Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

by Mary Roach

  In the Chaffin case, the situation is backward—and thus suspicious. The skill level in the signatures on the 1905 will is substantially worse than in the 1919 will. Which doesn’t make sense if it’s the same writer. Sperry pulls up the 1905 signature, written when Chaffin was in his fifties. The letters are awkwardly formed and there are hesitations—not the type of hesitations that suggest forgery, but the type that suggest this person is not a highly skilled penman. That seems likely, given the state of education in Davie County around that time. According to James W. Wall’s History of Davie County, illiteracy was common among rural families in the mid-1800s. In 1860, when James L. Chaffin was fifteen, only 690 of 1,230 school-age boys in Davie County were enrolled in public schools, and the school year was just a few months long (in winter, when the fields lay fallow). Lester says Grandpa Pink only went as far as third grade, and had a total of nine months of schooling. It’s likely his father would have had even less.

  “Now look at the later will,” says Sperry. “The letter formations are much more fluid. Look at the fs. How much less awkward they are.” And here Chaffin would have been seventy. “If the J. L. Chaffin signatures on the 1905 will are representative of that particular writer’s skill level, and I see no evidence that they are not, then that writer could not have written the signature on the 1919 will.” It would seem to be a fake.

  Sperry also finds some of the language of the second will suspiciously sophisticated for a nearly illiterate farmer. “Wit” is legalese, as is the phrase “both personal and real estate divided equal.”

  Sperry highlights a line in the 1919 will. “Look at the wording here,” he says. “He wants his property to be divided between his four children ‘if they are living at my death … and if not living give share to there children …’ Let’s say the 1919 will was forged and backdated by Chaffin’s other sons in an effort to get the land back from Susie Chaffin after Marshall died. We know there was some ill will between her and the other brothers. With that clause in place, she’s technically out of the picture: The will leaves Marshall’s share of the land to their son, not to her. So let’s imagine the scene on the day of the trial. The family goes to lunch—which is a matter of record—and the brothers sit her down and spell it out: ‘We’ve got ten witnesses prepared to vouch for this signature. You’ve got your choice, Susie. You can go in there and agree that it’s his handwriting and we’ll cut you a one-fourth share—even though you’re not entitled to it in this new will. Or you can let the jury decide, and risk losing it all.’ ”

  Sperry’s theory makes some sense. And if the forger’s intent was to corner Susie and force her hand—rather than actually convince her of the second will’s authenticity—then the breezy, unconcerned handwriting makes sense. Why bother fooling her, if you’ve got her where you want her?

  WHOEVER CHOSE THE epitaph for the gravestone of James L. Chaffin would seem to have had a twinkle in his eye. It says: THY WILL BE DONE. Lester and Ruby Jean and I are out at the Ijames Baptist Church cemetery, visiting the family plots.

  Lester has wandered over to the grave marker of a local acquaintance. “He shot hisself on the back porch.” He continues on down the rows, narrating death in the flat, evenly paced tones of a stock report. “There’s that baby died in the four-wheeler accident. And Thom’s son there: struck by lightning on a combine—” Ruby Jean cuts him off. “Look at this, Mary. Man put his two wives on the same tombstone. Wonder how they’d have felt about that!” Three stones down is the grave of one Flossie Gobble. You don’t have to meet some people to know you’d like them, and Flossie Gobble is one of those people.

  I tell Lester and Ruby Jean about what the handwriting expert found. I am careful to add that Sperry compared Pink’s signature on the court papers with the questioned James L. Chaffin signature, and it isn’t a match.

  “So Grandpa Pink didn’t do it,” says Ruby Jean. She sounds relieved. I don’t add that he must have played some role in the brotherly ruse—unless we buy the scenario of John or Abner Chaffin dressing up in the overcoat and playing ghost.

  “Hunh,” says Lester. “Do you feel good about it?”

  I tell him I’m not surprised by Sperry’s conclusion about the signatures, but I am disappointed. I would have loved to have evidence, even shaky, nonconclusive evidence, that the ghost of James L. Chaffin was real. Next I relate Sperry’s theory about the brothers confronting Susie Chaffin over lunch. In repeating it, the story sounds hopelessly oversophisticated for a bunch of dirt farmers’ sons. And why would they bother with the ghost, the overcoat, the slip of paper? Why not simply claim to have found the second will in the Bible?

  “Well,” says Lester, toeing an upended flower pot. “It’s hard for me or you or anybody else to try to interpret the few facts we’ve got.” I think he means, I wish you and your fancy-pants forensics man would stop trying. But he’s too polite for that.

  The car is quiet on the drive back to Mocksville. It’s late on a Saturday afternoon. Families are sitting in kitchens and on porches, trading gossip, shucking corn, shooing flies. Tomorrow the churches will fill with men and women who hold no doubts about the existence of the human soul and its joyous postmortem journey, men and women who could not care less about the hog sausage opinions of a forensic document examiner and a writer from California. To them, these things are simple and certain: The Chaffins are honest folk. The soul is real. Flossie Gobble lives on.

  Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings. I have one more stop: a research venture taking place at the University of Virginia. I have saved this for last, because it represents what I think is my best chance for a speck of evidence that people leave their bodies when they die.

  *SPR cofounder Frederick Myers muses at some length upon “the question of the clothes of ghosts—or the ghosts of clothes…. If A’s phantom wears a black coat, is that because A wore a black coat, or because B [the person who sees A’s ghost] was accustomed to see him in one? If A had taken to wearing a brown coat since B saw him in the flesh, would A’s phantom wear to B’s eyes a black coat or a brown? Or would the dress which A wore at the moment of death dominate, as it were, and supplant phantasmally the costumes of his ordinary days?” Myers’s guess is that A triggers a remembered image of himself in B’s mind, and that therefore A’s ghost would be clad in black, and not the brown coat he wore when B wasn’t around, or his funeral suit, or the field hockey kilt C liked him to put on when he’d had one too many glasses of port.

  *This comes as no surprise to yours truly, who has twice, on separate continents, carried out an experiment designed to prove the considerable curiosity of cows. This is an experiment I urge you to repeat, simply for the giddy thrill of it. Go into a pasture where cows are grazing in the distance. Shout to get their attention, and then suddenly lie down. The moment you do, they will hurry over to investigate, encircling you and staring down at you with unmitigated bovine fascination.

  12

  Six Feet Over

  A computer stands by on an operating room ceiling,

  awaiting near-death experiencers

  ON THE FAR WALL of an operating room in the University of Virginia Hospital is an enormous photograph of an alpine meadow. The sky and grass are the vivid, lit-up blues and greens of travel posters and ads for allergy drugs, and wildflowers are thick as snow. The beautiful scenery is intended to calm the surgical patients who come here. In the case of a patient I’ll call Wes, the flowers have their work cut out for them. Wes is about to be momentarily—ever so briefly—almost killed.

  The operation is a defibrillator insertion. Defibrillators are most recognizable as those electrified paddles you see being slapped on patients’ chests during cardiac arrest scenes on ER. Nowadays they make defibrillators the size of cell phones and—if you’re prone to dangerous heart arrhythmias—sew them right inside the chest.

  The almost-kil
ling is being done to test Wes’s newly implanted defibrillator. An electrical charge will hit his heart at the crest of a specific EKG peak, derailing the beat and rendering the organ a quivering (fibrillating) lump of tissue incapable of pumping blood. With no oxygen being delivered to his brain, Wes will be clinically dead within seconds. (As long as a heart begins beating again within about four minutes, no permanent brain damage occurs.) It’s then up to Wes’s new defibrillator to jump-start the beat. Patients like Wes are ideal subjects for a study of near-death experiences.

  Outside of the alpine panorama, Room 1 is a fairly standard operating room. There is the operating table, bulky and complicated. There is the towering bank of cardiac monitors, the anesthesiologist’s station, the whiteboard on the wall (“21 Days to National Nurses Week!”). You would have to be looking carefully to notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s up near the ceiling. Taped to the top of the highest monitor is an open laptop computer, as if perhaps they’d run out of study carrels over at the science library and were packing the students in wherever they could fit them. The computer belongs to Professor Bruce Greyson, who works a few blocks away, in the university’s Department of Psychiatric Medicine.

  Greyson has been studying near-death experiences (referred to by those who study them as NDEs) for twenty-nine years. It is difficult to sum up the NDE in a sentence. On a very nuts-and-bolts level, it’s an experience in which a person who came close to dying recalls having been someplace other than blacked out inside his or her body. Some recall traveling no farther than the ceiling, rising away from themselves like a pocket of hot air; others remember hurtling through a sort of tunnel, often toward an all-encompassing light and sometimes toward family or friends* who have died. Patients who recall hovering near the ceiling sometimes report having watched their operation or resuscitation from above. Though their descriptions can be remarkably detailed and accurate (more on this later), some people argue that the patients might have been extrapolating from things they heard or felt, or unconsciously incorporating memories of TV medical dramas or previous hospital visits.

  Greyson is trying to find out: Were they up there or not? In a study begun in early 2004, he hopes to interview eighty defibrillator insertion patients just after they come out of anesthesia. If they mention a near-death experience that included an out-of-body experience, he will ask them to describe everything they saw from up above. Appearing on Greyson’s flat-open laptop during the operations is one of twelve images, in one of five colors, randomly selected by a computer program. The objects depicted are simple and familiar—a frog, a plane, a leaf, a doll. They are brightly colored and animated to help attract the patient’s eye (or whatever it is you use to see when you’ve left your visual cortex behind). It’s an ingenious setup: Since the laptop’s screen faces the ceiling, the images can’t be seen from below.

  I rarely get excited about parapsychology experiments, but if this one produces even a single person who accurately describes the image, I’ll be up there on the ceiling, too. So far, none of the subjects interviewed has reported any type of near-death experience. Working against Greyson is the cocktail of anesthesia used on the patients; it includes a drug that interferes with their memory of anything they might experience (pain, fear, a field trip to heaven) while they’re under. “Though if the consciousness is leaving the brain, then would memory matter?” mused Greyson as we walked here today. He shrugged. “I don’t know.” In a similar study four years back—done at Southampton General Hospital in England by cardiologist Sam Parnia and neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick—only four of sixty-three cardiac arrest survivors interviewed recalled a near-death experience and none reported seeing things from an out-of-body perspective.

  Greyson is working in tandem with a team of UVA cardiologists led by Paul Mounsey. (Mounsey declined to speak with me.) Interestingly, cardiologists—not parapsychologists—have published some of the most widely read studies on near-death experiences. A notable example was the study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, published in the Lancet in 2001. His primary aim was simple, if ambitious: to find out what causes the near-death experience.

  Theories abound. Oxygen deprivation and the drugs used in anesthesia are commonly suggested, and indeed, both drugs and lack of oxygen can trigger elements of the near-death experience—including the tunnel and the light and the out-of -body experience—when death is not near. (Pot, hash, LSD, ketamine, mescaline, and fighter pilot training blackouts have all been known to induce NDE-like experiences.) Intense stress or emotional states have been cited, as have endorphins and seizures. And then there’s the theory Greyson is testing for: the preposterous, marvelous, mind-whirling possibility that the patient’s consciousness somehow exits, and operates independently of, his body.

  Van Lommel and his team interviewed 344 cardiac arrest patients in ten Dutch hospitals. All the patients had been clinically dead (defined by fibrillation on their EKG), and all interviews were done within a few days of the resuscitation. Eighteen percent reported at least one aspect of the typical near-death experience. Van Lommel marvels at the medical paradox of the cardiac arrest NDE: Consciousness, perception, and memory appear to be functioning during a period when the patient has lost, to quote van Lommel, “all functions of the cortex and the brainstem…. Such a brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn’t hallucinate; it couldn’t do anything at all.”

  The fact that only eighteen percent of resuscitated patients have any type of near-death experience led van Lommel to rule out medical explanations such as lack of oxygen to the brain. “With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia …” he wrote, “most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.”

  Van Lommel found that his subjects’ medication was statistically unrelated to their likelihood of having a near-death experience. (On the topic of anesthesia as an NDE inducer, Bruce Greyson makes the point that people under anesthesia but not close to death have far fewer NDEs than people who come close to death without being under anesthesia; so, as he puts it, “it’s hard to see how the drugs can be causing the NDE.”)

  Fear was also unrelated to frequency of NDE (as was religious belief, gender, and education level). One of the explanations left standing was the last explanation you’d expect to read about in a copy of the Lancet: that perhaps the near-death experience was, to quote van Lommel’s paper, a “state of consciousness … in which identity, cognition and emotion function independently from the body, but retain the possibility of nonsensory perception.” Van Lommel ended his paper by encouraging researchers to explore, or at least be open to, the possibility that the explanation for NDEs is that the people having them are undergoing a transcendent experience. That is to say, their consciousness exists in, as van Lommel described it in a more recent paper, some “invisible and immaterial world.”

  Greyson and Mounsey are exploring it. It took some doing. The hospital’s human subjects committee was uncomfortable with the study. To avoid upsetting his subjects, Greyson was asked to remove the word “death” from the consent forms and study title, a tricky undertaking when your study is on near-death experiences. Bear in mind, these are people with life-threatening heart conditions, people who are entering the hospital to have their hearts stopped. Greyson smiles. “And now for the dangerous part: I’m going to ask you if you remember anything.”

  We’re back in Greyson’s office, on the first floor of a creaky, converted Charlottesville house with a wide, inviting porch that no one has time to sit on. Greyson squeezes his near-death research in amid his teaching duties and his private psychiatric practice. I frequently get office e-mails back from him when it’s 9 p.m. in his time zone. I’m not sure whether he has a family. On a shelf at his other office, at the hospital, there is a framed photograph of a child and another of some goats. “Is this your little girl?” I had asked him. He said no. I didn’t know what to say next. “Are these your goats?” is w
hat I came up with. He explained that he shared the office. Greyson is dressed today in a deep green button-down shirt and casual dress pants. He wears wire-frame glasses and an even brown mustache. His hair sits neatly on his head, and his hands rest mainly in his lap. There’s a single barbell in the corner under a cabinet. I try, and fail, to picture him using it. Not that he seems unathletic. I just don’t envision him in motion. I envision him sitting. Working. Working and working.

  We’ve been talking about the stigma of parapsychology. The University of Virginia is one of only three American universities with a parapsychology research unit or lab. Do they ever regret it? Greyson says there was a fair amount of debate as to whether to accept the original gift with which the parapsychology unit was founded. In 1968, Xerox machine inventor Chester Carlson, upon his wife’s urgings, bequeathed a significant number of his millions to the University of Virginia for research on the question of survival of consciousness after death. The university seems to have made peace with their decision, and with the department. “Though if you talk to individuals,” Greyson says, “you get the whole spectrum. Some people think this research is a waste of time and resources, and others think it’s a valuable contribution to medical science.” Though Greyson probably gets more respect from his parapsychology colleagues than from his peers in psychiatry, he seems to be held in high regard as a researcher here. On his mantel is a bronze bust—the university’s William James Award for best research by a resident. I had never realized how much William James looks like Thomas Jefferson.

  “That is Thomas Jefferson,” says Greyson. “That’s the only bust you can get in Charlottesville, Virginia.”