When it comes to talking about the evil spirits, we tend to avoid it. Even in today’s technology driven world, the reality about ghosts remains a mystery. But human beings have always been inquisitive. Harry Prince spent 40 years in unravelling the mystery about ghosts. Spirits’ photographer tried their best to substantiate the facts, but some progressed with little success.
In fact, all efforts have been unsuccessful. Often people who claim to have seen a ghost are labelled as fraud or unpractical. Science has totally ignored the existence of\ ghosts. Yet, the phenomenon exists and is as true as our reflection in the mirror.
A young English lady had come to India with her husband. Early in the morning on March 19, 1917, she was dressing her little baby. Suddenly she felt the urge to look behind her. When she did, she was amazed to see her pilot brother standing there. She thought that he had been posted to India. She was so excited that she moved forward to greet him. But then suddenly she realized that in doing so her infant would fall from the bed. So she turned back towards her baby and assured the baby was safe. As she turned towards her brother, there was no one at that time. Her brother was nowhere to be seen. A few hours later, she learnt the shocking news. Her brother had been killed in an air battle.
In 1869, a woman in Italy saw the body of her mother. The woman was upset by the sight. She immediately penned down a letter to her mother. Soon she got the news that her dear mother had passed away sometime back and was buried on the same day when she (the daughter) had the vision.
These are not mere stories. And these two are not the only cases. There are innumerable such cases. But what do such stories convey? How should a contemporary mind comprehend these cases? Did the two ladies in the above stories saw ghosts? If yes, then what do we mean when we say the word ‘ghost’? These and many other intriguing questions haunt people now-a-days.
Surprisingly, of all the sciences only psychology has given a justified expression. According to psychiatry, ghosts are the result of unfulfilled wishes, guilts and some of our far-fetched imaginations. Accordingly, it is not improbable when a lonely widow sees an image of her dead husband or loving daughter or a son sees an image of a dead parent.
But this explanation has some inhibitions, i.e. How can one rationalize ‘seeing’ of an unknown person.
Margaret Sheridan was a child when she had her first encounter with a ghost. She had gone to stay at Frampton estate with her mother and brother. They awaited the news of their father, who was a British Army Officer. He was serving at the German front in the World War I. In the evening, when Margaret was coming down to the drawing room, she met a little boy on the stairs. Recollecting the incident, Margaret later wrote, “He was wearing a white sailor suit with a round straw hat on back of his head. He looked at me as I looked at him. We passed each other without a word. Nanny had always taught me never to speak with strangers; I assumed, nevertheless, that he had come to play with me. As soon as I got into the drawing room, I announced with shrill anticipation, ‘I saw a natty sailor boy’. An ashen silence followed. I came to know much later that the Sailor boy was a visitor of ill-omen in the Sheridan family. In reality, he was an ancestor who had been drowned at sea as a midshipman. He appeared at Frompton before the death of the heir. The strange part was that the portrait of him was that of young man of sixteen or seventeen, yet what I saw, and saw clearly, was a child of about my own age.”
The possible reason for Sheridan’s apparition is based on the theory about the recent controversial subject of telepathy. According to this theory, the reason for the child visualization was due to her mother or grandmother or perhaps both. The whole Sheridan family feared the dreaded superstition but tried their best to hide it. And in their effort to suppress the fear, they succeeded in passing on the myth to an impressionable child. She (Margaret) then inadvertently transformed the sailor into a child, a child of her own age. But the climax of the whole episode still remains a mystery, i.e. how did the heir die?
In similar content, telepathy has explained another amazing incident which occurred in 1964. In an automobile plant in Detroit, a motor ftter was working on an assembly line. Suddenly a big piece of machinery which was accidentally set in motion started to fall on him. He was too shocked to say or do anything. Suddenly, as he recollected later on, a tall black man with a scarred face pushed him to safety. But when he turned around to express gratitude, the other man was nowhere to be seen. Moreover, he had never seen the mysterious man in the plant earlier. But some of the older workers had seen the rescuer. According to them, he was the worker who had been decapitated twenty years ago while working on the same section of the plant.
The followers of the telepathic theory believe that the older worker who had witnessed the misfortune of the earlier worker must have explained the problem of the earlier victim to the ftter who was removed out of danger. However, doubt remains about the ftter’s conviction that he saw the man and was saved by somebody else. The ftter confdently recalled that his rescuer had “enormous strength and just pushed me out of the way as if weigh few ponds.”
There are innumerable such stories. And the reason for such beliefs is still untraced. In fact, to explain the reason for such encounters is itself an arduous task. One explanation could be that it is the soul’s final visit to distant loved one. It can also be a form of telepathy. Amidst such vagarities, the most scientific (If it could be called scientific!) explanation is that it is the unconscious mind’s response to loneliness and worry marked by bizarre coincidence. Yet even this explanation has its limitations. Nevertheless, the role of mind in such encounter cannot be under-estimated.
One of the most rare strange exchange of mind and circumstances occurred in the early 19th century in the United States. For four years, a prosperous farmer and his family in Tennesse were tormented by wicked force which came to be known as the Bell Witch.
The traumatic experience began with a series of unrelated sights. One day the head of the family, John Bell, noticed a peculiar looking dog in his cornfield. He shot at it. But when he went to see the animal, he could not find it. A few days after this incident, John Bell was walking along with his two sons. They saw a unique bird. John Bell shot at it, but when the boys rushed to pick up the bird, they saw nothing. Later Bell’s youngest daughter, Betsy Bell saw a young girl near the same tree. But when she approached near that tree to talk to her, Betsy could not find her.
In addition to these vents, the family often experienced the rattling of windows, tapping at the door, continuous stepping on the foor and often the growling of two dogs.
These incidents were followed by the family members being attacked by some ghostly hands while sleeping. There here times when were removed from their body and children’s hair were pulled in the dark. Betsy Bell was the most priced victim. At night, she was often heard shrieking and screaming.
The attacks on Betsy turned frequent. She often complained of being suffocated, suffered from fits, spoke of feeling pricks of pins and needles all over her body and once vomitted a stream of sharp objects. The Bell’s family members were terrified. Exorcists and spiritualists focked to town. Questions were put to the unseen ‘person’, commonly referred as witch. First the unseen force rolled out indistinct answers to questions. Then it started whistling and whispering, it refused to answer the direct questions and later on turned offensive. It became impossible to detect the purpose of the witch.
However, the witch was kind towards Betsy’s mother but Betsy and her father, John Bell, were the favourite victims of the witch.
But soon, the witch turned its full attention on Betsy’s father. His tongue swelled up so much that he neither eat nor talk. His face changed. He was tormented to an extent he had to quit working. He was put to bed and never got up again. He went in to coma. The doctor was called in and to his surprise, he noticed a vial of liquid among his other medicines. When asked, the witch replied, “I have produced the mixture and fed some to Bell during the night which fixed him.” To test the substance, it was given to a cat. The cat tossed and turned for sometime before finally collapsing. John Bell also died the next morning. The witch still did not moved a way with this death. Betsy Bell, who was 16 years’ old was about to marry a young man when the witch imposed upon her not to marry that man. Finally she called off her wedding and married another man who died soon. Betsy never married again. She remained a widow till her death in 1890, at the age of 86. After this incident, the witch disappeared.
The sufferings of the Bell family became the focus of many psychologists. Everybody believed in the existence of the unforeseen phenomena, but nobody could analyse the reasons for it.
The post-Freudian world analysed the phenomena in detail. Nandor Fodor, a psychoanalyst studied the case in detail. He said the symptoms of Betsy – swooning, fainting, dizzy spells, were those experienced by someone who is leaving the conscious self behind. In other words, someone entering a trance mode. While the symptoms of John Bell, i.e. inability to eat or speak and withdrawal from all normal activities were associated with the feeling of guilt. On the other hand, he explained the behaviour of Bell Witch as malicious but at the same time, very kind towards Lucy Bell. As the behaviour of the witch was not uniform toward the family members, he analysed the psychological factors of Betsy Bell and John Bell extensively. Fodor came to the conclusion that Betsy Bell’s behaviour was the result of her intense hatred for father – John Bell, who might have ruined the father–daughter relationship by his sexual advances. As result, Betsy alone was incapable of dealing with the situation and subsequently her personality split into two she and the “girl in the green dress swinging from the oak tree”. And it is this latter part of her self, which gathered courage to attack her father.
This was the psychological version of the Bell Witch. And it was impossible to agree or disagree with Fodor because of the remote possibility of ever proving it after al lapse of century and a half of that incident. In any case, the subject of ghosts is difficult to dissect. Hence, the theory of Fodor remains ambiguous till this day. At the most, we can only suppose that ghost are the familiar forms of our deepest wishes and fears, of our dreams and perhaps something beyond human comprehension.
In conclusion, one can say that ghosts should be accepted as one accepts fre, a somewhat mysterious phenomenon. For if one is explained about fre, what can one say? Perhaps, it is an event rather than a thing or al creature. Similarly, explains Robert Graves, (one who claimed that he saw the ghost of young Private Challoner) “Ghosts seem to be event rather than things or creatures.”
