Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  We should hover over this fact for a good, long while. We are, each and every one of us, just trying to get from day to day as best we can, with as little pain as possible. In this deep and abiding similarity, we each fight to maintain our worldviews. And we become irrational in various areas of life, from the paranormal to politics. In the year after President Barack Obama’s election, in fact, polls were conducted that showed both Democrats and Republicans held withering opinions of each other’s presidents. Big chunks of the Democratic electorate believed George W. Bush had some foreknowledge of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and allowed them to happen. An even higher percentage of Republicans believed Obama to be a socialist, questioned his citizenship, and wanted to see him impeached. Nevermind the facts. When someone advances an idea inconsistent with our own worldview, we don’t just disagree—we start painting a mental picture of the person we oppose as somehow deficient, all higgledy-piggledy in the temporal lobes, perhaps, or just an outright villain.

  And the beat goes on.

  Just as I was finishing this manuscript, a study was released in which a small correlation was found between elevated carbon dioxide levels and the occurrence of NDEs. The study sparked headlines of the “NDEs Explained” variety. But anyone who has reviewed the literature can immediately recognize this research as a total outlier. Number one, the sample size was just eleven people, and their CO2 levels were only slightly elevated—in fact, scuba divers can have similar carbon dioxide levels, but they don’t go around claiming they swam their way to God. More important, numerous studies had already found that there is no apparent link between an NDE and heightened levels of carbon dioxide.

  Jeff Wise, a science reporter for Psychology Today, was among those who wrote enthusiastically about this new carbon dioxide study, claiming it as an explanation for the NDE. Alex Tsakiris invited him on his podcast, Skeptiko, to discuss why he granted so much authority to research with so little actual weight. For the most part, the discussion was completely cordial. But toward the end, after Tsakiris had gently schooled Wise for about twenty minutes, the reporter broke in with a question of his own. “Are you,” he asked Tsakiris, “a creationist?”

  His implication was clear: anyone arguing that the NDE remains unexplained must not believe in evolution, must be anti-science. And that pretty much captures the tenor of the debate between believers and skeptics, each side harboring ill opinions of the other, each side making strange assumptions about the other’s beliefs.

  Elisabeth Kübler-Ross made history by initially avoiding such debates altogether. But before long, she would be drawn into them. And the personal consequences she suffered were tremendous.

  WHEN ON DEATH AND DYING was published, the changes in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s life came quickly. She had written an unlikely bestseller, a book that became, seemingly overnight, part of the canon of course work for medical and nursing students; and, she reached the people who watched loved ones die in a soulless, dehumanizing fashion. Everyone wanted a piece of her. And in time, she visited nearly every continent and received twenty honorary degrees.

  Her son Ken remembers the biggest change came in the form of a giant U.S. Postal Service sack that arrived every few days, bearing hundreds of letters. “My mother thought it was important to respond to every letter, personally,” he said. “I didn’t feel abandoned. She took me on trips with her when I was out of school. But it was different. She tried to do all the things we did before, and called us on the phone every night when she was gone.”

  Speaking to Ken Ross, I can’t help but notice that his normally ebullient tone drops an octave when he talks about those days. Kübler-Ross’s sudden, international celebrity created a massive strain on her marriage. And she had also developed a kind of paranormal problem. She didn’t publish her own experiences with NDEs in On Death and Dying. But she kept working at the bedsides of the sick, and strange events did not seem to leave her be. Less than two years later, in fact, she had her strangest experience of all, which she documents in Wheel of Life.

  The constant lectures, seminars, and out of town speaking engagements, the hours spent attending to the dying, had worn her down. She was considering giving up the work.

  She stood in the Chicago hospital where she became famous, talking to a colleague, when she noticed a woman near the bank of elevators. Kübler-Ross had been deep in thought. But this woman caught her attention. She thought she had seen her, somewhere, before. Then she noticed something alarming.

  The woman was semi-transparent.

  After Kübler-Ross ended the conversation with her colleague, the woman approached her, not walking so much as floating. “Do you mind if we walk to your office?” the apparition asked.

  Kübler-Ross said yes, and started the strangest walk of her life, a few dozen yards to her office. Inside, she remembered the woman’s face. It was Mrs. Schwartz. She sat down, thinking she might faint. Schwartz had died some ten months earlier.

  Kübler-Ross questioned her own sanity.

  In the course of her work she had counseled schizophrenics. And when they saw something that wasn’t there, she didn’t feed their fantasies. She told them they were hallucinating. So she reached for her pen, her papers, her coffee cup. She tried to tether herself, through touch, to the real world. But the apparition didn’t fade at the great lady’s attempts to make her go away. In fact, the spook spoke. “I had to come back,” Schwartz told her, “for two reasons. Number one is to thank you and the Reverend [Imara] for all you have done for me. However the second reason I came back is to tell you not to give up your work on death and dying … not yet.”

  Kübler-Ross wondered how Schwartz could possibly know she was planning on quitting. But she also continued to question whether the entire event was transpiring at all. At the ghost’s behest, she promised not to quit her work yet. And in return, she asked the ghost for a favor. “Will you,” she asked, “write a brief note for Reverend Imara?”

  Mrs. Schwartz complied, taking a pen in her hand, then disappeared. We’ll get back to that note. For now, understand her old patient’s alleged reappearance as a ghost would become a prominent feature in the story of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But for the moment, it was private. Kübler-Ross only outed herself as an experiencer of anything odd at all in 1975 when the author Raymond Moody asked her to write the foreword to Life After Life—the book that coined the phrase “near-death experience.” She and Imara looked over his manuscript. The experiences their own patients recounted were accurately mirrored in Moody’s own research. They also believed he had written credibly. But there was something more: Kübler-Ross was changing. “At this point in my life,” she later wrote, “I was open to anything and everything. Most days I felt as if a curtain was being lifted to give me access to a world no one had ever seen before.”

  This was also the problem. Because just then, vulnerable in the confines of a strained marriage, a grueling career path that was wearing her down, and new scrutiny related to her own investigation of the paranormal, she received a phone call. The people on the other end were Jay and Martha Barham, who had been drawn to her by coverage they had seen of her controversial endorsement of Moody’s book. They called her from San Diego and promised her something more incredible than she had ever experienced, something that, deep inside, she longed for. They promised to introduce her to spiritual entities. They promised to reproduce the strange, sporadic mystical experiences Kübler-Ross had enjoyed—and to do so on demand.

  The Barhams had found a fertile target. And the esteemed psychologist quickly booked a speaking engagement in San Diego so she could take a side trip to meet the Barhams, who met her at the airport and hugged her like old friends. From there, they whisked her to the Church of Divinity, where Barham channeled spirits for a congregation of about a hundred people. “On my first day there,” she later wrote, “I joined 25 people of all ages and types in the dark room [of a windowless building]. Everyone sat on folding chairs. Jay placed me in the front row, a spot of
honor. Then the lights were switched off and the group began singing a soft, rhythmic hum that built to a loud group chant, which gave Jay the energy needed to channel the entities… . As the chanting reached a new, almost euphoric level, Jay disappeared behind a screen [my emphasis]. Suddenly, an enormously tall figure appeared to the right of me… .”

  Over the ensuing months, Barham introduced her to spirit guides named Salem, Pedro, and an entity named Willie. This was strictly old-school, séance-style mysticism. In the 1930s people advertising themselves as psychic mediums turned out the lights and channeled the dead, asking the spirits to knock once for yes, twice for no. But really it was an assistant in on the gag or the medium making all the noise. Like the mediums of old, Barham, too, insisted all the lights be turned off—lest he or the spirits be damaged by the terrible power of the 60-watt bulb.

  Kübler-Ross should have known better, but she was too vulnerable, it seems, to see straight.

  Attempts were made to save her.

  Her husband Manny answered the phone once to find what he took to be a man disguising his voice on the line. The man claimed to be Kübler-Ross’s spirit guide. Manny hung up. How, he asked his wife, could she possibly fall for such obvious bullshit? But fall for it she did. She had quickly grown dependent on Barham and his church. And when she wouldn’t give up this newfound mysticism, or the constant lectures, Manny asked for a divorce.

  Ken says it was clear “they never stopped loving each other.” And because of his mother’s hectic travel schedule, the kids lived mostly with their father. Without her husband or children, Kübler-Ross fled to the Church of Divinity. She acquired a parcel of land nearby and started a center she called Shanti-Nilaya, meaning the “final home of peace.” She put Barham to work as a full-time spirit channeler.

  Manny still worried about her and made a phone call of his own—to Imara, who traveled to the center to investigate. He found the landscape around the center incredibly beautiful—forty acres of swaying trees and lakefront views. But what was happening inside was “pure evil.”

  On the very first night, he sat through a séance. His friend had fallen for what he calls a “bad acting job.” But he was chilled, the next day, when he walked through a hallway in the center and noticed Barham in a common room, staring intently at a television with the sound turned down. Imara stood in the doorway and says he knew, felt, just what Barham was up to—immediately and in his bones. “That sick bastard was practicing reading lips,” he says. “Who ever does that?”

  Was this one of Barham’s means of gaining supposedly “psychic information”? Imara didn’t care. He just wanted to get his friend away from the man, and tried, several times, to share his own observations with Kübler-Ross. But every time he said something negative, she interrupted him. She changed the subject. This told him all he needed to know. The Elisabeth Kübler-Ross with whom he worked had never interrupted people.

  She listened.

  In old videos of her at the bedsides of the dying, Kübler-Ross can still be seen gazing so intently at the sick as they speak that she seems to have no other possible purpose but to serve as a kind of universal mother—the receptacle for her patient’s woes. But this woman seemed trapped inside herself. “I think it was all internal,” Imara says. “This was about where she was and what she needed at the time.”

  He also shared with me an observation that is key to understanding the paranormal—and coming to grips with the paradoxical tale of Kübler-Ross, the insightful psychologist who seemingly lost her own grip on reality. “The things we saw,” he says, “had been incredible, but they were sudden, and you couldn’t count on them.”

  The paranormal, as we’ll find throughout this book, simply doesn’t ever occur on demand. We move through this life on life’s own prosaic terms, mostly. In the materialist formulation, we feed our stomach-furnaces with food to sustain us. We input and output information using our computer brains. We live in a Newtonian realm, where most everything, most all of the time, moves in precise, predictable, patterns. Kübler-Ross had, like many others before her and since, come to need someone or something in her life that could recreate those unexpected glimpses of something other—that could, metaphorically anyway, show her the tunnel of light she’d heard of in her patients’ near-death experiences. And she needed it so badly, she could plainly no longer see past her hopes and wishes—to spot even the most obvious con. And so she looms, I think, as the ultimate cautionary tale for all those who wish to explore the paranormal: Here be dragons. And by 1979, they were at her door.

  Time, People, the Los Angeles Times, and Harper’s magazine all wrote in-depth accounts of Kübler-Ross’s fall. And for a while, Kübler-Ross defended herself and Barham. She began to share the Mrs. Schwartz story at lectures and talks and endorsed all manner of nonsense. Things were bad, and they got worse. “Appearing at sessions in darkened rooms … ,” reads People, “these ‘entities’ [Barham channels] have assumed human form and according to some reports engaged in sexual relations with church members.”

  Church congregants noticed things they should have seen early on, things that had been painfully obvious to Imara. The supposed entities smelled of cigarettes, like Barham, and spoke with similar accents, pronouncing “escape” as “ex-cape,” for instance. Five women, each of whom thought they had sex with an afterlife entity, came down with the same vaginal infection. And finally, one of them did the unthinkable. She turned on the lights during one of Barham’s channeling sessions. The entity that had supposedly materialized was Willie. But when the lights came on there was no spirit. There was just Barham. Naked except for a turban.

  Kübler-Ross hung on to her fantasy for a while longer. But when Barham’s explanations no longer satisfied her, she parted ways with him, the great psychologist now the victim of a very long con, carried out over four years.

  A skeptical mind most certainly would have been helpful, a good, ruthless debunking was called for; because a too-open mind had ruined a reputation.

  KEN ROSS, THE GREAT lady’s son, now looks after his mother’s foundation. When someone like me comes along, looking for information, he serves as gatekeeper. HBO worked with him as they tried to develop a script. The latest to give it a go is actress Melina Kanakaredes, formerly of CSI: New York, who was developing a script with the cooperation of Kubler-Ross’s estate as I put the finishing touches on this book. She faces a significant challenge. Because Kubler-Ross’s life won’t submit itself to a neat, one-hour-and-forty-minute retelling.

  In her life’s final acts, after Barham, she seemingly reinvented herself yet again, working with AIDS patients throughout the 1980s, the new disregarded among the terminally ill, who faced a level of stigmatization perhaps not seen since the lepers of biblical times. Then began the series of debilitating strokes that ultimately ended her life. The story is difficult to tell not only because of all the events packed into it, however, but because the twists and turns could polarize an audience.

  What do we do with the paranormal stories that accumulated around her? What do we do with … the note?

  Remember, Kübler-Ross asked the ghost of Mrs. Schwartz to write a note to Imara, the story goes, and the semi-transparent being complied. According to Imara, Kübler-Ross did hand over the note—it was addressed to him, after all—and he owns it still.

  People have asked him for copies over the years, intending to analyze the handwriting, to compare it to a sample from Schwartz. An attorney from Florida recently implored him to submit the note for investigation. But Imara said no. “One more argument behind that woman’s name is not something I’m going to contribute to,” he says.

  His math is simple, and unassailable, and provides a fitting end to this tale: if the handwriting doesn’t match (as seems to me by far most likely), skeptics will use that information to undermine the veracity of everything Kübler-Ross ever said. But as Imara puts it, the “story about Mrs. Schwartz is nothing. It is inconsequential, in comparison to the many things that hap
pened. Things I witnessed myself.”

  Believers, in turn, would argue, less logically, that a change in Mrs. Schwartz’s handwriting style might reflect some effect of, I dunno, crossing over? But, as unlikely as it seems, what if the note did match some existing sample of Schwartz’s handwriting? Well, even that wouldn’t get us any closer to real answers: skeptics would just holler fraud—or more profitably point out that handwriting analysis is downright subjective, arguably not science at all.

  This tale ends, then, in the mire, the debate so polluted that sometimes, for the people involved, it seems best simply to permit no further inquiry. And so the life of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross will continue to be punctuated both by exclamation points and question marks—the sum of a life spent collecting the last stories of the dying.

  Chapter 2

  Do You See What I See?

  The Curious Conflict Between Telepathy Skeptics and Believers

  Because something is happening here. But you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?

  —Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”

  In 2001, British physicist Brian Josephson was asked by the Royal Mail, Britain’s postal service, to write a short essay commemorating a new series of Nobel Prize–themed stamps. He could have just written the standard thing—extolling the virtues of science and urging kids into the field. But what he delivered, and the Royal Mail published, deviated more than a few degrees from standard. “Quantum theory is now being fruitfully combined with theories of information and computation,” Josephson writes. “These developments may lead to an explanation of processes still not understood within conventional science such as telepathy, an area where Britain is at the forefront of research.”

  The mention of telepathy, invoking the paranormal, caused a furor. And in response, some of Josephson’s fellow physicists railed to the press, accusing Josephson of having “hoodwinked” the Royal Mail into printing falsehoods.