The Unsolved Mystery of Haunted People

The sufferings of the Bell family became the focus of psychologists. Everybody believed in the existence of the phenomena, but nobody could analyze the reasons for it.

The post-Freudian world analyzed the phenomenon 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 the 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 behavior of Bell Witch as malicious but at the same time very kind towards Lucy Bell. As the behavior of the witch was not uniform toward the family members, he analyzed the psychological factors of Betsy Bell and John Bell extensively. Fodor came to the conclusion that Betsy Bell’s behavior was the result of her intense hatred for her father – John Bell, who might have harmed the father-daughter relationship by his sexual advances or by some form of incestuous relationship. As a result, Betsy alone was not capable 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 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 the 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.”