A young English lady had come to India with her husband. Early in the
morning on March 19,1917, she was
dressing up her little baby. Suddenly she felt the urge to look behind her. She
did so. 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 took some steps to greet him. But then suddenly she
realized that her infant would fall down from the bed. So she turned back
towards her baby and when saw him sitting safely, she again turned towards her brother. But there was no one at this
time. Her brother was gone. Thinking that her brother was playing hide and seek with her, she searched the whole
house. But he was nowhere to be located. Exhausted,she sat down disheartened. 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
wrote down a letter to her mother.
By return post 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 arrive at? How should a modern mind comprehend these cases ?
Did the two ladies in the above stories see ghosts ? If yes, then what do we mean
when we say the word ghost ? These
and many other intriguing questions haunt a modern mind.
Surprisingly, of all the sciences,
only psychiatry has seemingly given
an understandable answer. According to psychiatry,
ghosts are signs of unfulfilled wishes,
guilts and of far-fetched imaginations. Accordingly, it is not improbable
when a lonely widow sees an image of her dead husband or a loving daughter or a
son sees an image of a dead parent. But this explanation has shortcomings. For
how can one rationalise the 'seeing' of an unknown person. Margaret Sheridan was just 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 were to await the news of
their father, who was a British Army
Officer. He was serving at the German
front in 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 the
back of his head. He looked at me, and I looked at him. We passed each other
without a word. Nanny had always
impressed upon me that I must never speak to strangers; I assumed,
nevertheless, that he had come to play with me. 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 life he was
an ancestor who had been drowned at sea as a midshipman. He appeared at
Frompton only before the death of the heir. The strange part was that the
portrait of him was that of a young man of sixteen or seventeen, yet what I saw
- and saw clearly - was a child of about my own age.
Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, Abraham Lincoln.
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 Margaret's visualization was due to
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. Margaret then inadvertently
transformed the sailor into a child, a child of her own age. So much is
understandable from the science of telepathy. But the climax of the whole
episode still remains a mystery i.e. how did the heir die? In similar fashion,telepathy
has explained another amazing incident, which occurred in 1964. In an automobile plant in Detroit, a motor fitter 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 20 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
conveyed the predicament of the earlier victim to the fitter who was removed
out of danger. However, doubt remains about the fitter's conviction that he saw
the man and was saved by somebody else. The fitter confidently recalled that
his rescuer had "enormous strength and just pushed me out of the way as if
I were of featherweight." There are innumerable such stories. And the
reason for most such beliefs or sightings go un traced. 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
a far off loved one. It can also be a form of telepathy. Amidst such conjectures, the most 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
encounters cannot be underestimated.
Surprisingly, till now, one of the
most astonishing manifestations of the 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 a wicked force which came to be known as
the Bell Witch.
An artist's sketching of the Bell home, originally published in 1894
The traumatic experience began with a series of seemingly 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 collect the animal, he could find no trace of 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. A few days
afterwards. 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 found no one. In addition to these events, the family often experienced the rattling
of windows, a tapping at the door, continuous clawing on the floor and often
the growling of two dogs.
An artist's drawing of Betsy Bell, originally published in 1894
These incidents were followed by
the family members being attacked by some unforeseen hands while sleeping.
Often covers were removed from their body and children's hair were pulled up in
the dark. Betsy Bell was the most
priced victim. At night she was often heard shrieking and screaming.
The attacks on Betsy became frequent. She often complained of being suffocated,
suffered from fainting fits , spoke
of feeling 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 flocked to the town. Questions were put to the unseen 'person', commonly called witch. First the unseen force rapped
out indistinct answers to questions, then it started whistling and whispering,
it refused to answer the direct questions and later on became offensive. It
became impossible to detect the purpose of the witch.
Witch was kind towards Betsy's
mother but Betsy and her father/John Bell, were the favourite
victims of the witch.
Gradually, the witch turned its full attention on Betsy's father. His tongue swelled up to such a sight that he could
neither eat nor talk. His face changed. He was tormented so much that finally
he had to stop working. He was put to bed and never got up again. He went into 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, "1 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 did not go away with this death.
Betsy Bell, who was of 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 after. 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 psychologists. Everybody believed in
the existence of the phenomena, but nobody could analyse the reasons for it.
Signs at the entrance to the Bell Witch Cave promote ghost tourism in Adams, Tennessee
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. 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 harmed the father
- daughter relationship by his sexual advances . As a 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 a
lapse of a century and a half of that incident. In any case the subject of
ghosts is a difficult topic to dissect. Hence, the theory of Fodor remains
ambiguous till this day. At the most ,we can only suppose that ghosts 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 fire, a somewhat mysterious phenomenon. For
if one is to explain about fire, what can one say? Perhaps, that it is an event
rather than a thing or a creature. Similarly, explains Robert Graves, (one who claimed that he saw the ghost of young
Private Challoner) "Ghosts seem to be events rather than things or
creatures."
Courtesy :- World Famous unsolved Mysteries by Abhay Kumar Dubey , Wikipedia
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