In the early 1800s, after John Bell shoots at a strange animal in his cornfield near Tennessee's Red River, he and his family fall victim to malicious attacks by an entity called the Bell Witch.

"National Humanities Medal recipient and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize David Levering Lewis's own family history that shifts our understanding of the larger American story Sitting beneath a stained-glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, it struck Lewis that he knew very little about those ancestors. And so, in his mid-80s, the esteemed historian began to excavate their...