‘But you think differently,’ Lopez said.
Professor Bowen smiled. ‘I think exactly the same. However, just because something remains unexplained does not mean that it cannot be provided with some evidence to support it. I’ve been researching things like out-of-body experiences, NDEs – that is, near-death experiences – such-like for over twenty-five years and I can tell you two things for sure: one, that I don’t know what it all means, and, two, it happens all the time and it’s real.’
Ethan leaned against the office wall. ‘The soul outlives the body?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she cautioned. ‘Nobody knows. All of the world’s religions are founded on the belief that there is life after death. It doesn’t matter which god they purport to worship or what name they give to that afterlife, whether it’s Heaven or Nirvana or Paradise: all faiths are void if there is no afterlife. Because we can say that nobody knows for sure if there’s an afterlife, then the lie of all humanity’s religions is exposed. But that doesn’t mean that the afterlife doesn’t exist, only that man’s attempts so far to rationalize and justify their beliefs are utterly in vain.’
‘How does this tie in with the homicides?’ Jarvis asked.
Professor Bowen gestured to the image of the wraith in her book.
‘There are stories from medieval times of what were called at the time “vengeful spirits”. Supposedly the souls of those wronged in life, they would return from the dead to get revenge on their assailants. These spirits were renowned for immense strength and violence and formed the origin of poltergeist legends. But according to these old accounts, a poltergeist is nothing compared to a wraith.’
‘And these things would actively hunt down enemies from their former lives?’ Ethan asked.
‘Supposedly so,’ Professor Bowen replied. ‘The only detailed account we have of a wraith comes from the diary of a man named Henry Wilberforce, a British Army Officer who served in India during the uprising of 1857. The insurrection was called The Mutiny, when Indian soldiers subservient to the British Crown rebelled when they were ordered to bite the paper off their ammunition cartridges, which they believed were coated in tallow. The use of the fat went against their religious beliefs.’
‘The grease was made from tallow or lard,’ Ethan said, recalling the event from history books, ‘which derived from beef or pork respectively and, therefore, upset both Hindus and Muslims. The rebellion was eventually put down.’
‘Precisely,’ Bowen confirmed. ‘During the conflict, many British prisoners were captured and were held in a place called the Black Hole of Calcutta, a prison so small, hot and dangerous that in one night alone only twenty-three of its one hundred forty-six prisoners survived, the dead victims of starvation, dehydration and the trampling of other prisoners.’
‘Makes Cook County look like the Ritz,’ Lopez observed.
‘One of those survivors was Henry Wilberforce,’ Bowen explained. ‘Liberated by British troops, he went on to serve as a provincial governor. But immediately after the deaths in the Black Hole, he recorded that every single prison guard in the jail was murdered over the next few nights. Some were crushed to death, others torn limb from limb, others impaled at impossible heights and angles on trees and railings. Most people thought that the jail survivors were responsible, but all of them presented alibis and none could explain how the jailors had come to die in such extreme ways.’
‘You’re saying that somebody’s ghost killed them?’ Lopez asked.
‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Bowen admitted, ‘but the event was recorded by Wilberforce as an example of an extreme supernatural event because one person actually saw the ghost that did it.’
‘What did he say?’ Ethan asked.
‘Not much of any use,’ Bowen replied. ‘He died of shock soon after saying that they had seen the Devil himself lift a man off his feet and tear him physically in half. That victim was one of the jailors.’
‘Wait one,’ Lopez said. ‘So you believe in this kind of phenomena, but you don’t believe it at the same time?’
‘It’s not about belief , ’ Professor Bowen said, ‘it’s about evidence. You only have to search the Internet to find a thousand pages of claims of violent hauntings and terrible poltergeist activity. But a more patient search on each of the cases reveals that other people who lived in the same houses noted no such activity. The Haunting in Connecticut, the Amityville Horror, the Exorcist: all of them have been made famous through television and film, yet none of them have a shred of evidence to support the claims and considerable evidence showing them to be false. The house in the Amityville case has been occupied continuously since the family concerned in the book and film moved out, yet nobody has reported anything untoward as having happened within the property since. ’
‘But?’ Ethan coaxed her with a smile.
‘But,’ she replied, ‘as with so many supposedly paranormal events, a small percentage defies rational explanation. They stand up to scrutiny, are witnessed by people who make no attempt to gain financially or otherwise from their stories, and often have footage or audio recordings to support their claims. They’re rare, but there, as I like to say.’
‘Could they crush an elevator car or tear a man in half ?’ Ethan challenged her.
Professor Bowen sighed.
‘I’ve never heard of anything like that,’ she admitted, ‘but, in 1967, in Rosenheim, Germany, scientists from the Max Planck Institute were called to a lawyer’s office to investigate an immense surge of poltergeist activity. Drawers would open and close, lights would swing, printers would spill their ink, telephone calls would be made when there was nobody actually using a phone. One set of records shows the talking clock being dialed three times per minute, too fast for the mechanical dialing system of the phones of the time to handle. On one occasion, every light bulb in the building blew at once. Such events require huge amounts of energy and yet nobody was doing anything untoward. The scientists set up cameras and voice recorders to monitor events and recorded some of the only existing footage of things like pictures rotating on their hooks, far beyond the reach of the witnesses. They also noted that electrical equipment would falter and lights would flicker when a nineteen-year-old employee was in the building. They eventually traced the events to her and, when she was sent on vacation, the poltergeist activity ceased.’
‘That’s hardly the same, even if it is true,’ Ethan said.
‘On one occasion,’ Professor Bowen added, ‘an extremely heavy filing cabinet was witnessed to have been shifted across the office floor. It would seem that, as remarkable as it may appear, it is possible that this kind of energy can indeed be directed by poltergeist activity and to an extent that exceeds our own physical capabilities.’
‘And you say that a wraith is worse?’ Lopez asked.
‘Much worse,’ Professor Bowen confirmed. ‘There is no precedent in modern times. The name derives from archaic Scottish dialect, meaning a ghost. However, most descriptions of a wraith suggest it’s something like a poltergeist on steroids, extremely violent and utterly unstoppable. There are numerous references to witches in ancient literature that might in fact refer to wraiths, but nobody’s really sure.’
Ethan glanced thoughtfully out of the window of the office.
‘So you’re saying that poltergeist activity is often attached to somebody who is alive, but a wraith is the spirit of somebody who is dead?’
Professor Bowen nodded. ‘That is almost certainly the case. Poltergeists tend to be caused by the living, through means that we just don’t understand that may involve an individual actually causing the entire disturbance themselves or being used as a channel for the events. It is often centered on troubled teenage girls, as in the Rosenheim case, or girls at about the age of puberty. Wraiths, on the other hand, are the spirits of the dead.’
Lopez looked at Ethan. ‘That kind of rules out Karina,’ she said.
Ethan shrugged. ‘All of this is just based on hearsay. Like you sai
d, professor, there’s absolutely no evidence that there is an afterlife, anyway. So why should we even consider that this is the work of some kind of rampaging spirit?’
‘That’s not quite what I said,’ Professor Bowen corrected him. ‘Whatever you may or may not think about the afterlife, the notion that we can exist independently of our bodies is a fact.’
30
‘How can you say that?’ Lopez asked. ‘There’s no evidence to support it.’
‘Actually,’ Professor Bowen replied, ‘there is a wealth of evidence. There have been countless cases of victims of massive trauma finding themselves floating above their bodies as paramedical teams strive to save their lives. The experiences of people floating up through tunnels of light, meeting deceased family members and so on are common in the public knowledge.’
‘No.’ Lopez shook her head. ‘I heard it was suggested that all such experiences were the result of lucid dreaming.’
‘What’s that?’ Ethan asked.
‘It’s when you wake up within a dream,’ Lopez said. ‘The brain builds our world around us using what we see through our eyes. When we’re asleep, it does so without information coming in, and we dream. That’s why dreams can be so weird – the dream world is just the brain working alone. But some people train themselves to become aware when they’re dreaming, and the result is the best virtual-reality in the world, completely indistinguishable from the here and now, except that there are no rules: if this was a dream, I could walk through that wall right now.’
‘She’s right,’ Bowen said. ‘Lucid dreams are remarkable, and the majority of all supposed alien abductions can be put down to people having lucid dreams without realizing what they are. If you don’t understand them, they can be terrifying, as it appears to be absolute reality. Near-death experiences could plausibly fall into the same category.’
‘It’s still personal experience, though,’ Ethan said. ‘So it can’t be proved. I thought that such experiences were thought to be the product of chemicals in the brain, or similar?’
‘A chemical known as dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, exists in trace amounts in mammals, including humans,’ Professor Bowen agreed. ‘It acts as a psychedelic drug, if ingested, and has been repeatedly cited as the cause of both out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, which in many cases are closely related to each other.’
‘So can’t DMT explain the experiences entirely then?’ Lopez asked.
Professor Bowen inclined her head in acquiescence. ‘That’s not impossible, but the victims I’m referring to were clinically dead. They did not have any activity in their brains. Not only that, but the events they witnessed when floating above their bodies actually occurred and were not the imagined products of the release of chemicals such as DMT. There are multiple accounts of people recounting the actions of surgeons and nurses working to save their lives while they were clinically dead. How could they even see and hear, Mr. Warner, if their eyes were closed and their brains inactive?’
‘More to the point,’ Lopez challenged, ‘how could they remember their experiences if their brains were inactive? I thought that if a person’s cortex was completely shut down, it could not be reactivated, that they really would be dead?’
‘Because you assume that the brain is the sole repository of memory,’ Bowen replied to her. ‘But what if the brain is in fact an antenna of sorts, a point of access rather than the home of memory? There are individuals who have fallen into icy water and been trapped for up to two hours, their bodies as cold as a corpse and their brains entirely inactive. Yet these people have been revived and made full recoveries. If their brain was dead and with it their memory lost, how could they have recovered in full?’
Professor Bowen gestured to newspaper cuttings tacked to the walls of her office.
‘In 2006, a Japanese man named Mitsutaka Uchikoshi was stranded on a mountain in the depths of winter for twenty-four days. His core temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees Celsius and he ate nothing. It is believed he went into some kind of hibernation, because, after being found, he was revived in hospital and made a full recovery.’
She gestured to another cutting.
‘Erika Nordby, a one-year old who in 2001 got out of her Canadian home on a bitter winter’s night and was found hours later lying in the snow wearing only a diaper in temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. Her heart had not beaten for two hours and she was clinically dead, so cold that her mouth was frozen shut and her toes frozen together. Yet when she was warmed by a hospital team, her heart spontaneously began to beat again on its own and, upon recovery, she showed no sign of brain damage.’
Professor Bowen turned back to face them. ‘Both of these cases evidence the ability of the human brain to survive extreme trauma, with the cold likely responsible for preventing decay of otherwise dead organs and allowing them to return to life.’
‘But doesn’t that support a sceptical view of the soul and not a believer’s perspective?’ Lopez asked.
‘At first glance, yes,’ the professor agreed, ‘until you think about it. It took extreme cold to achieve what survivors of near-death experiences achieved without any such support. The decay of biological organs occurs very quickly in a hospital bed at room temperature. Yet the subjects clearly recall details of their experiences and of the real world around them despite having no recorded brain activity.’
Ethan frowned. ‘I thought that there were experiments done, where investigators secretly placed playing cards on top of cabinets in the hope that patients who had out-of-body experiences would spot them.’
‘They did,’ Professor Bowen agreed, ‘but answer me this: If you were suffering from a potentially fatal trauma and found yourself floating above your own body while surgeons tried desperately to resuscitate you, would you be watching anxiously to see if they were successful or would you be busy examining the dusty tops of nearby cabinets?’
Ethan smiled ruefully.
‘Fair point,’ Lopez said. ‘So you have evidence of life after death?’
‘Direct evidence of a man who experienced not just a near-death experience and all of the classical signs that go along with it,’ Professor Bowen replied, ‘but who also underwent a physiological change as a result of the NDE.’
‘What kind of change?’ Ethan asked.
‘The subject was a sixty-year-old man, whose experience was published in an extensive journal written by a British nurse who spent years documenting such events,’ Professor Bowen explained. ‘He had a profound out-of-body experience during a period of extremely deep unconsciousness and found himself floating above his own body. From there, he was later able to accurately describe the actions of the doctor and nurse caring for him at the time. He then rose up out of the room and traveled to what he described as a pink room, where his dead mother told him that it wasn’t yet his time and that he had to go back.’
‘Sounds like the effect of drugs,’ Lopez surmised. ‘If he wasn’t clinically dead, how could his experience be defined as proof of an afterlife?’
‘Because when he was in the pink room, what he described as a “messianic figure” touched his hand,’ Professor Bowen replied. ‘The subject had suffered from cerebral palsy all of his life, and, from birth, his right hand had been in a permanently contracted position. But following his experience, he was able to open and use his hand normally. There is absolutely no medical explanation for that.’
Professor Bowen stepped out from behind her desk and gestured to her bookshelves.
‘Another case involved a fifty-nine-year-old woman who was admitted to a British hospital suffering from a severe asthma attack. She was in such distress and danger that she blacked out in the emergency room, but to her she didn’t lose consciousness at all. She reported that she suddenly felt entirely calm and was looking down at her body on a hospital bed from above. She reported noticing a mousetrap discarded on top of a tall cupboard on one side of the room. Then a bright light appeared and she was drawn toward
it. Figures appeared, as outlines, and she reported feeling incredibly peaceful, but the figures told her that she had to go back. Although she wasn’t able to identify the figures, she reported feeling as though she knew them, like they were members of her own family.’ Professor Bowen looked at Lopez as she went on: ‘When she recovered consciousness, she reported the experience to a nurse, who checked the top of the cupboard in the emergency room and found the mousetrap.’
Ethan inclined his head.
‘But what you’re describing, even though they are true accounts with evidence, doesn’t tie in that well with what we’re encountering here in New York. This thing, if it really exists, is roaming the damned streets killing people.’
Professor Bowen glanced down at the picture of the wraith in the open book and sighed.
‘There is a different kind of NDE,’ she said. ‘They don’t get nearly as much attention, perhaps because they’re considered somewhat frightening.’
‘Frightening?’ Lopez asked. ‘In what way?’
‘They start the same,’ Professor Bowen explained, ‘with the body rising into a tunnel of light, but then things start to change. There are a few variations: the first is that the ordinary process of rising up into the light is translated by the person experiencing it as frightening. The second is that the person finds themselves in an infinite void of blackness, utterly alone and isolated. There is no sense of time – they could have been there ten minutes or ten thousand years, but are unable to tell. The third, and final type, is an experience of being dragged down into an intensely cold darkness by ghoulish, demonic beings. These experiences are considered terrifying by those who witness them, and are accompanied by loud and annoying noises, the sense of many beings in extreme pain or distress, and a complete inability to prevent the witness from plunging into an abyss of misery and suffering.’
The Eternity Project Page 18