by Colin Wilson
The most fascinating point about this case, of course, is that Jasbir was already three when he ‘died’ and was ‘taken over’ by Sobha Ram, who died at the same time. The implication is that Sobha Ram was able to slip into the body before brain death had occurred and fight his way back to life.
Without the kind of detailed investigation undertaken by Stevenson and Bannerjee, no case of reincarnation can be regarded as proven; a case that looks superficially convincing may collapse the moment it is probed. In fact, there is evidence that Stevenson himself was deceived in such a case. Edward Ryall, who lived in Benfleet, Essex, was to claim that he was haunted by memories of a ‘previous existence’ ever since childhood; in these memories, he was a Somerset farmer named John Fletcher, who had been killed in 1685, when he was guiding the troops of the Duke of Monmouth to attack the royalist forces at Sedgemoor. Slowly, these memories had become more and more detailed until he could remember large sections of his ‘earlier life’. During the invasion of Italy in 1945, Ryall claimed to have heard a woman’s voice in his ear telling him to take care; studying the ground ahead he saw he was about to walk into a booby trap.
In 1970, Ryall wrote a letter to the Daily Express about these experiences, and it aroused widespread interest. Ian Stevenson met Ryall, and decided he was genuine. It was Stevenson who persuaded Ryall to write a book about his ‘previous existence’, and Second Time Round appeared in 1974, two years before Ryall’s death. The woman who had warned Ryall not to walk into the trip wire was, according to this book, John Fletcher’s wife in Weston Zoyland.
In a BBC programme soon after publication, Ryall accompanied the interviewer to the church in which he claimed to have been married, and to various other sites in the life of John Fletcher, and the interviewer admitted to being totally convinced by Ryall’s story, and by his obvious involvement in his past incarnation.
But the parish records of the church were still in existence, and when Ian Wilson consulted these, he found no evidence whatsoever for the existence of John Fletcher or his family. Ryall claimed that Fletcher’s father had been killed by a bull in 1660, and was buried by the Rev. Thomas Holt, the vicar of Weston Zoyland; Thomas Holt was the vicar, but there was no record of the burial of Fletcher’s father. There is no record of Fletcher’s marriage, or of the baptisms of his two sons, although he claimed they were baptised by a subsequent vicar, who kept a meticulous record of all baptisms (which is still in the County Records Office). Finally, Ryall showed himself to be extremely cautious and unhelpful in his correspondence with a local historian who wanted to help him trace John Fletcher’s farm — although Ryall had claimed to know precisely where it was situated. Under Ian Wilson’s analysis, a highly convincing story begins to look like a historical fantasy.
Wilson’s own explanation of most of these strange cases is basically the same as that of Thomson Jay Hudson in The Law of Psychic Phenomena : the extraordinary powers of the ‘subjective mind’. Hudson cites a particularly fascinating case from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria about an illiterate peasant girl who fell into ‘a nervous fever’ and began talking in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, It looked like some kind of ‘possession’, but a persistent young doctor managed to trace the girl’s surviving uncle, and learned that her parents had died when she was a child, and that she had been taken into the house of an old pastor. More research revealed that the old man had a habit of walking up and down a passage reading aloud from books in Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Consciously, the girl could not remember a word of these languages; but her ‘subjective mind’ had recorded them, and they emerged when she was in a nervous fever.
In 1933, a neurologist named Wilder Penfield, who was engaged on work with epileptic patients, was performing an operation on a female patient’s brain when his electric probe touched a point in the temporal cortex. The patient (who was wide awake — the brain has no feelings, so anaesthetic is unnecessary) told Penfield that as he touched her, she was suddenly in the kitchen listening to her little boy, who was playing outside in the yard. She was competely ‘there’ — aware, for example, of the sounds of passing cars. Another patient on whom he performed the experiment found himself at a baseball game in a small town watching a boy crawl under the fence; another was in a concert hall, hearing every instrument of the orchestra clearly. Other patients ‘played back’ scenes from childhood in the most minute detail. It was as if Penfield had accidentally switched on some kind of video-recorder that had literally captured every waking (and probably sleeping) moment of the patient’s life.* The conclusion was obvious. We all possess a library that contains everything that we have done or thought. Then why is it not accessible to us? Because we are too ‘busy’. Life is difficult and complicated; we do not have the time to browse in the library. So, like those calculating prodigies who lost the ability at the age of fourteen, we have simply abandoned this capability as an evolutionary luxury. Yet Pen-field’s experiments show that we could recover it if we really wanted to. It is not even necessary to use an electric probe. Psychiatrists who have developed a technique known as ‘abreaction therapy’ have discovered that ordinary suggestion can make a patient re-live a traumatic experience in total physical detail; there is no reason why the same techniques should not be used to make us re-live some of our most delightful experiences.
But Penfield’s discovery certainly provides grounds for scepticism about cases like that of Edward Ryall. Ian Wilson justifies his own scepticism by describing a remarkable case investigated by the Society for Psychical Research in 1906. Under hypnosis, a woman (called Miss C) began to ‘recall’ details from the life of a woman called Blanche Poynings, who had lived in the time of Richard II, and been a close friend of Maud, the Countess of Salisbury; her knowledge of the countess’s life certainly seemed remarkably accurate. As far as she knew, Miss C had never read any historical novel that might have provided such detail. One day, when the SPR investigator was having tea with Miss C, they began talking about the planchette, an automatic-writing device, and Miss C agreed to try to communicate with Blanche Poynings with a planchette. ‘Blanche’ and Miss C were soon holding an animated conversation, with ‘Blanche’ reproaching her for not communicating for so long. But when they asked her how they could check on her story, she replied: ‘Ask E. Holt.’ E. Holt turned out to be Emily Holt, author of a novel called Countess Maud. Miss C had read it as a child, and long ago forgotten it. But Countess Maud proved to contain every detail about the Countess of Salisbury that Miss C had given under hypnosis.
That certainly sounds like game, set and match to the sceptics about reincarnation. But a case of the 1950s illustrates the dangers of being carried away by the passion for incredulity. Morey Bernstein, a businessman of Pueblo, Colorado, discovered he was naturally proficient in hypnosis, and persuaded the wife of an insurance salesman, Virginia Tighe, to allow him to try hypnotic regression on her. Virginia proved to be a deep hypnotic subject, and when Bernstein regressed her beyond her birth, she began to speak with an Irish brogue, and identified herself as Bridey Murphy, who had been born near Cork, Ireland, in 1798. In six tape-recorded sessions, she gave a detailed account of her life as Bridey, the wife of a barrister who taught at Queen’s University, Belfast. Bridey had died after a fall in 1864.
Bernstein wrote a book about the case, The Search for Bridey Murphy, which was serialised in the Chicago Daily News, to the chagrin of its Hearst rival, the Chicago American. A Chicago Daily News reporter went to Belfast to try to track down Bridey Murphy, but found himself hampered by the fact that records of births and deaths began in Ireland two years after Bridey’s death. But he found a number of other, confirmatory factors. Two Belfast grocers mentioned by Mrs Tighe were found listed in the Belfast Directory for 1865. A two-pence coin mentioned by Bridey as being in use during her lifetime had been minted shortly before her birth, and ceased to be used twelve years before her death. Bridey had said that she was born in The Meadows’, near Belfast, and a map of Belfast dated 1801 showed an area c
alled Mardike Meadows. Other details given by Bridey — such as a Dooley Road, Belfast, and a St Theresa’s Church — failed to check. This did not deter the enthusiasm of the American public, and The Search for Bridey Murphy became the major bestseller of 1956.
And at this point, the rival newspaper printed the results of its own investigations. It had uncovered Virginia Tighe’s identity (Bernstein had used a pseudonym) and discovered that she had lived in Chicago. According to the Chicago American, Mrs Tighe had an aunt who was ‘as Irish as the lakes of Killarney’, and who had told her tales about Ireland in her childhood; she was called Mary Burns. Moreover, during her childhood Virginia had lived opposite an Irishwoman named Bridey Corkell, whose unmarried name was Murphy; her Irish background, according to the Chicago American, had fascinated the little girl. And Virginia had had a ‘crush’ on Mrs Corkell’s son John …
The Bridey Murphy furore collapsed as suddenly as it had begun, and the book dropped from bestseller lists. But a Denver feature writer who investigated this ‘exposé’ discovered that most of it was simply untrue. Mrs Mary Burns — the aunt who was ‘as Irish as the lakes of Killarney’ — had been born in New York, and had not met Virginia until the girl was eighteen; both she and Virginia emphatically denied that there had been any Irish stories. Mrs Corkell proved to be strangely elusive, declining to be interviewed, so the reporter was unable to find out whether her unmarried name was Murphy. What he did discover was that her son John — on whom Virginia was supposed to have had a crush — was the editor of the Sunday edition of the Chicago American, the newspaper that had failed to secure serial rights on Bernstein’s book. Virginia insisted that she had never even spoken to Mrs Corkell, and had no interest in her son John, who was eight years her senior and married.
All this fails to prove that Virginia Tighe’s Bridey incarnation was any more real than Miss C’s Blanche Poynings. But it does prove that it is easier to demolish a claim than to subject it to serious investigation. Most writers on the case (for example, Martin Gardner in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science) are content to quote the exposé without mentioning the Denver Post’s exposé of the exposé. The ‘passion for incredulity’ can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.
The Bridey Murphy case had the effect of interesting other hypnotists in the subject of ‘regression’. An English doctor, Arnall Bloxham, who lived near Cardiff, regressed a girl named Ann Ockendon, who recalled her life as a man in a land where people went naked and wore animals’ teeth — Bloxham concluded she was speaking of prehistoric times. But obviously, there was no way of checking on this particular incarnation. Later cases proved more fruitful. And a television producer, Jeffrey Iverson, became so fascinated by a programme he made on Bloxham that he set out to investigate some of the cases, and published his results in a book called More Lives Than One? A swimming instructor named Graham Huxtable had ‘become’ an eighteenth-century sailor on a ship called HMS Aggie; he enacted a battle scene with a French ship with total conviction, and finally screamed horribly as he was wounded in the leg. Earl Mountbatten commissioned a modern historian, Oliver Warner, to try to investigate the tape recording made by Huxtable, and although he did not succeed in tracing the ship or the battle, Warner ended by being totally convinced of its authenticity — Huxtable’s sailor seemed to know far more about the ships of the period than could be picked up from historical novels.
But Iverson’s most convincing case is of a woman who prefers to be known as Jane Evans, and who recalled seven past lives; a Roman housewife living in Britain, a Jewess murdered in a pogrom in York, a French courtesan, a maidservant to a French merchant, a sewing girl in the time of Queen Anne, a lady-in-waiting to the Spanish Infanta, and an American nun from Des Moines, Iowa. The Roman wife, Livonia, showed a remarkable knowledge of the period, suggesting an expert on British and Roman history. ‘Mrs Evans’ insisted that her only knowledge of history came from the usual elementary course at school. Iverson went to the Loire valley to investigate her incarnation as Alison, maidservant of Jacques Coeur, adviser to King Charles VII of France. ‘Jane Evans’ had never been to the Loire valley and knew nothing about French history; but Iverson’s investigations among French historians showed him just how much Alison knew about mediaeval France.
But the most impressive ‘incarnation’ was as a Jewess, Rebecca, in twelfth-century York. Shortly before Richard the Lion Heart rode off to the Third Crusade, in 1189, there were anti-Jewish riots in London; the English had worked themselves up into a frenzy about ‘infidels’, and the Jews seemed to qualify as much as the Muslims. In 1190, there were riots in York; Jews took refuge in the castle, and most of them killed their families, then themselves, to avoid the vengeance of the mob. Rebecca and her family escaped the massacre, and took refuge in the crypt of a Christian church, ‘just outside the big gates’. But the mob found them and killed them.
Iverson decided to consult an expert on the massacre, Professor Barrie Dobson, of the University of York. Dobson was impressed by her reconstruction of the massacre — particularly since ‘Jane Evans’ professed to be totally ignorant of any such thing. He decided that the church that answered her description was St Mary’s, Castlegate. There was only one problem — this had no crypt. But six months later, workmen renovating the church discovered the remains of ‘something that seems to have been a crypt’ — a room with round stone arches and vaults, under the chancel.
Ian Wilson, while admitting that this ‘regression’ is impressive, has a number of criticisms. There were, he points out, forty churches in York; how can Professor Dobson be sure that St Mary’s is the right one? Rebecca described the murder of an old Jew in ‘Coney Street’. But in twelfth-century York, Coney Street was still called Cuninga (King) Street. Rebecca refers to the ‘big copper gate of York’, when, in fact, the Coppergate was a street. These objections lose much of their force when we discover that Professor Dobson had already raised them — and answered them. The street where the old Jew was murdered may have been Cuninga Street, but it is probable that it was actually pronounced Coney Street. The English have a habit of changing foreign pronunciations. (In my home town, Leicester, Belvoir Street is pronounced Beaver Street.) The street called Coppergate existed in York in 1190, and at the end of it was one of the gates leading to the castle. No doubt most of the residents of York believed that ‘Coppergate’ referred to this gate.
All this also answers the third objection: how Professor Dobson could identify the church when there were thirty-nine others; Rebecca describes it specifically as being ‘just outside the big gates’. This makes sense, since she says they had just escaped from the castle …
Ian Wilson’s criticisms make it clear that the case against reincarnation is fundamentally the same as the case against ‘spirit communication’ via mediums. Anything that can be explained in terms of cryptomnesia, telepathy or possible fraud must be regarded as unproven. If we are to prove spirit communication, then we have to demonstrate that the ‘spirit’ has communicated something that could not have been known to the medium or to anyone else present. A number of cases — such as the Cross Correspondences — have satisfied this criterion. If we are to ‘prove’ reincarnation, the same thing applies. It has to be demonstrated that the ‘reincarnated’ person knows things that could only have been learned in a ‘previous existence’. So in the case of Graham Huxtable, it makes no difference that a naval historian finds his account wholly convincing. We need to know beyond all possible doubt that Huxtable never saw a film or read a book that might have provided the material for the battle scene.
But in the case of ‘Jane Evans’, it is almost impossible to see how this type of explanation could apply. If it is true that she is no great reader, and that her only knowledge of history comes from elementary school, then there is apparently no way in which she would have learned about the life of a Roman matron in Colchester or a Jewess in York. At the same time, her ‘incarnations’ lack one important element:
proof that Livonia and Rebecca and the rest actually existed. Without such proof, we can never be quite certain that they were not another amazing creation of the ‘subjective mind’.
Another English hypnotist, Joe Keeton, who lives in the Wirral, has also specialised in regressions, and has formed a group whose aim is to try to find documentary evidence for ‘past lives’. Ironically, Keeton himself does not believe that he is dealing with cases of reincarnation. He prefers to believe that he may be dealing with some purely mental faculty, with some unknown form of access to the memory of the human race, something similar to Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’.
I met Joe Keeton for the first time in 1978, when he came to Westward Television in Plymouth. He had been ‘regressing’ a pretty nurse named Pauline McKay, who also came from the Wirral, and Pauline had ‘become’ a West Country servant girl called Kitty Jay, who said she had committed suicide near Chagford in the late-eighteenth century. Joe had written to the head librarian in Exeter to ask whether he knew of a Kitty Jay, and was surprised to learn that ‘Jay’s Grave’ lies on the edge of Dartmoor, and that she had hanged herself in Canna Farm. As a suicide, she had not been allowed burial in a graveyard.
In the television studio, Keeton hypnotised Pauline McKay, then took her back to her own past life, then finally to her life as Kitty Jay. ‘Kitty’ described how she had gone to work at Ford Farm, Manaton, as a maid, and had allowed herself to be seduced by a man named Rob, who worked at nearby Canna Farm. Although Pauline had never been to the West Country, she seemed to know the area, and correctly named a bridge where she and Rob stood on their walks. She told of how Rob had deserted her, then described her suicide — at this point she became obviously distressed, and gasped for breath. It was an impressive performance. Yet it was obviously open to the interpretation of cryptomnesia. Pauline may have read the story of Kitty Jay in some volume on ghosts, such as Peter Underwood’s Gazetteer of British Ghosts.