Real-Life X-Files (23 page)

Perhase not since the famous “Bridie Murphy” case of the 1950s—when American housewife Virginia Tighe supposedly discovered she was the reincarnation of an Irishwoman—has a single “past-life regression” case received such widespread attention as that of an English resident named Jenny Cockell. Since childhood, Mrs. Cockell relates, she has had constant dream-memories of another Irishwoman, eventually identified as Mary Sutton, who died more than two decades before Cockell was born, leaving behind eight young children. However, investigation shows not only that the reincarnation claims are unconvincing but also that there is quite a different hypothesis that best accounts for the proffered evidence.

Jenny Cockell was born in 1953 in rural England. Now a wife and mother, she lives and works as a registered chiropodist (i.e., podiatrist) in Northhamptonshire. Her unusual story has been told on such television programs as
Unsolved Mysteries
and in her own book,
Across Time and Death: A Mother’s Search for Her Past Life Children
(Cockell 1993). Therein, as a self-described “withdrawn and nervous child,” she relates how she frequently woke sobbing with her “memories of Mary’s death” and her expressed “fear for the children I was leaving behind” (1). In addition to her childhood dreams, she would frequently echo Mary’s domestic work during her play: making “bread” by mixing grass seeds in water, sweeping with a broom, and acting out other chores (14). “I was also constantly tidying and clearing out my room and toys,” she writes, “something that I enjoyed almost more than playing with them” (5). At this time, she did not know Mary’s last name and was unaware of countless other details about her origins and life. Somewhat artistically in
clined, Jenny frequently sketched maps of Mary ’s Irish village, although there were admitted variations in the supposed landmarks (5). Among the reasons for Jenny s withdrawal was the unhappy atmosphere of her home, there being, as she described it, “an impossible tension” between her parents (14). “I usually played alone,” she writes, “and the only company I regularly enjoyed was that of my two imaginary male friends” (15).Although she had a high IQ (which would later earn her membership in Mensa, the “genius” society), she reports that she was thought a slow learner due to her “dreamlike state of mind” that carried even into the classroom (15).

Although she describes her supposed memories as “dreams” and refers to her “private trance world” in which she was “oblivious to external activity,” the memories were vivid and seemingly real. As is often the case, this was especially so under hypnosis. In 1988—by then married and the mother of two young children—Cockell was hypnotized for the first time. Under hypnosis, she seemingly became Mary. “I cried as she cried,” she states; “I knew her pain as my own” (33). Tears rolled uncontrollably down her cheeks. Although under hypnosis she seemed to exist partly in the past and partly the present, she says, “Yet I was Mary, and the past had become very real. I could smell the grass on the slopes out-side a large farmhouse, and I breathed in the fresh spring air” (36). Again, “As the questions were being asked and answered in this strange, me-chanical way, I seemed to be free to wander through the places I saw—tangible, vivid places. I felt the wind in my hair; I could touch and smell the air as though I were there” (37).

Under hypnosis she also explored what she believed were her “psychic abilities.” In addition to her past-life memories, she was already convinced she had the power of psychometry (object reading) and dream premonitions (13,28). The hypnotic sessions also took her on an out-of- body experience as part of a dubious test of clairvoyance. (Also, in an earlier session, as “Mary,” she had died, then went out of body to see the surroundings of her “now vacant body” [40, 55].) Not surprisingly, the hypnotic sessions also tapped other past-life experiences. “By chance I found myself,” she reports, “in one of the memories that had been with me since childhood.” One of several such memories, this involved a little French girl from the eighteenth century (40-41). Ultimately, however, the hypnosis helped little in her quest to identify Mary or Mary’s family, leav
ing her “almost where I was before the hypnosis started” (69). She bemoaned “the lack of concrete details such as that forever elusive surname” (70).

She turned then to actual research, publishing an ad in a Mensa magazine, sending out numerous form letters, acquiring maps, and so on. Eventually she turned up a village (Malahide), a road (Swords Road), and finally a woman named Mary Sutton who roughly fit the target. The story ended with Mrs. Cockell making contact with some of Mary’s surviving children. Although they were supposedly her own offspring, they were—ironically and somewhat bizarrely—old enough to be her parents (117-53). Nevertheless, she was satisfied with her “reunion” and began to look into her “next life”—as a Nepalese girl in the twenty-first century (153).

Unfortunately, Cockell’s intriguing and no doubt sincere saga does not withstand critical analysis. First, consider the overwhelming lack of factual information provided by the dreams and hypnosis. Unknown were Mary’s surname, either maiden or married, or the names of her husband or children. Similarly, the village’s name and even its location were a mystery. Cockell was ignorant of dates as well, including Mary’s birth date or even the year of her birth. And so on and on.

She employed circular reasoning. She sent out queries that sought a village with certain sketchy requirements, and when such a village was—not surprisingly—discovered, she adopted it as the one she was looking for. Obviously, if it did not fit she would have looked further. In addition, the technique of retrofitting (after-the-fact matching) was employed. For example, Mrs. Cockell made a sketch of a church after one of her hypnosis sessions, and this was matched with a photo of an actual church, St. Andrew’s, in the village of Malahide. But the sketch is simplistic, showing only a gable end and revealing no awareness of the greater overall structure. In addition, it entirely omits the central feature of the church’s gable end—a massive gothic window—and there are many other significant omissions and mismatchings. Moreover, St. Andrew’s is not the one Mary had actually attended, which was St. Sylvester’s Catholic Church, but instead merely one she would have walked by, one belonging to the Church of Ireland.

Rationalizations for errors and omissions abound throughout Cockell’s book. “A lot of the remembering was in isolated fragments, and sometimes I would have difficulty making sense of them,” she says (6). “I
still find it hard to see Mary herself. It was easier to see the surroundings, which is not too surprising as I see through her and the life remembered as her. I feel her personality mostly” (9). Mary’s husband was “hard to remember,” but then “he seemed to be home less and less” (20). That she lacked even a surname for Mary “was no surprise to me, since I have always been bad at names” (27). Under hypnosis she gave the husband’s name, incorrectly, as Bryan; it was John. At one time she thought the family name was O’Neil rather than Sutton (37, 38). When the name of the road Mary lived on was found to be Swords, not Salmons, Road, Cockell noted that both begin with S and that the accuracy was “about as close as I usually get when trying to remember names“ (66). A village resident “could not quite place the roads” on the map Cockell had drawn, but later found it “to be more accurate than he had expected, given that it had been drawn from dreams” (64-65). Again, when viewing the Catholic church “struck no chords of memory,” she “wondered, however, whether the frontage had changed in the intervening fifty years or so: the lawns might once have been a graveyard, and the driveway certainly looked new.” She concluded that “so little of what I remembered had stayed intact” (84).

But if Jenny Cockell’s story is untrue, where did it come from? The best evidence suggests that such past-life memories are not memories at all. The alleged remembrances made under hypnosis are simply the products of an invitation to fantasize. According to one authority:

For a long while it was believed that hypnosis provided the person hypnotized with abnormal or unusual abilities of recall. The ease with which hypnotized subjects would retrieve forgotten memories and relive early childhood experiences was astonishing….

However, when the veridicality of such memories was examined, it was found that many of the memories were not only false, but they were even outright fabrications. Confabulations, i.e. making up stories to fill in memory gaps, seemed to be the norm rather than the exception. It seems, literally, that using “hypnosis” to revive or awaken a person’s past history somehow or other not only stimulates the person’s desire to recall and his memory processes, but it also opens the flood gates of his or her imagination (Baker 1992, 152).

As to the genesis of “Mary,” I think we must look to Jenny’s unhappy childhood and her consequent tendency to fantasize. An analysis of her autobiographical statements shows her to have many of the traits of a
fantasy-Prone personality (see Wilson and Barber 1983). For example, (1) she is an excellent hypnotic subject (35, 39); (2) as a child she spent much time fantasizing (16), and (3) had imaginary playmates (15), as well as (4) a fantasy identity (i.e., “Mary”); in addition, (5) her imagined sensations are quite vivid and real to her (36-37), and (6) she not only recalls but
relives
past experiences (36-37); (7) she also has had out-of- body experiences (40, 54-55), and (8) believes she has a variety of psychic abilities (13,28,55). Taken together, these traits are strong evidence of fantasy proneness.

As she herself acknowledges, she was forever dreaming: “Sometimes it was about the future, sometimes about the past, but hardly ever about the present.” Indeed, she says, “My escape into the past grew as I grew, and it was like a little death in my own life, a death of part of me that replaced part of my life” (16). Such is the admission of a classic fantasizer, whose need to retreat from an unpleasant reality led her to manufacture a reality—one that took on, in a manner of speaking, a life of its own.

References

Baker, Robert A. 1992.
Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within
. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus.

Cockell, Jenny. 1993.
Across Time and Death: A Mother’s Search for Her Past Life Children
. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Wilson, Sheryl C., and Theodore X. Barber. 1983. “The Fantasy-Prone Personality” in
Imagery; Current Theory Research and Application
, ed. Anees A. Sheikh, New York: Wiley, 340-90.

Chapter 21

At psychic fairs and other popular venues, “aura” photographic portraits are all the rage. But are they really what they are claimed to be? According to belief that has persisted since ancient times, the aura is a radiance from the “energy field” that supposedly emanates from and surrounds all living things. It is perceived not by ordinary vision but by clairvoyance. Although “no evidence has been found to prove its existence” (Guiley 1991), the concept has thrived as pseudoscience. For example, in his 1911 book,
The Human Atmosphere
, Dr. Walter J. Kilner claimed he could not only see the aura and use it for medical diagnoses, but he also accepted the validity of nonexistent “N-rays” and clairvoyance.
The British Medical Journal
rightly scoffed.

Today self-professed “medical intuitives” like Caroline Myss (1997) claim to describe the nature of people s physical diseases by reading their “energy field.” Thus Myss “can make recommendations for treating their condition on both a physical and spiritual level.” She calls this supposedly auric process “energy medicine,” but offers no scientific evidence to substantiate her alleged powers. (
New Age
magazine stated Myss no longer gives readings, and quoted me as terming the practice “offensive and dangerous” [Koontz 2000, 66, 102].) The human body does in fact give off certain radiations, including weak electromagnetic emanations (from the electrical activity of the nerves), chemical emissions (some of which may be perceivable, for instance, as body odor), sonic waves (from the physical actions within the body), etc. Paranormalists sometimes equate these radiations with the aura (Permutt 1988, 57-58), but they do not represent a single, unified phenomenon, nor have they been shown to have the mystical properties attributed to auras.

If psychics could actually see the purported energy fields, one wonders why, as Guiley (1991) observes, their composition “is the subject of conflicting opinions.” She states: “No two clairvoyants see exactly the same aura. Some say they see the entire aura, divided into different layers or bodies, while others say they see only parts of the aura.” In fact, tests of psychics’ abilities to see the alleged radiant emanations have repeatedly met with failure. One test, for example, involved placing either one or two persons in a completely dark room and asking the alleged psychic to state how many auras she saw. Only chance results were obtained (Loftin 1990). James Randi conducted another test for a television special, offering $100,000 for successful results. The psychic challenger selected ten people she maintained had clearly visible auras, and agreed that the auras would extend above the screens behind which—unseen by her—the people were to stand. Unfortunately, in choosing which screens supposedly had people behind them, the psychic got only four out of ten correct guesses—less than the five that chance allowed (Steiner 1989).