One of the most significant events attracting a great deal of interest in reincarnation in the last half of the 20th century was the publication of Morey Bernstein’s book The Search for Bridey Murphy, which became a best- seller and was made into a film. Bridey was one of the first and most publicized personalities to emerge from the then fledgling practice of employing hypnosis to explore people’s past lives. The book stimulated a great deal of controversy as well as general interest and spawned some of the first serious attempts to actually investigate the validity of reported past life experiences… The Bridey Murphy case has been dismissed by many people as either fantasy or fabrication, but even if it provides little evidence for reincarnation, it still poses some intriguing questions to which so far no one has produced satisfactory answers.
Bridey Murphy’s incarnation in this life was as an American woman, Virginia Tighe, the wife of Hugh Tighe an insurance salesman. The couple lived in Pueblo, Colorado, and among their friends was a businessman Morey Bernstein who had taken up hypnotism as a hobby. One evening at a party Virginia volunteered to be a subject for Bernstein. He discovered that she was a good hypnotic subject and persuaded her to allow him to try to regress her under hypnosis back even beyond her birth, an experiment he had long wanted to do.
Virginia underwent six regression sessions with Bernstein between November 1952 and October 1953, which both his own wife and Hugh Tighe witnessed. During the first session Bernstein instructed Virginia to go back and back in her mind until she found herself in some other scene, in some other place, in some other time. Then, he said, when he talked to her again she would tell him about it. Suddenly Virginia began to talk in a soft Irish brogue.
Neither Bernstein nor Virginia had ever been to Ireland. And yet over the subsequent five sessions Bridey’s Irish brogue grew stronger, and the picture of her life in eighteenth-century County Cork became more detailed. Bridey said she was born on 20 December 1798, came from a Protestant family, and was the daughter of a barrister, Duncan Murphy, and his wife Kathleen. She said that she lived at “the meadows” outside Cork and gave details of her siblings, an older brother, Duncan, and a younger brother who had died in infancy.
Until she was 15 Bridey had gone to a school run by a Mrs. Strayne whose daughter Alice married Bridey’s brother Duncan. Bridey herself married Brian MacCarthy the son of a Roman Catholic barrister John MacCarthy. The couple went through two marriage ceremonies, one in Cork and a second Roman Catholic ceremony, which was kept a secret from Bridey’s parents, in Belfast at the home of a priest, Father John Joseph Gorman. The couple had no children and lived in Belfast until Bridey’s death at the age of 66 as a result of a fall in which she broke her hip. She was, in her own words, “ditched,” i.e. buried, in Belfast in 1864.
Bridey claimed that while they were living in Belfast her husband Brian wrote for the Belfast News Letter and taught at Queen’s University. She mentioned the names of several places in Ireland including Galway, County Limerick, Antrim, and a place called Baylings Crossing. She also mentioned various shops she had known in Belfast including a food shop called Farr’s and a greengrocer called John Carrigan. She described the currency used as pounds, tuppences, and sixpences.
Before Bernstein published his book about Bridey his publisher suggested that some independent research should be carried out in Ireland to check out as many as possible of the details of her story. When this was done many of the general facts she had given about life in Ireland did indeed prove to be correct. But it was impossible to prove the existence of Bridey herself because records of births, deaths and marriages did not exist until after 1864, the year in which Bridey died.
Subsequently every statement made by Bridey Murphy has been scrutinized, checked, and analysed both by people who have wanted to demolish her story and those who have wanted to confirm it. Bridey Murphy’s is certainly not a watertight case, It is still floating, but there are holes beneath the waterline.
Some of the facts that have been confirmed are more compelling than others. Many of the places she had mentioned – Galway, Limerick and Mourne, for example, are celebrated enough for most people to have known. But Baylings Crossing did not appear on any map, and it was discovered to exist only by chance, but as a crossing point which would not appear on a map. What did appear on an 1801 map of Cork was an area just outside the city called Mardike Meadows, which corresponded very well with Bridey’s description of living with her parents at “the meadows.” There is no trace of a Roman Catholic barrister called John Brian MacCarthy living at that time, though there was a bookkeeper of that name. Neither has any trace been found of a St. Theresa’s Church in Belfast at that time, nor of a priest named John Gorman. But there was a greengrocer called John Carrigan in Belfast at that time and a William Farr who sold food, and neither of these names are particularly common or obvious choices for someone drawing on a random store of Irish names. And the “tuppence” that Bridey mentioned was a coin only in circulation during her lifetime, between 1797 and 1850.
Bridey’s use of colloquial and contemporary Irish language was also shown to be largely correct. During one session, for example, she sneezed violently then opened her eyes and asked for a “linen,” the word for a handkerchief. She also said that her mother had made her some “slips,” the word used to describe a pinafore at that time. However, mixed with these convincing “Irishisms” were many modern American words and expressions such as “candy” and “downtown.” This isn’t surprising as it’s not unusual for hypnotized subjects to use some of their own current idiomatic language. One would expect a mixture rather than consistent use of one or the other language.
Many attempts were made to discredit Virginia Tighe and Morey Bernstein when the story first appeared in America. Bernstein’s book was serialized in the Chicago Daily News and, not surprisingly, many of the attacks originated in other newspapers. The Chicago American, for example, pointed out that Virginia Tighe had an Irish aunt who had regaled her with tales of Irish life, which provided the background to flesh out a fantasy. More damningly, they also claimed to have discovered “the real Bridey,” an Irish woman called Bridie Corkell whose maiden name was Murphy, and who had at one time lived in the same street as Virginia and her foster-parents in Chicago. Bridie Corkell, the Chicago American claimed, had talked to Virginia many times and knew her well. They also claimed that Virginia had been in love with Bridie Corkell’s son. The Bridey Murphy story was exploded as apparently all a hoax. Various newspapers around the world published purported “confessions” to this effect by both Bernstein and Tighe, and on 25 June 1956, Life Magazine, under the headline “Bridey Search Ends At Last,” printed a picture of Bridie Corkell surrounded by her grandchildren.
That was by no means the end of the story. A further flurry of investigative journalism by the Denver Post showed that the aunt referred to by the Chicago American, Mrs. Marie Burns, although of Scottish-Irish descent, had been born in New York and had spent most of her life in Chicago and that in any case Virginia had not met her until she was 18. A woman called Bridie Corkell had indeed lived opposite Virginia (which Virginia readily admitted) and had had a son, John, but Virginia denied knowing her well or ever having been in love with her son. He was seven or eight years olden than she was and married by the time Virginia had started to become interested in boys. It was difficult for the Denver Post to find out much more about Mrs. Corkell because she refused resolutely to answer any questions, which may have had something to do with the fact that her son, John Corkell, was in fact the editor of the Chicago American’s Sunday edition.Virginia’s own response to these claims and counterclaims was evident in a lecture she gave in 1976:
Life Magazine … took it upon themselves to write an expose … and people were saying, “Oh well, she heard that all from a neighbour.” May I say that the woman lived somewhere in the general vicinity of where I lived. I never said one word to that woman! It came out later, but was never printed, that the woman’s son was the telegraph editor of the Chicago Herald American. Someone found a woman who would say that she was Irish and that her name was Bridey Murphy and that she’d talked to me. It is not true—my hand to God and my three grandchildren and my three children! Also—the parish priest of this particular woman would say that her first name was Bridey or Bridget, but would not sign any paper to the effect that her last name was Murphy
On the face of it the most likely explanation of the Bridey Murphy story is that she had at some time acquired all the information she gave, forgotten it, and that these forgotten memories then resurfaced when she was under hypnosis. This phenomenon, known as cryptomnesia, is probably the basis for many apparent past-life memories. Little of what she says seems to have been so obscure that she couldn’t have acquired the knowledge if she had set out to do so. But no one has produced a truly convincing explanation of where she might have acquired her knowledge of Ireland and Irish life in the nineteenth-century, the name Baylings Crossing for instance, or why she should have done so. Books and films are one obvious source, but Virginia, according to Bernstein, had not the slightest interest in books and certainly not in the kind of books that would have given her the detail needed to produce the Bridey Murphy story.
Neither did she seem either to welcome the publicity her story stimulated or to profit by it. She appeared under a pseudonym in Bernstein’s book, and after she was “outed,” refused to make money by becoming a public personality. And there has never been any suggestion that she had any kind of special relationship with Bernstein, the hypnotist, and was either consciously or unconsciously trying to please him or to attract his interest and attention.
There seems to be general agreement that Bernstein himself acted in good faith. The worst charge that can be leveled against him is, perhaps, that he accepted too readily that what he heard in the hypnotic sessions was evidence of reincarnation. Most people now would probably agree that the story of Bridey Murphy does little to either prove or disprove the idea of reincarnation. But it may well suggest that sometimes in the hypnotic state people can apparently access memories that seem to belong to another time, another place, or another person. (pp. 1 – 7)
When we discuss the research into the question of life after death several other more compelling cases of reincarnation will be described..