Bella is based on a real historical event, which over the years has become mythologized. All that we know for certain is as follows. In 1943 four boys discovered a woman’s skeletal remains, wedged inside the hollow trunk of a wych elm in Hagley Wood. Some time later messages began to appear in the local area, written in chalk. Over and over they posed the same question: Who put Bella in the Wych Elm? This is the compost from which the novel derives its nourishment. Like the g