we have no record of mary beth 's ever explaining this strange statement we are told only that she made it to a laundress named mildred collins , and to an irish maid named patricia devlin , and we received the stories third-hand we were further given to understand that there was no agreement among the descendants of these two women as to what the famous miss mary beth meant by this comment one person believed 'the man ' to be the devil , and another that he was 'a ghost ' who had haunted the family for hundreds of years .