Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mary Roach

  Tandy knew from local hearsay that the Coventry Tourist Information Centre was a promising place to start. Though they spent their days pushing “Warwick Ghosts—Alive!” the staff was convinced that something ghostly was going on directly below them. Excavations for the foundation of the tourism office had uncovered a fourteenth-century cellar that the tourism staff now uses for storage. In a Journal of the Society for Psychical Research article on the project, Tandy quotes a Coventry tour guide who had accompanied a Canadian journalist to the cellar: “The gentleman was frozen to the spot and the colour drained from his face.”

  Tandy went in to take some measurements. I asked him if he felt anything. He said only once—a brief, sudden sense of something “washing over him.” His wife Lynne, who has accompanied him on several visits, volunteers that she felt nothing. “Though I do sometimes feel a strange oppressiveness in the Sainsbury’s dairy area.” I volunteer that, owing to her accent or my fourth-grade maturity level, this came through as: “the Sainsbury’s derriere.” Lynne’s look suggests that the humor isn’t registering. It suggests she might think I’m something of a dairy area myself.

  Tandy did not find infrasonic frequencies in the cellar, but he did find them just outside it. The eighteen-hertz entity lives in the hallway that opens into the cellar (though its source remains unknown). Tandy figures people were blaming the cellar because of how it looked. As he puts it, “You don’t get ghosts in well-lit white-walled concrete corridors. You get ghosts in vaulted fourteenth-century cellars.”

  According to a Dortmund University nonlethal weapons expert named Jürgen Altmann, infrasound can, in a small percentage of the population, set off vibrations in the liquid inside the cochlea. These vibrations—which happen because of an uncommon anatomical weakness in the bone structure of the ear—could create a sudden, inexplicable feeling of motion, which could lead to the unease that some of the cellar visitors reported.

  The majority of visitors, however, feel nothing. Tandy gave a talk earlier in the week and took the entire crowd over to the cellar afterward. Despite their having been primed to feel something, only one out of the group of fifty did. The same meager odds appear to apply for industrial infrasound. NASA astronauts on liftoffs are exposed to massive infrasound vibrations, to no apparent deleterious effect. (It was, in fact, in a NASA contractor’s report that Tandy read about the vibrating eyeball effect. NASA had experimentally exposed volunteers to infrasound back in the sixties, to be sure, as Tandy puts it, “that they didn’t deliver jam to the moon.”) It is thought that only a small portion of the population is sensitive to infrasound. Tandy believes that when the odd office worker starts talking about Sick Building Syndrome, infrasound may in fact be the culprit. There are said to be people so debilitatingly sensitive to infrasound that even the very low levels of it that come off the ocean can make them nauseous. At any rate, it’s not the sort of situation where you can set up a speaker and inflict mental and physical discomfort on demand.

  This particular fact came as a great disappointment to the military-industrial complex. For years, infrasound was served up as the next big thing in nonlethal weapons. Obviously, powerful amplifiers would be needed to boost the decibel level—unless your intent was simply to make your enemy feel peculiar. In strong doses, infrasound has been alleged to cause all manner of bodily unpleasantness: nausea, salivation, “extreme annoyance,” rapid pulse, vibrating visual field, “intolerable sensations in the chest,” gagging, vomiting, bowel spasms, and “uncontrollable defecation.” Jürgen Altmann, the best authority on the subject that I could find, says that the more dire second half of the list is hearsay. In the vast stack of literature that Altmann reviewed, he found only one allegation of vomiting and none for bowel spasms and their pal uncontrollable D.

  Contrary to persistent Internet rumors, actual infrasound weapons are rare. Altmann found one Russian institution—the very specifically named Center for the Testing of Devices with Non-Lethal Effects on Humans—that was said to have developed a device propelling a baseball-sized pulse of about ten hertz over hundreds of meters. He could find no information on the efficacy of the device, but his tone suggests you’d be better off propelling real baseballs.

  Nonetheless, people worry. “I still get people ringing me up, thinking their neighbor is trying to get them out of the house by shooting infrasound at them,” says Tandy. I used to have a neighbor who shoots high-decibel Eagles songs out his windows, causing nausea and extreme annoyance at a fraction of the cost. I’d have loved to get my hands on a retaliatory infrasound blaster.

  “Try a church organ,” suggests Tandy. “The big ones put out a lot of infrasound. Or you could rent an elephant.”

  Elephants, as well as whales and rhinos, have recently been found to communicate by infrasound; they can both produce it and hear it. In the wake of recent research at the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina, tigers were added to the list. Tigers have large territories to defend, and it’s thought they use infrasound—which has the advantage of carrying over long distances and penetrating dense foliage—to warn trespassers.

  The tiger finding spoke to Tandy. The fact that humans—albeit a minority of them—are able to sense infrasound had puzzled him. Why would the ability have evolved if we don’t communicate in infrasound? Perhaps to sense predators. Being able to detect a tiger in the vicinity was—for primitive man, anyway—a valuable knack. “So maybe there are people in the cellar whose tiger detector, as it were, is going off.”

  The research is a nice fit with Tandy’s work. Though tigers’ vocalizations were found to span a range of audible and inaudible (to us) sound, their roars were measured at and below eighteen hertz—very close to the infrasound frequency that set Vic Tandy’s saber rattling. To test the notion that tigers use infrasound to ward off potential rivals, Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, the researcher who had recorded vocalizing tigers, set up powerful speakers to play the big cats’ roars and growls back to them. If ever there were a moment when acoustical science broke through the drear confines of audiograms and spectral analyses, this was it. Von Muggenthaler reports that the recordings caused several of the tigers to “roar and leap towards the speakers.”

  You can try this experiment on yourself by turning your computer speaker to top volume, going to www.acoustics.org/ press/145th/Walsh2.htm, scrolling down to the paragraph about roars, and clicking on the speaker icon. Even though I know what’s coming, it scares the rubber dog doo out of me every time I play it. I recall once going to the big cat house of our local zoo at feeding time. For a solid minute, the tigers and lions stood in their cages and roared. I started to cry, though I wasn’t upset. I had the same embarrassing response to what I’m guessing were the effects of infrasound twice before: once while standing on a rooftop that was buzzed by a Blue Angels fighter plane, and another time standing two streets away from an imploded building as it collapsed. Also, I used to feel an ineffable queerness in my chest during Sunday mass, which I put down to God looking inside me and knowing I wasn’t listening. Now I’m thinking it was the organ music. I’m thinking I must be an infrasound sensitive.

  I’ll soon know, because Tandy has promised to expose me to some nineteen-hertz waves. In fact, that’s where we’re heading now. Tandy gets up from the couch. It’s 6:30 p.m., and the Coventry tourism office has closed. Perhaps we’re going to the haunted tower at Warwick Castle? Tandy stops halfway down the first-floor hallway and makes a left. We are not going to Warwick Castle. We’re going to Vic and Lynne Tandy’s dining room. “You can really get a nice standing nineteen-hertz wave going in here. I’ve got my kit all set up for you.”

  Tandy’s laptop is set up to channel computer-generated infrasound through the subwoofers of a car stereo amplifier and into a speaker. He pulls out a dining room chair for me. The speaker is seated at the head of the table. “Ready?” says Tandy.

  He hits a series of keys on the laptop. We sit in the quiet, heads bowed, as if waiting for the speake
r to say grace.

  I think I feel something, but then again, I’m looking for it. Tandy says he can’t usually feel it while it’s on, but that he notices the room feels different when he shuts it off. So we turn the infrasound off, then back on, and then off again. It’s hard to say. It’s certainly subtle.

  Lynne comes in to set the table for dinner. After she leaves, I ask Tandy to put the infrasound on one last time. He leans over, presses some keys. Is there a mild buzziness in my brain? A faint, indescribable weirdness? It’s there, I think it’s there. “I can feel something already,” I whisper.

  Tandy looks up from his keyboard. “I haven’t got anything on yet.”

  IF YOU ASK me which is the more likely explanation—infrasonics or spirits—I will tell you to apply the wisdom of Occam’s razor,* a principle which holds that the simplest, the least farfetched, of two competing theories is the place to put your money. But depending on who’s shaving, Occam’s razor yields manifestly different views. To those who believe in an afterlife, the most straightforward explanation for hearing your dead dad is that you’re hearing your dead dad’s spirit. Infrasonics and vibrating eyeballs and fight-or-flight responses would, given this particular worldview, seem to be needless and unlikely complexities. But to those of a less spiritual bent, the concept of a consciousness leaving a body and persisting in some ordered form that is able to interact with living beings is a notion that demands an even more elaborate and unnecessarily complex explanation.

  Perhaps it’s time for a break from the tail-chasing complexities of scientific method. Perhaps some other learned pursuit has something to offer us. Has anyone, for instance, tried to prove the existence of ghosts in a court of law? In fact they have. In the farm belt of central North Carolina, some eighty years ago.

  *A gripping moment that capped an otherwise drab existence. A proponent of what Encyclopædia Britannica calls “a plain style of writing,” Greville failed to publish much of anything while alive. Well-born but repeatedly passed over for appointments, he was eventually dubbed Knight of the Bath. (The Knights of the Bath are an official Order of Her Majesty the Queen, who does not take enjoyment from Monty Python–style send-ups thereof. Or possibly she does: John Cleese was offered—and declined—an Order of the British Empire.)

  *Tandy is speaking metaphorically. Humans don’t have erectile hair or feathers on the backs of their necks. Looking into this, I learned that hackle feathers are popular for fly-tying. It took a while to figure this out, because the Google entries would say things like, “This is a Metz Grizzly Hen Neck hackle. It could be used for a Matuka-style streamer wing, however, and it’s a top choice for streamer collars, as it’s soft and pulses when the barbules are ‘unzipped.’ ”

  *The principle known as Occam’s razor was not, curiously enough, William of Occam’s idea. Occam simply used it—frequently and “sharply,” to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry—so much so that it became known as his razor. The entry goes on to say that “he used it to dispense with relations, which he held to be nothing distinct from their foundation in things; with efficient causality, which he tended to view merely as regular succession,” a sentence that cries out for Occam’s editing pencil.

  11

  Chaffin v. the Dead Guy

  in the Overcoat

  In which the law finds for a ghost, and the author

  calls in an expert witness

  IN THE SUMMER of 1925, the ordinary life of a Mocksville, North Carolina, farmer shifted a few acres shy of ordinary. James Pinkney Chaffin lived with his wife and daughter in a four-room house on a stream in a field that he planted with sugarcane and cotton. Chaffin picked and baled his own cotton and made molasses from the sugarcane he grew. He carried the molasses in jugs on his back to sell to his neighbors and the townspeople in Mocksville. He did the same with the butter his wife made and the axe handles that he carved and sold for twenty-five cents. On Sundays he walked two miles with his family to the Ijames Baptist Church, where he sat each week in the same seat, beside an open window—“so he could spit his tobacco,” recalls his grandson Lester. Evenings, James Pinkney Chaffin sat by the fire and greased his boots and sharpened his blades. He did not drink or smoke. He was, says Lester, “just as plain as an old shoe.”

  One morning in June 1925, James Pinkney Chaffin announced to his wife that his father—who had been dead four years—had appeared to him at his bedside. Chaffin was not given to dreams of prophecy or to ghost stories or practical jokes, and one can imagine that the breakfast mood that morning was a bit strained. He confided to his wife that several times over the past month, he had dreamed of his father, James L. Chaffin, appearing at his bedside with a sorrowful expression. The previous night, his father had appeared in a black overcoat,* which the son recognized from when his father had been alive. James Senior stepped closer to the bed and opened up one side of his overcoat, in the manner of a man selling purloined watches. “He pointed to the inside pocket,” Chaffin is quoted as saying in Mocksville’s Davie Record, “and he said: ‘You will find something about my last will in my overcoat pocket.’”

  At the time, as far as anyone knew, the last will of James L. Chaffin was the one on record in the Davie County Clerk’s Office, dated 1905. In a perplexing act of filial betrayal, the old farmer had directed that his entire estate—farmland amounting to one hundred and two acres—go to his second-youngest son, Marshall. Nothing was left to James Pinkney Chaffin or his elder brother John, or to the youngest of the four sons, Abner. To John, especially, it was an egregious slight, as land in that day was typically bequeathed to the eldest son. Though the three sons must surely have been bitter about the will, they did not contest it.

  After some searching, Pink, as he was known to his family and friends, located the old man’s overcoat, in the attic of his older brother John. “On examination of the inside pocket,” his testimony goes, “I found the lining had been sewed together. I immediately cut the stitches and found a little roll of paper tied with a string which was in my father’s handwriting and contained only the following words: ‘Read the 27th Chapter of Genesis in my daddie’s old Bible.’” (Chapter 27 is a parable of two brothers, one who cheats the other out of his rightful inheritance.) With his daughter Estelle and his neighbor Thom Blackwelder along as witnesses, Pink proceeded to his mother’s house, where they found the old Bible in the attic. Blackwelder opened the dilapidated book to Genesis and discovered that the facing pages that make up Chapter 27 had been folded over to embrace a single piece of ruled yellow tablet paper. It was a second will, dated 1919 and dividing the land equally among the four children. Marshall was by now dead—he died from a faulty heart valve less than a year after inheriting his father’s land—but his wife Susie, described by grandson Lester as a more “downtown” sort of person than any of the Chaffin brothers, immediately contested the second will. A date for a trial was set.

  The story spread—as stories combining ghosts and large chunks of money and feuding relatives will—and by the time the day for the trial arrived, members of the press were thick as the flies in Pink Chaffin’s unscreened living room. Pink arrived in court with ten witnesses in tow—family, friends, and neighbors—all prepared to attest that the signature on the second will was indeed that of James L. Chaffin. (The will itself bore no witness signatures.) After the jury was sworn in, the judge called a lunch break. Apparently Susie and the brothers reached a deal during the recess. In a move that stunned and deeply disappointed the gathered crowds of reporters and townsfolk, Susie stated that the signature was genuine and withdrew her opposition. The widow and three brothers had agreed to share the estate equally. The court thus formally decreed that the document in question—a paper whose secret location had been pointed out by an apparition—was indeed the last will and testament of James L. Chaffin.

  Though the reporters were denied the gleefully anticipated spectacle of shouting, finger-pointing loved ones, they left with an even better story. “Dead Man Returns in Dre
am,” ran a local headline. “Can the Dead Speak from Grave?” asked another.

  About a year later, Britain’s Society for Psychical Research got wind of the case and hired a local lawyer to interview the parties involved and submit a report. The lawyer, J. McN. Johnson of Aberdeen, North Carolina, said he held “scant respect” for the beliefs of SPR members, but promised to pursue his task with mind held open. He obtained sworn statements by James Pinkney Chaffin and Thomas Blackwelder, the man who had driven Pink and Pink’s daughter in his Model T on the twenty-mile journey to find the old coat and, later, the grandfather’s Bible. Johnson was impressed with the sincerity of the Chaffin clan. “I believe I am safe in asserting that if you once talked with these honest people and looked into their clear, unsophisticated countenances, your criticism would vanish into thin air, as did mine.” He wrote these words in a 1927 letter to the SPR, and concluded that the will was genuine and the farmer’s ghost story improbable but true.

  Johnson ruled out the possibility that the second will was a fake on the grounds that not only the witnesses but the defendant herself, Marshall’s widow Susie, agreed that the handwriting on the second will was that of James L. Chaffin.