familiar. Human. Domestic. The sort of name that might belong to a widow down the road or a woman selling preserves. That’s one of the oldest tricks in horror: the thing in the dark tells you its name and the name sounds ordinary enough to trust. But ordinary names can carry extraordinary hatred.

It claimed to be a witch.

More than that, it claimed purpose. It had not drifted there by chance, nor was it merely haunting a spot. It was there, it said, to torment the Bell family—especially John Bell and Betsy. Why? Depending on who told the tale, the reasons varied: old grudges, curses, offended pride, some trespass in property or spirit. Folk stories breed explanations the way wet wood breeds fungus. But all such explanations share one root need: if you can say why evil has come, then maybe you can bargain with it, outwit it, repent of whatever invited it in.

The Bells, like all afflicted people, wanted a rule to the nightmare. Instead, they found only appetite.

A House That Learned to Speak

What happened next is where the story stops behaving like a ghost tale and starts feeling like a fever dream shared by a whole community.

Most hauntings, at least the ones folks can stomach talking about after supper, stay in the realm of sound and suggestion: footsteps in an attic, a pale woman on a staircase, a chill in a room where no draft should be. The Bell haunting didn’t know when to quit. It escalated the way a disease does when the body fails to throw it off.

The voice called Kate became a constant in the Bell home.

It didn’t merely cry out from corners or mutter from under the bed. It conversed. It interrupted. It sang. Sometimes it sounded near the ceiling; sometimes beneath the floor. Sometimes it seemed to come from the fireplace, or out beyond the yard, or from the very center of the room where no body stood to make such sounds. If one person had heard it, that might be madness. If two had heard it, hysteria. But many heard it. Families from neighboring farms. Travelers. Men who came in grinning and left with their skin the color of candle wax.

The voice displayed memory, and memory is one of the true signatures of terror. A bump in the night can be dismissed. A moan in the hall can be blamed on wind. But a thing that remembers what you said yesterday and throws it back at you tomorrow has crossed from nuisance into intelligence. Kate remembered verses of scripture after a single hearing. It repeated sermons delivered miles away. It named private sins. It gossiped. It insulted. It praised one person and humiliated another, as if sorting the world into categories only it understood.

There are accounts that it fed on attention, and I believe that in the way one believes fire feeds on air. The more people came, the more elaborate the manifestations became. A skeptic would demand proof, and some fresh outrage would break loose in answer: slaps falling on Betsy from invisible hands, the bedstead shuddering, laughter skittering through the rafters. You can almost feel the atmosphere of those nights if you try—the cramped room smelling of sweat, wool, tallow smoke, damp wood; the visitors all pretending bravery because no one wants to be first to admit fear; the family hollow-eyed from sleeplessness; and over everything that unbearable waiting, that sense of the room drawing a breath.

Then a voice from nowhere says your name.

There’s a special kind of helplessness in being mocked by what you cannot strike.

John Bell, by all reports, grew worn down under it. The entity harried him with particular spite. If Betsy was the plaything, John was the target. There are legends that his tongue swelled, that he suffered strange spells—facial twitching, difficulty swallowing, bouts of weakness that no doctor could account for. Whether these symptoms came from age, illness, stress, poison, or all woven together by retelling, the important truth is this: the haunting settled on him like a hand around the throat. In public and private, the voice abused him. It called him old Jack Bell. It promised his end.

And if a thing says often enough that it means to kill you, every pain begins to feel like proof.

The attacks on Betsy were no less cruel for being less final. She was struck in front of witnesses. Hands that no one could see left welts and bruises. Pins pricked her flesh. Her hair was twisted and yanked. She was made to cry out before neighbors and relatives alike, the humiliation of it folded into the injury. There’s a meanness in that beyond simple violence. The thing wanted suffering to be seen. Wanted the family’s distress displayed and validated. Wanted, perhaps, an audience.

That audience came in droves.

Soon the Bell farm was spoken of far beyond Adams. Stories traveled the way all durable stories do: on wagon seats, in taverns, at campfires, in churchyards, from cousin to cousin and county to county until fact wore folklore’s coat and no man could say where one ended and the other began. Some came in pious concern. Some in disbelief. Some because every generation has its thrill-seekers, men and women willing to sidle up to damnation so long as they can return home with a good tale.

Not all left with one they enjoyed telling.

There are stories of visitors being slapped, cursed, or chased. Of the voice exposing hidden scandals and private sins in front of assembled company. Imagine that in a rural community where reputation was nearly a second skin. Imagine showing up to prove a family of frightened neighbors were frauds, only to hear a bodiless voice discuss your secrets in a room full of witnesses. A haunting can bruise the flesh, yes—but shame can flay deeper.

And still the voice sang.

The hymns may be the detail that clings hardest. There is something almost unbearable in the image of a malicious intelligence taking up sacred songs. Maybe because hymns are communal by nature—they bind a congregation, a family, a people to one another and to God. To hear them turned uncanny, to hear devotion spoken in the mouth of mockery, is to feel not merely fear but violation. It says: what you love, I can use. What comforts you, I can corrupt. Your very language of salvation belongs to me if I choose to borrow it.

Some nights the voice was playful. Some nights wrathful. Some nights it sounded eerily maternal, almost tender, before veering sharp as broken glass. That inconsistency made it harder to resist. Men can brace against a storm if they know it is a storm; they board windows and wait. But what defense is there against something mercurial? Something that laughs one hour and curses the next, then recites scripture with the exact intonation of your pastor before ending the performance by striking your daughter across the face?

You can call such a thing ghost, demon, witch, poltergeist, fraud, shared delusion, folk fever. The labels matter less than the effect. The Bell family was living in a reality they could not control and could not reliably explain. That is one definition of hell.

And in the middle of this carnival of dread, one story arrived like a rider out of another, larger American legend.

Andrew Jackson, not yet president but already a figure swollen with myth, was said to have heard of the Bell disturbances and decided to see the matter for himself.

Of course he did. Men like Jackson are drawn to challenge the way lightning is drawn to steeples. Whether from bravado, curiosity, vanity, or a real wish to expose nonsense, he supposedly made his way toward the Bell property with companions, horses, and all the skeptical swagger a military man can muster. The details vary in the telling, but the heart of the story remains fixed: before the party reached the house, their wagon became inexplicably stuck. Not mired in ordinary mud. Not broken in any visible way. Simply held fast, as though giant hands beneath the earth had taken hold of the wheels.

Jackson and his men strained, cursed, checked the harness, examined the ruts. Nothing explained it. Then from the surrounding air came a voice—thin, amused, unmistakably inhuman in the way all too-human things can become when heard in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The witch, it said, would see General Jackson that evening.

At once, according to legend, the wagon moved again.

That kind of story survives because it gives the haunting what all enduring monsters eventually acquire: a famous witness. It yokes local terror to national mythology. It says this wasn’t merely some country tale told by people with too much darkness and not enough schooling. Even Andrew Jackson came. Even he heard. Even he, by some versions, spent a night under that roof and left in the morning saying he’d rather fight the British at New Orleans again than face the Bell Witch once more.

True? Maybe. Maybe not. But legends do not survive on proof. They survive on fitness. This one fits because it enlarges the haunting in exactly the right way. It declares that force of personality, military courage, and political ambition meant nothing before whatever had taken up residence on the Bell farm. The unseen mocked not only a family, but power itself.

And if power can be mocked, what chance has an ordinary man?

Kate

By now, if you were living nearby, you’d have stopped asking whether the Bell place was haunted and started asking what, exactly, had come there.

That’s the old human itch, the one that makes us name storms and classify diseases and build cabinets full of labeled bones. A thing with no category can grow too large in the mind. So people circled the matter with terms they understood best. Witch. Spirit. Familiar. Demon. Curse. But the entity preferred its own introduction.

Kate.

She—if she was a she—did not present herself as a drifting dead soul bound to unfinished business. There was no sobbing widow in a white gown, no child crying from a dry well. This intelligence had motive. It had wit. It had likes and dislikes. It favored some visitors, tormented others, and seemed to relish disagreement the way a cat relishes a crippled mouse. At times it even behaved like a gossiping neighbor invisible to the eye yet somehow present in every room.

That may be what made the Bell Witch so durable in American folklore. A lot of spirits are scary. Few have personality. Fewer still have personality mean enough to feel alive.

It is said Kate spoke of events happening miles away and later proved correct. She repeated sermons preached at distant churches. She knew when family members thought one thing and said another. Whether this was theatrical ventriloquism, pious exaggeration, psychic projection, or some less comfortable possibility depends on what shelf you want to put the story on. But every shelf leads to the same emotional truth: those who encountered the voice felt watched at a depth no human watching reaches.

To be seen by another person is ordinary. To be known by another person is intimate. To be known by something you cannot see and cannot bar from the house is annihilating.

Betsy suffered under that knowledge perhaps most of all. Young women in old stories are often made vessels for communal anxiety, and there’s no use pretending the Bell case escapes that pattern. Here was a daughter approaching marriageable age, living under the eye of an entity determined to intervene in the most private shaping forces of her life. According to legend, Betsy had a suitor, Joshua Gardner, and the witch despised him. Torments increased around any talk of courtship. The voice needled, mocked, and interfered until the relationship withered under the strain.

Think what that means in practical terms. A young woman on a frontier farm has little enough control over her future as it is. Marriage can be escape, duty, burden, comfort, or all four. Then an invisible intelligence enters the house and takes an active interest in sabotaging the match. The haunting no longer concerns only fear at bedtime or the household’s reputation. It reaches into fate itself. It says: I will decide what becomes of you.

Stories differ on whether Betsy eventually yielded in despair or conviction, but the old versions say the engagement was broken. If so, then the witch won not just screams and bruises but the power to rewrite a life.

As for John Bell, the pressure on him deepened into a kind of campaign.

He reportedly suffered increasing illness, and the entity commented on it with a hideous familiarity. It threatened him openly. It claimed responsibility for his suffering before the end had even arrived. One can imagine the atmosphere in that house as John worsened: medicine bottles on a table, anxious whispering, the smell of sickness and woodsmoke, every cough freighted with dread because was this merely disease, or was the thing making good on its promise?

Then came the death.

There are few details in American folklore more chilling than the little bottle.

As the story is told, John Bell was found one morning in worsening condition, unable to speak properly, and a vial of strange liquid turned up where his medicine should have been. The family did not recognize it. The entity, however, was delighted. It announced that it had given old Jack Bell a dose during the night. To test the liquid, some say it was administered to a cat, which promptly died. Soon after, John Bell himself was dead.

Imagine that room.

Imagine being a son or daughter or wife standing there while an unseen voice crows over the death of the man of the house. Imagine grief trying to take shape in the middle of supernatural theater. There are tragedies that allow a family solemnity. This was not one. If the legend is true even in outline, then mourning was invaded by performance, sorrow by spectacle, death by taunting.

At John Bell’s funeral, the witch was said to sing.

That detail would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible. A bodiless singer making merry over a coffin. The sacred turned carnival once again. The old order mocked before the whole community.

And this is where the Bell Witch crosses from haunting into accusation. American ghost stories are thick as flies around murder, betrayal, lost love, unmarked graves. But only a handful place a death squarely at the feet of the supernatural. The Bell legend does. It doesn’t merely say a family was frightened. It says a force entered their lives, targeted a man, announced its intention, and saw him dead. In a nation that likes to explain itself through practical causes, that claim has tremendous staying power. Murder by poison is intimate. Murder by ghost is intimate and impossible at once. It lodges in the imagination because it violates two orders of belief: domestic safety and natural law.

Was there poison? Was there some hidden hand, entirely human? Did illness and panic gather around coincidence until coincidence became legend? Maybe. Folklore is a machine that grinds rough events into memorable shapes. But legend does not persist for two centuries merely because it is odd. It persists because it touches a nerve that remains tender.

The Bell Witch touches several.

It speaks to the fear that home, the place built to keep wilderness and chaos out, may itself turn traitor. It speaks to the fear of being mocked by what harms you. It speaks to the fear that evil is not only destructive but clever. And maybe most of all, it speaks to the old Calvinist dread still buried deep in the American grain: the suspicion that one may be chosen not for blessing but for visitation.

After John Bell’s death, the disturbances were said to lessen, then fade. Kate reportedly announced she was leaving but would return in seven years. In some versions she did, briefly, to speak with John Bell Jr. and utter prophecies about the future. In others she wandered off into the wider folklore of the region, becoming attached to the cave, the property, the darkness itself. Once a haunting reaches that stage, it stops being an event and becomes a weather system in the culture. It can rain anywhere.

And maybe that’s fitting. Because by then the Bell Witch no longer belonged to the Bells alone. It belonged to Tennessee. It belonged to the American appetite for a story that cannot be pinned flat. It belonged to every traveler who heard the tale and added one more detail for flavor or emphasis. It belonged to every campfire where a child asked, “Was it real?” and no one gave quite the same answer.

The truest answer, maybe, is this: it became real enough.

The Cave, the Road, and What Waits

Legends, if they’re strong enough, root themselves into geography.

They stop being stories about what happened once and become stories about where it can still happen. That’s how a cave becomes more than a cave. How a field holds twilight differently from neighboring fields. How a little Tennessee town can carry the weight of a two-hundred-year-old whisper and still feel it rustling under the skin of the present.

Adams remains tied to the Bell Witch the way certain families remain tied to a scandal no one alive remembers firsthand. The connection outlives proof. It seeps into local business, roadside signs, tour talk, schoolyard dares, and the private calculations people make when they find themselves out after dark and farther from porchlight than they intended to be. Some laugh it off. Some monetize it. Some roll their eyes and still don’t quite like driving that stretch of road alone at midnight. Folklore and commerce make strange bedfellows, but fear has always paid rent where curiosity moved in first.

Then there is the Bell Witch Cave.

Caves are unfair places to begin with. They do half the work of haunting on their own. A cave is the earth admitting it has an inside. It is mouth, wound, tomb, and passage all at once. You step in and the temperature drops; your own breath comes back to you altered; every drip of water sounds like a footfall delayed by time itself. Even a child knows a cave is where ordinary rules loosen. Light doesn’t belong there. Direction doesn’t belong there. Your body understands this before your mind can phrase it.

So when a legend as nasty as the Bell Witch seeks a final roost in the public imagination, of course it chooses the cave.

Visitors come because they want to feel something. That’s the plain truth beneath all heritage tourism and ghost walks. They want the prickling scalp, the sudden cold, the irrational certainty that they are not alone. Maybe they come with cameras and skeptical smiles. Maybe with Bibles. Maybe with little jokes ready on the tongue because joking is one of the oldest anti-fear medicines known to man. They go down where the rock sweats and the dark pools thick and heavy, and they listen.

What do they hear?

Usually what caves give everyone: water, echo, their own blood in the ear.

Sometimes more.

A whisper. A name. A laugh they can’t source. A touch of moving air where none should be. Enough, at any rate, that some emerge chuckling too loudly and some emerge pale. Whether the cave is truly haunted is almost beside the point now. It has become a vessel prepared in advance by legend, and human beings are creatures who pour expectation into such vessels until expectation itself acquires shape. Yet once in a while—and here’s where the old stories keep a foothold—someone comes out with an experience too odd, too well-timed, too personally aimed to be shrugged away without effort.

That’s how these things survive: one fresh testimony at a time.

Maybe a woman hears a hymn under her breath when no one nearby is singing. Maybe a man who has spent the whole tour mocking the tale feels fingers at the back of his neck and turns to empty stone. Maybe a child asks on the drive home who the lady named Kate was, though no one spoke the name aloud in the cave that day. Are these proof? No. They’re tinder. And the Bell Witch legend has never lacked for sparks.

What makes the whole affair endure is not just its violence or weirdness, though it has plenty of both. It endures because it sits at the crossroads of several very American roads: frontier hardship, evangelical religion, family honor, celebrity witness, suspicious death, and the entertainment value of terror. It has all the ingredients of a myth sturdy enough to be retold in every age using the fears of that age.

In one century it is a witch.
In another a poltergeist.
In another trauma, repression, fraud, or collective psychosis.
In another still it becomes content, attraction, brand.

But peel those layers back and the old core remains.

A family in an isolated place begins hearing things in the walls.
A father sees something impossible in the field.
A daughter is abused by unseen hands.
A voice enters the house and will not leave.
It names itself.
It wants.
It hates.
It kills.

That shape is ancient. It goes right down to the bedrock of human fear.

The modern world likes to imagine itself beyond such stories, but that’s vanity talking. We still jump when the house settles wrong at 2 a.m. We still feel a primitive revulsion when a voice calls our name from another room and no one is there. We still suspect, in our least guarded moments, that intelligence might exist without flesh and that not all intelligence wishes us well. Technology changes. Wiring improves. Psychology gives us better dictionaries for distress. But put a person in the dark with an unexplained sound and watch how quickly the old brain lights up.

That old brain is why Adams still matters.

People go there because they want contact with the unresolved. They want one foot in history and one in nightmare. They want to stand where generations before them stood and ask the same impossible question: What really happened here?

There is no final answer, and perhaps that is the legend’s most diabolical trait. If the Bell haunting were cleanly debunked, it would die. If it were scientifically proven, it would become something else—less folklore than specimen. But suspended between belief and disbelief, it remains alive. It reproduces in uncertainty.

And there is another reason the story doesn’t loosen its grip.

At its heart lies a possibility too ugly to dismiss and too shapeless to prosecute: that evil can enter a household not as a single blow, but as a campaign of humiliation. A drip, a knock, a whisper, a bruise, a joke at your expense, a secret made public, a night without sleep, another and another, until your certainty erodes and your home no longer feels like yours. Anyone who has lived under sustained cruelty—whether from person, circumstance, illness, or memory—understands that rhythm. That is what makes the Bell Witch more than a period piece. The supernatural trimmings may change with the teller, but the underlying architecture of torment remains recognizable.

So yes, maybe it was folklore.
Maybe hysteria.
Maybe fraud wrapped around private malice.
Maybe a haunting.

Or maybe all great ghost stories are true in the same way nightmares are true: not because the monster can be photographed in daylight, but because the fear it embodies already lives in us, waiting for a voice, a house, a name.

In Adams, Tennessee, they gave that name Kate.

And if you go there—if you take the road out when evening leans over the fields and the trees begin stitching shadow to shadow—you might find yourself listening harder than you mean to. The cave will be there, breathing its mineral breath. The land will lie quiet in the old way, the patient way. Crickets will rasp. Gravel will crunch under your feet. Maybe the stories will seem silly then, thinned by daylight and commerce and the ordinary mechanics of tourism.

But stay a little longer.

Wait until the sun drains out of the sky and the dark gathers in the low places.
Wait until conversation falters.
Wait until you hear some small, deliberate sound where no sound ought to be.

A knock.

A chain dragged softly over stone.

A woman’s voice, perhaps far off, perhaps close as your own pulse, lifting a hymn as sweet as church and as wrong as grave dirt under the tongue.

Then tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself.

Tell yourself it was wind in a seam of rock.
Tell yourself some guide planted speakers.
Tell yourself all legends train the ear toward tricks.
Tell yourself John Bell was sick, Betsy was troubled, neighbors were suggestible, and Andrew Jackson probably had better things to do.

Tell yourself the dark is only dark.

And if, while you’re telling yourself these things, something in that darkness laughs low and pleased—as if it has heard every explanation before and enjoys them all—then do what people have always done in the presence of the unknowable.

Go very still.

And listen.