The Search for Bridey Murphy

by Morey Bernstein

  Do you remember when he died?

  No. I would remember, but I went away when Father John died.

  You went away when Father John died?

  Yes. I stayed there until Father John died, then I went home.

  Well, did you join Father John then?

  Oh, I saw Father John for a while, and I talked to him.

  Where was he?

  He was there in the house. He used to come and visit.

  In Cork?

  No… with Brian, and I would see him… and he would come back there. He liked to visit with us, and he always came back.

  Well now, who died first, you or Father John?

  I did. And then some time later he died? And then you immediately joined him? Is that right?

  Yes, he came to the house… he came where he wanted to come.

  But Brian didn’t know that Father John and you were there, is that right?

  Yes.

  And you couldn’t seem to tell him that?

  No, I couldn’t. [Almost a tense whisper.] He wouldn’t listen.

  Well, did the people who died go to different places?

  Yes… there were… no it’s just one place, but… it’s spread out.

  How did you talk to each other?

  Just like… we always did.

  I see. The others could hear you?

  Yes, they could hear me.

  But the people on earth, like Brian, could not possibly hear you?

  They won’t listen!

  They wouldn’t listen? Do you think that if they would have tried to listen they could have heard you?

  Yes, I think so.

  But you’re not sure?

  No. I just wanted them to… so bad.

  Well, didn’t anybody in this spirit world ever teach you anything? Didn’t you ever go to school, or didn’t anybody ever give you any instructions of any kind?

  No. Was just sort of a… transitory thing. Just a period, just something that happened.

  But you did realize that you didn’t die, after all, when your body died?

  I always wanted to tell Brian, but he was so worried.

  He was worried?

  Was… afraid he didn’t say enough prayers or… go to church enough or something all the time.

  I see. I understand. Now, for a moment let us go back to when you were a baby in New Amsterdam, when you died as a baby in New Amsterdam. Do you recall that?

  Yes, I do.

  In what country was New Amsterdam?

  Was in America.

  New Amsterdam in America.

  Yes.

  Uh-huh. You know what that is called now?

  No….

  Is it still called New Amsterdam?

  No.

  What is it called now?

  New York.

  Uh-huh.

  New York now.

  [This is a good example of the shifting point of orientation of a subject in a hypnotic age regression. As Dr. Lewis R. Wolberg, famous medical hypnotist and psychiatrist, says, “Regression is never stationary, constantly being altered by the intrusion of mental functioning at other age levels.”

  In this case the subject first replied that she did not know the present name of New Amsterdam. But after a few moments of reflection she was able to utilize her present knowledge.]

  How old were you?

  Don’t know… just baby.

  [The entire New Amsterdam episode is without value from the standpoint of veridical checking. She cannot give us dates or even use her own name. The sequence, therefore, is of interest only in so far as it fits into the whole pattern.]

  All right. Now, rest and relax. Clear your mind completely, because you’re coming back to the present time and place. You’re coming back to the present time and place. Now you’re at the present time and place. You’re perfectly relaxed, you’re perfectly comfortable. You feel very, very pleasant, pleasant—a soothing, comfortable sensation. I shall start counting toward five. When I reach the count of five, you will awaken and feel fine. One… two…3

  1Readers who have heard the phonograph record made from the original tape should be reminded that the record was necessarily edited to keep within time limitations (and to eliminate proper names and identifying references)

  2For readers, whether of the Catholic Faith or not, the following quotation (taken from the book, Purgatory, by Reverend F. X. Schouppe, S.J., Chapter Three, page five) may help to clarify the theological definition of the word purgatory: “The word Purgatory is sometimes taken to mean a place, sometimes an intermediate state between hell and heaven. It is, properly speaking, the condition of souls which, at the moment of death, are in the state of grace, but which have not completely expiated their faults, nor attained the degree of purity necessary to enjoy the vision of God.”

  3Information regarding phonograph records (made from the actual tape recordings of the Bridey Murphy hypnotic sessions) can be obtained by writing to the Wholesale Supply Corporation, Box 458, Pueblo, Colorado

  CHAPTER 11

  Even though the next day was Sunday, I went to the office while Hazel was still doing the breakfast dishes. For many years I had been in the habit of spending a few hours at the office each Sunday; after six days in that madhouse I suppose the novel prospect of working in undisturbed serenity pulled me down there on the seventh day. I was particularly enjoying the Sabbath calm that day: no telephones, no salesmen, no customers, no equipment breakdowns, no interruptions of any kind.

  Then there suddenly came a thunderous rumbling from the main entrance doors downstairs. I knew exactly what that noise meant. Ordinary people knock on the doors. But this deafening, furious shaking of the doors, in earthquake-fashion, was done by no ordinary human being. It had to be Stormy Sam Macintosh.

  It was.

  I managed to open the doors before he ripped them out of the frame, and then Stormy Sam flew right by me, leaving one of his typical greetings: “Only an idiot would work on Sunday, you idiot!”

  Sam Macintosh is an industrial engineer. Although he is well known in industrial circles throughout the Southwest—he was the field engineer for a major manufacturer during the last two decades—he makes his home in Pueblo. Lean and handsome, he’s especially tall, about six feet four or five.

  The stormy Scotchman raced to the back end, the electric motor section. He was looking for, he somehow explained between bursts of cursing, a 25-horsepower, slow-speed, high-torque, totally enclosed motor for hoisting duty.

  Accepting no help from me, he found the motor he wanted, then walked briskly to the switchboard, plugged in a downstairs phone, called long distance for the mine “super,” and completed arrangements to have a truck pick up the motor that afternoon. Regarding me as though I were completely helpless, and muttering profane epithets against the whole human race, he went to the invoice register, made out the charge for the motor, and filed the invoice in its proper place.

  Finally, his job done, he turned to me. “Say, Dr. Saxon tells me that you’ve been doing some work in hypnotic age regression. Sounds interesting. Have you done anything more lately?”

  How can a fellow win? Even in the midst of the ulcers factory and high-torque motors the old subject keeps creeping in.

  I talked in general terms for a while, not mentioning a word about the newest development. But he was showing more interest by the minute, and he obviously had more knowledge of the subject than I had supposed.

  Abruptly he announced, “Mary and I will be over to your place tonight to hear some of your tape recordings.” Just like that. Macintosh was not one to fool with formalities; he merely decreed. Of course, he had done business with me for years; and his wife, Mary, an avid gardener, had long been exchanging plants and advice with Hazel.

  That evening, after Sam and Mary Macintosh arrived, I decided that, instead of playing an ordinary age regression, I would put on the Bridey Murphy tape of the night before. While our guests settled back and listened, Hazel occupied herself by drawing up
a ranch-style house plan. And I started on a layout for a full-page advertisement in the Record Stockman, a cattlemen’s publication. Having heard the recording before, we didn’t intend to give it our full attention again.

  I looked up only once during the first part of the tape, the ordinary age regression. Mary Macintosh was retaining her customary composure, and Sam was as sternly serious as usual. Later, when the recording came to that point where we go “over the hump”—that is, where the regression moves back into the period before the subject’s birth into the present lifetime—I made it a point to observe Sam and Mary again.

  As the Bridey Murphy story commenced, they both hunched forward. Mary’s jaw dropped; Sam’s eyes narrowed. I said nothing. And Hazel was oblivious to all of us; she had just finished the rough floor-plan sketch and was now starting on the elevations for the ranch home she probably would never have.

  The take-up reel on the tape recorder turned slowly, around and around, and eventually brought Bridey Murphy to that portion of the tape which is concerned with St. Theresa’s Church in Belfast.

  Listening almost subconsciously, I gave most of my attention to the advertisement on which I was putting the finishing touches.

  Suddenly we were all jerked to attention by Stormy Sam, who was on his feet, shouting, “Turn that thing off!”

  Bewildered, I walked over and pressed the “stop” button on the recorder. I could hardly see any reason for his brusque command. Had he been somehow offended? I turned to him for an explanation.

  “You two,” said Sam, “may have something of momentous significance here. Yet you sit there doodling like a pair of dolts.”

  “Relax, Mac, we’ve already heard it,” I explained.

  “Heard it! Heard it! Wake up, Rip van Winkle! I’m not talking about listening to it. I’m talking about doing something about it.”

  When he saw that I was still puzzled—and after labeling me with a few more of his pet names—he went on, “Pretty soon, regardless of what precautions you take, people will start talking about this. Then you’ll get your first real taste of how much mayhem can be committed by rumors, gossip, and chatter.

  “By some you will be regarded as just a harmless darn fool. But others will dub you a fanatic, a troublemaker, a crackpot, or a lunatic. You’ll be getting phone calls and letters from mediums, cultists, and faddists. To top it all, there will be those who are offended in the mistaken impression that you are questioning various religious beliefs.”

  There were a few moments of silence while I considered his point. Then I asked, “Well, what can I do about it?”

  “Unfortunately, not very much. But there are a few things. First you and Hazel must have nothing personally to do with the checking of individual identities in Ireland—the ones that are involved in this tape. Leave that to an independent agency. In other words, keep your nose away from any Irish knowledge. In fact, keep as aloof from this work as you possibly can. Just be the middleman, the fellow with the tape recorder.

  “And make a lot more tapes with this girl; check, double-check, and cross-check her while you’re interrogating her. Get facts, facts, facts.”

  While Mac was glibly suggesting “a lot more tapes,” I was thinking of all the trouble I had in arranging a single session. “And if I follow all your suggestions,” I asked, “then all my troubles will be over?”

  Stormy gave out with a smile, an expression that is almost foreign to his face. “No. But do what I suggest anyway.”

  “Incidentally, Mac, I didn’t know that you were interested in reincarnation.”

  He stiffened. “I’m not!” Then he softened a little and added, “But years ago I did a paper on child prodigies. I’ve never quite gotten over it. Mozart wrote a sonata when he was four and an opera by the time he was seven. I remember that a twelve-year old Swiss boy had been appointed inspector of the Grand Maritime Canal by the Swiss Government because of his mechanical genius. And what about Samuel Reshevsky, the chess champion? When he was only five years old he simultaneously took on three European chess champs and whipped them all.

  “A two-year-old kid in Massachusetts,” he continued, “could read and write. By the time he was four he could speak four languages, and a few years later he could tackle any kind of geometry problem. And some time ago the Readers Digest ran an article about Blind Tom, the Negro slave, who played his master’s piano brilliantly the first time he ever put his hands on it.

  “How,” he asked, “can a mind that’s only a few years old write sonatas, solve complicated mathematical problems, and play championship chess? There must be some other factor, something we don’t see.”

  I had often wondered about the same thing myself. I had observed, moreover, that in almost all these cases there had been no apparent hereditary justification for these transcendent capacities. Then, too, those fields in which the prodigies exhibited their proficiency were old ones—music, mathematics, chess, languages.

  Before the Macintoshes left that night, Sam helped me to draft some questions for the second session—that is, if I could ever catch and hold my subject long enough for another session. In making up the questions we kept in mind that it would be asking too much to expect that she would remember historical and political details.

  Memory is, after all, vitally concerned with association. And association is indissolubly linked with emotion and interest. You may have no difficulty, for instance, in recalling the scene of your graduation from high school even though it may have taken place more than twenty years ago. If asked, though, who was the governor of your state at the time of your graduation, you will likely draw a blank. Even though the same amount of time has elapsed in both cases, and you were probably reading the governor’s name in the newspaper almost daily, your mind registered one event and apparently dropped the other.

  I was once asked whether the numeral six on my wrist watch was an Arabic or a Roman numeral. Without referring to my watch, even though I look at it several times each day, I could not remember which type of number it bore. Later, looking at my watch, I was embarrassed to notice that, as is the rule with most watches, it had no number six; the second hand took its place.

  So memory is primarily dependent upon neither frequency of observation nor the passage of time. Rather, the essence of memory is interest, of which a fundamental element is emotion. In short, the greater the emotional impact of an event the sharper the memory of it.

  The same thing is true, I have found, in my hypnotic experiments. While hypnosis enormously extends the memory, it does not perform the magic of conjuring images which held no emotional content for the subject. Hypnosis lifts a curtain and permits the “eye” of the mind to penetrate to depths which are ordinarily inaccessible to the conscious mind. But even at this “distance” the mind (under hypnosis) will still remember in vivid detail only those incidents which were charged with at least some degree of emotion; it still tends to “forget” events which held no interest.

  Careful not to expect the impossible from “Bridey Murphy’s” memory, therefore we made out a list of questions. Not a long list. Since “Bridey” had been somewhat exhausted after the long first session, I knew that the second session must be somewhat shorter. And owing to my belief that an ordinary present-life age regression was the right sort of “warm-up” for a past-life regression, not too much time remained for the quiz period.

  I now realized, moreover, that, in addition to limiting the length of the session, there was something more I could do in order to bring “Bridey” out of her trance in a less fatigued state. I could simply use the post-hypnotic suggestions that she would, after she awakened, feel “even better than before she went to sleep,” “completely relaxed,” “comfortable and rested.” It might even be a good idea, I thought, to give her a five-minute rest period before awakening her, suggesting that the five-minute sleep would be equivalent to one full hour of deep slumber.

  As I had anticipated, pinning down the Simmonses long enough to make tape numbe
r two was no cinch. But at last, a week before Christmas, Rex called me. He and Ruth were having guests that night, he told me, but if I wanted to bring my recorder over to their house and make another tape some time during the evening I could come ahead.

  I went.

  On December 18, 1952, at 9:30 P.M., after having impatiently plodded through an hour of social functioning, I got the second session under way in the presence of witnesses. The hypnosis and the simple age regression went smoothly. After that a transcription of the tape reads as follows:

  TAPE II

  And now you’re going to go on farther back, you’re going to slip back, back, back. Surprising as it may seem, you’ll find that you can go on farther back. You’ll find that you can go on farther back—back—back. Your memory will go on back—backback. And your memory will find yourself; you will find a scene in which you were included, perhaps in some other lifetime, some other age, some other time, some other place. You will pick up that scene which includes you; you will see that scene clearly. I will talk to you again in just a few moments, and when I talk to you again, some scene in which you took place will have popped into your mind. You will see it clearly, and you will be able to tell me about it. Now, now, what scene is in your mind? Tell me about it.

  Going to go on a trip.

  Going to go on a trip?

  Uh-huh.

  Where?

  To Antrim.

  To where?

  Antrim.

  Antrim?

  Uh-huh.

  Where’s that?

  It’s at the seashore.

  That’s at the seashore?

  Uh-huh. There are cliffs… V… white, bright cliffs… and there’s a red stone… black ones… from the glens… and other…

  [It will be noticed that the subject has this time reverted to a different scene from the one she initially recalled during the first session. At that time she saw herself scratching the paint off her bed at the age of four.]