by John Edward
Suzane went in first, and Gary told me later he wasn’t prepared for the sheer force of her style. “You’ll have to wait your turn,” she said when she entered the room; she wasn’t talking either to Gary or to the woman on the other side of the screen. Suzane is no wallflower to begin with, but when she’s connecting, she kicks into a whole different mode. She’s all over the place, her hands are going, and if this is possible, she speaks even faster than I do. She’s just alive with information. With Pat Price, I learned later, Suzane really got in a zone, talking without seeming to stop for a breath, pouring out fact after fact that Pat had to keep up with to validate.
“My jaw was on the floor,” Gary said later. “She was talking nonstop like a cab driver from New York, and getting all this highly specific information. Pat was looking at me, nodding and crying.” The most emotional piece of information was that Pat had lost her son.
I went next, and probably seemed like Ben Stein in comparison. The electrodes were attached—not two or three as I thought, but nineteen, kept together on my head with a kind of shower cap. The first and strongest energy that came through was a male figure to Pat’s side. It seemed to be her husband. I asked her if she understood that, and she said yes. A younger male figure also came through, connected to Pat’s husband. I believed it was their son, and he had shot himself to death. Under normal circumstances, I would have just said it. But I was concerned about telling Pat something so sensitive in front of the cameras. I thought quickly, and just said, “I feel like it’s boom! They go out, boom! There’s like a big explosion or some type of big boom that happens. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
Others came through, but it was Pat’s husband who remained the strongest energy. I told her that I was being shown a bouquet of pink roses, his way of expressing his love. Then I got a sequence of information, all of which she validated.
“You did not have the opportunity to talk to him in the way that you wanted to talk to him prior to his passing, correct?”
“Right.”
“Okay. Now he’s making me feel that either his mother passed very young in his life, or that he was absent or distant from her in life, that there might have been some type of emotional disconnect somehow. And I feel like on the other side they were able to reconnect that. Okay? That’s what’s being shown. Do you understand that?
“Yeah.”
“He’s telling me it’s okay. He wants you to know that it’s okay. He’s making me feel like that’s why he’s made it so important for you to know that he’s here. Okay? He wants me to also confirm to you that he’s made a visit to you, and what I classify as being a visit is where somebody comes through to you without a psychic, and he’s telling me to confirm for you where he came to you, where he was standing in what looks like to me to be the bedroom, where there was a closet door that’s open and you had just been smelling his clothes or you were smelling something that’s connected to him. Does that make sense?”
“Oh, yes.”
There was just one thing strange about this reading: Pat Price’s husband was not dead. In fact, he was sitting outside the room. I was very unnerved when she introduced us later—so much so that I didn’t ask her why she kept validating that he had died, or so it had seemed. I was glad her husband was alive, but I thought I had completely misinterpreted the messages and really blown the session—while being tested in a university laboratory on national television. The whole thing was very confusing—both how I had gotten something so wrong, and why the sitter kept saying I was right when I was wrong. One possible explanation for both these unusual circumstances would emerge months later.
George, Laurie, and Anne followed to complete this grueling day for Pat, who must have felt overpowered for days afterward. I found out later that she heard some of the information over and over again—including her son Mike’s death, which all of us got, although not everyone got it as a suicide. When I told Gary at the end of the day that I had gotten the suicide but awkwardly tried to protect Pat by describing it as a “boom,” he was skeptical. He wondered if I had heard from Pat or one of the other mediums after my session that it was suicide, and was now trying to claim I had known it all along. He didn’t know me, and he had to maintain his scientific objectivity, entertaining all possibilities until he could eliminate them. He never told me this until much later, after we had gotten to know one another.
A few months after the test, Pat Price was brought back into the lab to carefully score transcripts of each of the sessions. Every utterance by all five mediums was put in one of six categories—name, initial, historical fact, personal description, temperament, and “opinion”—and Pat then evaluated each statement and assigned it one of seven ratings—everything from possibly correct to definitely an error. Gary and his colleagues sat with Pat and made her justify every rating. Then they put the data into an Excel computer file.
When Gary tabulated the data, he wouldn’t tell us who had the highest score because he didn’t want it to be a competition—or at least he wanted to minimize our natural instincts. He saw this as a team effort. The important result for him was our cumulative performance. He found that our accuracy rates ranged from 77 to 93 percent, with our total average score as a group, 83 percent. The control subjects, the non-mediums, were 36 percent accurate in their guesses—and those were answers to questions, many of which they had a 50 percent chance of getting right. They filled out questionnaires asking whether they thought nine of Pat’s relatives and two of her pets were alive or dead, along with questions ranging from “Was the sitter’s child happy?” to “Who called the sitter “Patsy?” For many questions, less than 5 percent of the controls got correct answers.
A few months later, I had a chance to watch an unedited tape of Suzane’s reading. The information came fast, even faster than at other times I’d seen her, and it didn’t stop. When the data were tallied, they showed that Suzane had generated 136 pieces of specific information—and more than 80 percent of it was accurate. That means that in one twelve-minute reading, she made more than 100 correct statements about someone she had never met and could not even see. But it doesn’t stop there. She did this with almost no conversation with this woman. Suzane asked only five incidental questions during the entire reading. For lack of an explanation they like better, some entrenched skeptics like to call what we do “cold readings”—ask a lot of questions and skillfully figure out facts from the answers you get, read body language and facial cues. What would they call what Suzane did in Tucson? Probably their latest rationalization: a “hot reading.” Otherwise known as fraud. Spy, do research, go through the garbage—whatever.
The results of the heart and brain tests were interesting. Gary’s hypothesis was that if a medium was reading the energy of the sitter, and you measured the brain waves and heart rates of both, you might find that their hearts or brains were in some way synchronized, or coupled—like one of Gary’s feedback systems. Maybe our two hearts would beat in coordination. But we as mediums believe the opposite is happening. We disconnect from the sitter because we’re not really reading them, we’re reading the spirits they came with. So Gary measured each of us at rest, with our eyes closed, and then during our readings. He found that on average, over the course of the readings, our hearts became not more synchronized but less so—which would be consistent with our claim that we are not connecting with them, but with another entity. This happened with all five of us. As for brain waves, our EEG patterns revealed no connection between the sitter’s heart and our brains.
When we were done and Gary gave us the numbers, Suzane and I were thrilled. “Now we can say it’s been proven,” Suzane said, just about ready to call Larry King herself. But Gary said, well, not exactly. “It’s not a perfect study,” he said. The flaw? He had not kept us apart after our readings. We hung out in the courtyard, and even though he had someone with us, and even though the only conversation was between the mediums who had already done their readings, Gary said h
e could not say with 100 percent certainty that we did not trade information.
Suzane is the archetype of the straight-ahead-no-time-forniceties New Yorker. And she was incensed, to use a nicety. The idea that we had cheated was absurd, not to mention insulting. Gary said he knew we hadn’t cheated, hadn’t broken the secrecy pledge, but this was science. If he was going to write this up for publication, present it as a landmark study and the foundation for the future, then he had to be able to say that cribbing had been eliminated as a possibility. Then why didn’t you think of that before the experiment? Suzane wanted to know. “So we come all the way out here and do this and now we can’t even say it’s documented? That’s bullshit.”
Gary wanted to do additional experiments, not for HBO but for his own research, and Suzane and I agreed to come back to Arizona twice more over the next ten months. Anne Gehman and Laurie Campbell joined us in the second experiment, at a resort called Miraval. This time, each of us stayed in our own room and the sitters were brought to us, and besides not being able to see the sitter, who would be brought in behind us, we were not allowed to have any verbal communication for the first ten minutes. This was called the Silent Sitter Experiment, and Linda and Gary devised it after arranging at the last minute to make one of the sitters Pat Price from the Tucson test. He wanted to see if any of us would realize it was the same person during the ten-minute silent period. None of us did. But later, when he told us the reason he had asked her to come back for a second experiment, I was bowled over. Only days before, Pat’s husband had been killed in a car accident. When I read her this time, he didn’t come through. Gary and I tried to sort through this irony, one layer at a time.
After the first reading in Tucson, I assumed that I had just been wrong, that I had not clearly discerned the energy and was connecting with someone else. But after the second reading at Miraval, I realized that it was Pat’s son Mike, who had committed suicide, who was giving me the information about his dad’s imminent crossing over—as a preparation for his mom. At Miraval I also learned that Pat had some psychic ability of her own, and unknown to anyone, had a premonition of her husband’s death before the Tucson test. That was why she had answered yes to everything I had said about her husband having passed when he was sitting right outside the room. She was literally answering the question I asked: “Do you understand that?” What she meant was that she understood the information in the context of her own premonition. Had I asked more straightforwardly, “I’m getting that your husband has passed. Is that true?” she would have answered differently. It also turned out that she was a little confused during the session. When I described her going into a bedroom and smelling an article of clothing, I felt it was coming from her husband. But this was something that she had done in her son’s room after he passed.
This was a perfect example of my personal adage: “Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I get it wrong. But I get it.” In this case, I just assumed that the events had already happened. I thought the information was coming from Pat’s husband when it was actually coming from her son about her husband. It’s also important to note that every medium is also a psychic, which means we do have the ability to project future events. So there’s always the potential for confusion. That’s why it’s important to understand the process, and know that sometimes it’s the things that make no sense at all at the time of the reading that turn out to be the greatest validations.
When Pat came back to Miraval—before I knew it was her sitting behind me—it was her son who did the talking. He told me, “This is a validation of the validation.” I didn’t understand who this spirit was or what he was talking about until I turned around afterward and saw that it was Pat. And then I realized it was young Mike’s way of saying, “You screwed up last time. That was me trying to prepare my mom. So let’s get it right this time. Now tell my mom I’m with Dad and we’re okay.”
I FOUND THE FIRST TEN MINUTES of each reading at Miraval strange and intriguing. Without any verbal communication between medium and sitter, we wouldn’t even know, as Suzane put it, whether the sitter was “man, woman, or dog.” And in fact, I thought one of the sitters, a man, was a woman. At least he wasn’t a dog. Later, when another sitter came in, one of the first things I got was the movie Pretty in Pink. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it—was it a reference to a character in the movie, an actor, something in the plot? Then I just said what I got. “You look pretty in pink.” The man behind me was wearing a hot pink fluorescent jogging suit.
The idea of not being able to ask any questions was interesting to me, because one of the most common accusations against mediums is that a reading is basically an interview in which the subject doesn’t realize he’s being interviewed. It’s a “cold reading”—a mix of skilled questioning, clever deductions, and of course, lucky guesses. Yes, there are people who do cold readings. They call themselves “mentalists,” and they are essentially mental magicians. Meanwhile, a good medium will hit on highly specific and obscure details that could not possibly be elicited through a cold reading. But, of course, perception is everything. A medium who has question marks at the end of a lot of his statements—as most will—might be confused with someone who’s just doing an interview. But are these really questions? Or are they simply requests to confirm information?
There’s a big difference between saying, “What is your middle name?” and “Who’s Carl?” The latter is the natural way a medium would work: You get information, it’s information that’s not yours, you don’t completely understand it, and you want to know if you got it right. Many times if a medium does have to ask a question, it’s really just a way of facilitating the information so he can move on to the next thing. But after the experiments in Tucson and then Miraval, I realized that this was a form of lazy mediumship. It’s just as easy to make statements and allow them to be confirmed: “He’s telling me your middle name is Carl. Is that true?”
It was at Miraval that I saw the tape of Suzane’s reading in Tucson, in which she asked only five questions during a reading that elicited more than 100 pieces of specific, accurate information. And then, when I was not permitted to ask the sitter any questions for ten minutes, I realized how unnecessary feedback from the client really is. It’s helpful to validate information, but in the end, what the person says has little impact on what I say. Robert Brown, a medium and colleague from London, refers to me as a “psychic terrier.” I stay with what I’m getting, like a dog with a bone, even if the person is emphatically saying no.
Of course, Pat Price saying yes when the answer was no was a new wrinkle. What would I have done if she had said her husband was not dead? Would I have had the confidence—not to mention the rudeness—to insist that her husband, who was sitting outside the room, was dead? Not likely. I might have stayed with the information and let her identify who it was coming from. If I was certain it was her husband I was getting, I might have found a way to give her a gentle heads up. Or I would have dropped the entire line, too unsure and uncomfortable to pursue it. I always say whatever I get I put out there, usually without even thinking about it. But once in a while, it’s not a bad idea to think twice.
A few months after the Miraval tests, Gary brought the sitters to Tucson for the same kind of detailed scoring session that he’d had with the sitter in the first experiment. Our cumulative accuracy rate was 82 percent. There was a relatively small difference between the silent period and the questioning period. We were 77 percent accurate when we could neither see the sitter nor verbally communicate with him. When we could speak, our accuracy rate rose to 85 percent.
THE 90-MINUTE HBO SPECIAL, Life After Life, aired on October 5, 1999, and featured more of me than I expected . . . or would have liked. The part showing me doing readings or being interviewed was fine, but the rest was embarrassing. Me with Sandra, me with my dogs, me working out in the gym, me dancing. I also thought the program didn’t do justice to Suzane Northrop. Very little of her phenomenal reading of Pat
the sitter survived the editing. But Lisa Jackson did a fine job treating the material seriously and exploring it more openly and thoroughly than anyone before. She didn’t take a position in our favor, as I had hoped she might. But she didn’t try to debunk us either. She played it down the middle, showing us in good moments in Gary’s lab and in private readings, along with interviews with skeptics—intelligent and reasonably dispassionate academics, as well as volunteer subject Lynn Darling—not show-business cynics who don’t have the intellectual curiosity to really explore what this is all about.
Gary and Linda did the last of the three tests a month after the HBO special aired, then went on to write up their findings in a twenty-nine-page paper for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, a publication devoted to the exploration of psychic phenomena. Not exactly Science, but as Gary says, none of the big scientific journals will touch this stuff, so you publish where you can, where there are open minds. But it didn’t keep him from presenting his work and data with the highest scientific integrity—and in careful language. “It appears that highly skilled mediums, in laboratory-controlled yet supportive conditions, can receive specific categories of information that can be rated accurately by trained research sitters . . . ,” he wrote. “These two experiments provide quantitative data that are consistent with the hypothesis that some form of anomalous information retrieval was occurring in these skilled mediums.” He also got to work writing a book, The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life after Death, which was scheduled to be published in 2002.
While the findings didn’t speak to the question of how we were doing this, Gary suggested that further research with brain-wave measurements might offer some clues. And anticipating the skeptics, he noted: “Traditional hypotheses of fraud, subtle cueing, and statistical coincidence are improbable explanations of the total set of observations reported here.” Conscious of the concept of scientific certainty, Gary said he could not definitively rule out that HBO cooked up the whole thing, with or without the complicity of the sitter or the mediums. “Private detectives were not employed to attempt to independently verify confidentiality. However, it seems highly improbable that Lisa Jackson, an Emmy Award–winning producer who works for a multiple Emmy Award–winning production company, would risk her professional and personal reputation to engage in fraud at the University of Arizona.”