Just returned from a blissful east coast vacation full of family, friends and the humidity I miss so much out here in the desert. We ended our days in Newport, RI—one of the original colonies boasting the oldest Independence Day parade. Sitting in the library now—absorbing knowledge via osmosis?—I have two sandy shells in my purse and a copy of Hypnosis Quarterly, Vol. XXII No. 4 from 1979.
A steal at $.50, the tagline of Hypnosis Quarterly reads “The Illustrated Journal of Hypnotism in All its Phases”. This issue looks at the “Bridey Murphy farce” from the fifties, specifically “dissecting [it]…employing logic and the facts of hypnosis and psychology as the instruments of dismemberment.” This is the wikied story:
“In 1952, Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein put housewife Virginia Tighe of Pueblo, Colorado in a trance that sparked off startling revelations about Tighe's alleged past life as a 19th-century Irishwoman and her rebirth in the United States 59 years later. Bernstein used a technique called hypnotic regression, during which the subject is gradually taken back to childhood. He then attempted to take Virginia one step further, before birth, and suddenly was astonished to find he was listening to Bridey Murphy.
Her tale began in 1806 when Bridey was eight years old and living in a house in Cork. She was the daughter of Duncan Murphy, a barrister, and his wife Kathleen. At the age of 17 she married lawyer Sean Brian McCarthy and moved to Belfast. Bridey told of a fall that caused her death and of watching her own funeral, describing her tombstone and the state of being in life after death. It was, she recalled, a feeling of neither pain nor happiness. Somehow, she was reborn in America, although Bridey was not clear how this event happened. Virginia Tighe herself was born in the Midwest in 1923, had never been to Ireland, and did not speak with even the slightest hint of an Irish accent.”
This case was particularly offensive to the Hypnosis Quarterly editors, who take issue with “the basic problem involved”, which they call “the desire of people to know about death”: “The tragedy of the Bridey Murphy farce is that it gives hope based on ignorance, wishful thinking and misinformation rather than knowledge and fact”.
Other articles in Hypnosis go on to list the inaccuracies of the Bridey story. Printed on the front of magazine is the dedication to “the Advancement of Ethical Hypnosis”, and the feel of the publication is very academic—these are doctors wanting to divorce hypnosis from the unprofessional associations of reincarnation and the afterlife. While I understood their motivations, as I flipped through the magazine on the rocky beaches of Rhode Island, I couldn’t help but disapprove of their desire to shut it all down.
Perhaps it was a lingering colonial spirit, but I like the idea of a remaining corner of mystery in the world, especially in these oil-seeped recession days. My romanticized (read: disease and hunger free) version of colonial life on the island, when everything was new and the universe seemed endless, is as irresistible as the urge to believe a mid-western woman spontaneously connected with the Irish ghost of her previous life.
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