by Colin Wilson
Her family were naturally anxious to test her, and asked her all kinds of questions. ‘Mary’ soon convinced them; she was able to describe hundreds of incidents in the life of the former Mary Roff. She described in detail her stay at a water-cure place in Peoria. Asked if she remembered an incident when the stove pipe fell and burnt Frank, she was able to point out the exact place on the arm where Frank was burnt. Asked about an old dog, she showed them the spot where it had died. When she talked about slashing her arm with the knife, she started to roll up her sleeve to show Dr Stevens the scar, then recollected that this was not the same body: ‘It’s not this arm — it’s the one in the ground.’ After her death, her parents had tried to communicate with her by means of a medium; Mary was able to tell them the message she wrote out for them through the medium’s hand, giving the exact time and place.
One of the most convincing incidents occurred when Mrs Roff found a old velvet head-dress that Mary had worn during her life time. Mary’s father suggested leaving it out on the hall stand. ‘Mary’ came in from outside and immediately said: ‘Why, there’s my old head-dress that I wore when my hair was short.’ This reminded her of a box of letters, and when her mother brought this, she found one of her collars. ‘Look, here’s that old collar I tatted.’
‘Mary’ told her family that she could stay with them until 21 May. On that morning, her mother wrote: ‘Mary is to leave the body of Rancy today, about eleven o’clock.’ ‘Mary’ went around saying goodbye to neighbours, hugged and kissed her parents, and set out for Lurancy Vennum’s home. On the way, ‘Mary’ vanished and Lurancy Vennum returned.
Four years later, Mary Lurancy Vennum married a farmer, George Binning. Her parents discouraged her from using her mediumship in case it brought back the ‘fits’, but Mary Roff often ‘dropped in’ when her own parents were there, and seemed quite unchanged from her previous visit. When Mary Lurancy Vennum had her first baby, ‘Mary’ even put her into a trance so she would not suffer the pains of childbirth.
Richard Hodgson, the sceptical young Australian who ‘exposed’ Madame Blavatsky in 1885, and who went to America to investigate Mrs Piper in the following year, heard about the case, and instantly saw that, if genuine, it was a practically watertight proof of life after death. He interviewed all the principal characters except Lurancy Vennum herself, who had moved west with her husband. In spite of this disappointment, Hodgson ended totally convinced of the truth of the incidents as narrated by Dr Stevens and various family members and friends. He agreed that this could be a case of multiple personality, but felt, on the whole, that all the evidence pointed to a genuine case of ‘possession’ of Lurancy Vennum by the deceased Mary Roff. Myers placed the case in his chapter on multiple personality, but added that ‘at a later stage, and when some other wonders have become … more familiar … we may perhaps consider once more what further lessons this singular narrative may have to teach us’. He died before these ‘further lessons’ could be discussed, but it is clear that he also regarded the Vennum case as a proof of the survival of personality after death.
If Hodgson and Myers are correct, then it would support the picture that began to emerge in the opening chapter of this book through the work of Adam Crabtree and Wilson Van Dusen. We are inclined to think of death either as a dead end, or as a launching into a totally new kind of existence: some strange mystical state in which all the secrets of the universe will be known. All the evidence we have considered indicates that this is a misconception. Life on the ‘next plane’ is apparently not fundamentally dissimilar from life on earth, although many of its conditions seem to be different. According to various ‘communicators’, there are other planes that are inconceivable to us, but under the circumstances, these are no concern of ours. But unless the evidence of psychical research is an enormous confidence trick, devised by the collective unconscious to satisfy our craving for ‘survival’, the individual survives death in a form not unlike his present mode of being.
There are many ways in which the evidence of reincarnation is more convincing than the evidence of life after death that comes through mediums. The Cross Correspondences finally convinced the investigators that Myers and Gurney had survived their deaths; but Mary Roffs’ parents must have been quite certain she was still alive within hours of her moving back into their house.
Another of the early classic cases — unfortunately never investigated by a trained researcher like Hodgson — has become known as the Alexandrina case.
On 15 March 1910, a five-year-old girl named Alexandrina Samona died in Palermo, Sicily. Her mother, Adela — wife of Dr Carmelo Samona — was distraught with grief. But three days after the death, she had a dream in which Alexandrina told her not to mourn, because she was going to return. She showed her mother an embryo. Adela Samona dismissed the dream, knowing that an ovarian operation had made it almost impossible for her to have children.
A few days later, when Adela was sadly recalling the child to her husband, three loud knocks were heard. The parents began to attend seances, and two ‘spirits’ spoke through the medium — one claiming to be the child, the other an aunt who had died long ago. ‘Alexandrina’ told her mother that she would be reborn before Christmas, as one of two twins. In fact, twin girls were born to Adela Samona on 22 November 1910, just over nine months after Alexandrina’s death. The two girls were of totally different personalities, but one of them had two small birth marks in the same place as the dead child; she was also, like Alexandrina, left-handed. The parents named her after the dead child. In personality, this second Alexandrina was very like the first: introverted, tidy, disposed to spend much of her time folding clothes and linen.
What finally convinced the parents that the child was a reincarnation of the dead Alexandrina was an incident that happened when the twins were ten. They were told that they were going on an outing to the town of Monreale — neither of them had been there. But Alexandrina insisted that she had been there with her mother, in the company of a ‘lady with horns’. She also described the statue on the roof of the church, and described some ‘red priests’ they had seen there. In fact, Adela Samona had taken her first daughter Alexandrina to Monreale not long before her death, in the company of a woman who had some unsightly cysts on her forehead. They had been to the church and seen some priests from Greece, who wore red robes. Dr Samona was so struck by this evidence of reincarnation that he went to some trouble to put the case on record, together with the depositions of various witnesses, and published it in the periodical Filosofia della Scienza.
From the point of view of the investigator, the problem here is that the mother’s wishful thinking may have been responsible for the whole episode. The death of Alexandrina produced suicidal depression; her unconscious may have reacted by sending her a dream in which the child promised to return. By the time she had this dream, she may have already conceived the twins, and her unconscious mind may also have known this. So the second Alexandrina had the identity of her dead sister foisted on her. Perhaps her mother described the trip to Monreale to her, then forgot it. Or perhaps she overheard her mother speaking about it to her father …
This, of course, is always the problem with a case that took place long before anyone thought of subjecting it to scientific investigation. But this objection does not apply to a very similar recent case that took place in England. It is discussed by Ian Wilson in a book called Mind Out of Time?, which takes a sceptical view of reincarnation, dismissing most cases as a matter of ‘cryptomnesia’ — unconscious memory.
In May 1957, two sisters, Joanna and Jacqueline Pollock, aged eleven and six, were walking along a road in Hexham, Northumberland, when a car mounted the pavement and killed them both; a nine-year-old boy was also killed. The driver was a woman who had taken an overdose of drugs and gone out with the intention of committing suicide. Their father, John Pollock, was a Catholic, but he also believed in reincarnation — a belief condemned by the Church; he felt that the death of the girls was a judg
ement on him for his interest in these unorthodox matters. In spite of this, he became obsessed by the idea that the girls were going to be reborn to his wife. And when, a year later, his wife Florence announced she was pregnant, he told her unhesitatingly that she would have twin daughters, and this was God’s way of returning Joanna and Jacqueline. When a gynaecologist told her that she was definitely pregnant with only one child, she decided that her husband’s obsession was getting the better of him. But in fact, twin daughters were born on 4 October 1958. And Jennifer, the twin who was born second, had a thin white line across her forehead exactly where her dead sister Jacqueline had a scar — the result of falling off her bicycle. She also had a birthmark on her left hip, identical to one that Jacqueline had had in the same place. There was no similar mark on the ‘elder’ sister, Gillian — which seemed odd, since the twins were monozygotic (formed from the same egg).
When the twins were four months old, the family moved to Whitley Bay. One day three years later, John Pollock took them on a day trip to Hexham. And they behaved as if they were quite familiar with the place. One suddenly said to the other: ‘The school’s round the corner.’ ‘That’s were we used to play in the playground.’ ‘The swings and slides are over there.’ ‘We used to live in that house.’ This last comment was made as they passed their old house.
The toys of the dead sisters had been packed in a box which was stored in the loft; when the twins were four, the parents decided to let them play with these. Jennifer said immediately: There’s Mary. And this is my Suzanne’ — correctly naming the two dolls. ‘And there’s your wringer.’ Florence Pollock, who witnessed this scene, can hardly be accused of wishful thinking, for (as a good Catholic) she thoroughly disapproved of her husband’s obsession with reincarnation. She refused to let him say anything about it to the children, or even to tell them anything about their dead sisters other than that they were ‘in heaven’.
When she heard the twins screaming one day, Florence Pollock rushed outside to find them clinging to one another and shouting ‘The car! It’s coming at us.’ A car had just started up further along the lane. On another occasion, she found them playing a curious game in which Gillian cradled Jennifer’s head, saying: ‘The blood’s coming out of your eyes. That’s where the car hit you.’ Florence Pollock became increasingly disturbed by these incidents, and she was relieved when, at about the age of five, the twins seemed to lose all memory of their dead sisters, and became perfectly normal children.
Ian Wilson points out that the father’s belief in reincarnation weakens much of the evidence. Yet it is still impossible to see how John Pollock can have faked this evidence, unless he secretly coached the children in their roles when their mother was not present. And the twins themselves have denied that anything of the sort took place. Wilson himself admits that the case of the Pollock twins is one of the few in his book where prima facie evidence seems to support the idea of reincarnation.
One of the most widely publicised modern cases of alleged reincarnation took place in India in the early 1930s, and was later studied by Professor Hemendra Bannerjee, director of the Department of Parapsychology at Rajasthan University (who, together with Professor Ian Stevenson, is the world’s leading scientific investigator of such cases). On 12 October 1926, a girl called Kumari Shanti Devi was born in Delhi, India, and when she was four years old, she began to talk about a previous life she had lived in the town of Muttra, a hundred miles from Delhi. She said she had been of the Choban caste, had lived in a yellow house, and that her husband had been a cloth merchant named Kedar Nath Chaubey. A retired school principal heard about the girl, and asked to meet her. The child told him the address she had lived at in Muttra, and the principal wrote a letter there. To his surprise, he received a letter back from Shanti Devi’s ‘husband’ Kedar Nath. He confirmed various details about his life with his former wife, and requested that a relative of his in Delhi should be allowed to talk to the child. When the man arrived, Shanti Devi recognised him as her ‘husband’ ’s cousin, Kanji Mal, and soon had him convinced of her genuineness. When he reported back to Kedar Nath, Shanti Devi’s ‘husband’ no longer hesitated. He rushed to Delhi, and the child flung herself into his arms. She was able to give convincing answers to all his questions about her previous existence as his wife, and mentioned a box containing a hundred rupees that she had buried in one of the rooms of their house.
On 24 November 1935, the nine-year-old girl was finally taken to Muttra by her parents; they were accompanied by three respectable citizens — a newspaperman, a politician and a lawyer — who went along to act as witnesses (and who later wrote an account of the case). As the train approached the platform in Muttra, Shanti Devi recognised the elder brother of Kedar Nath, who was waiting there. They then took a carriage, and Shanti Devi was told to direct it anywhere she wanted. As they drove along, she pointed out buildings that had not been there during her own life in Muttra. She directed them to the first house in which she and her husband had formerly lived — now rented to strangers. Asked by a local man where the ‘jai-zarur’ was situated — a word used in Muttra for a privy — she pointed to the outdoor lavatory. Then they went on to the house in which she had died. There she recognised various relatives, and showed that she was intimately acquainted with the house. Finally, she led them to the room in which she had buried the money. Digging uncovered an empty tin. Kedar Nath later admitted he had removed the money. As they left the house, Shanti Devi recognised in the crowd outside her ‘former’ father and mother …
No such case can, of course, be regarded as watertight, simply because the authors of the pamphlet failed to take the same precautions that had become commonplace in all Society for Psychical Research investigations — depositions of witnesses, double-checking on the possibilities of cryptomnesia, and so on. But three decades later, another investigator applied these precautions to his own investigations of cases of alleged reincarnation. And the striking thing about so many of Ian Stevenson’s Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation,* and the subsequent three volumes of Cases of the Reincarnation Type, * is how much so many of them echo the case of Shanti Devi. Swarnlata, the daughter of a civil servant, was born in 1948, began to tell her brothers and sisters about a ‘previous life’ in the city of Katni, where she had been called Biya, and had been married to a man called Sri Chintamini Pandey. At the age of three and a half, her father took her with him on a school inspection trip, and as they passed through Katni — about a hundred miles from their home — she asked the driver to turn down a road to ‘my house’. Her father now learned that she had been telling her family about her ‘previous life’ for some time. She performed for her parents songs and dances that she claimed she had learned in her previous life, and which she had certainly had no opportunity to learn in the present one. When she was ten, her family moved to Chhatarpur, and she there met a lady named Srimati Agnihotri, whom she claimed to recognise as someone she had known in her previous life. Her father was impressed when this lady confirmed many of his daughter’s statements about Katni and her life there — for the first time he began to take her claims seriously. He began writing down her statements. Professor Hemendra Bannerjee went to meet Swarnlata in 1959, then went straight on to Katni to see how her statements compared with those of her ‘previous’ family in Katni. He had made a list of nine points about the family house; all proved to be accurate; so did Swarnlata’s descriptions of her life as Biya, the deceased wife. Soon after this, Swarnlata and her family went to Katni; what followed was very similar to what had happened to Shanti Devi. On Professor Bannerjee’s instructions, Swarnlata’s family not only took care to offer her no clues, but even tried to mislead her on various points — such as telling her that the family cowherd was dead, and then bringing him into her presence; she immediately recognised him. Stevenson’s table of all the places, people and events described by Swarnlata goes on for eight pages, and makes impressive reading. The result of all this was that the Katni family accepte
d Swarnlata as the dead Biya, and she spent much time with them and built up close ties with her previous ‘brothers’ and ‘children’. Stevenson himself investigated this case in 1961, with the advantage of all the documentation already made by Professor Bannerjee. So as a proof of reincarnation, the Swarnlata case seems to be as ‘watertight’ as it could be.
Another of Stevenson’s cases recalls Lurancy Vennum and Mary Roff. In 1954, a three-year-old boy named Jasbir Lal Jat died of smallpox. Before he could be buried the next day, the corpse stirred and revived. It was some weeks before the child could speak, but when he did, his parents were astonished that his personality had changed completely. Jasbir had been a rather dull, quiet little boy; he had suddenly become more lively. He announced that he was the son of a Brahmin family (a higher caste than his present family) who lived in the village of Vehedi, and he refused to eat food unless it was cooked by a Brahmin. He said he had been poisoned by doctored sweets, and had fallen off a cart and smashed his skull, as a result of which he died. Jasbir’s family were understandably sceptical, assuming that his illness had affected his mind. But they began to reconsider in 1957, when a Brahmin lady from Vehedi came to Jasbir’s village, and he instantly recognised her as his aunt. Jasbir was taken back to Vehedi, and, like Shanti Devi and Swarnlata, he showed a detailed knowledge of his former residence, escorting a party on a tour. His name in the previous existence had been Sobha Ram, and his detailed knowledge of his life convinced everyone that Jasbir and Sobha Ram were the same person. The accusation about the poisoned sweets was never satisfactorily cleared up — Sobha Ram was said to have died of smallpox.