Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (22 page)

I’ll soon know, because Tandy has promised to expose me to some nineteen-hertz waves. In fact, that’s where we’re heading now. Tandy gets up from the couch. It’s 6:30 p.m., and the Coventry tourism office has closed. Perhaps we’re going to the haunted tower at Warwick Castle? Tandy stops halfway down the first-floor hallway and makes a left. We are not going to Warwick Castle. We’re going to Vic and Lynne Tandy’s dining room. “You can really get a nice standing nineteen-hertz wave going in here. I’ve got my kit all set up for you.”

Tandy’s laptop is set up to channel computer-generated infrasound through the subwoofers of a car stereo amplifier and into a speaker. He pulls out a dining room chair for me. The speaker is seated at the head of the table. “Ready?” says Tandy.

He hits a series of keys on the laptop. We sit in the quiet, heads bowed, as if waiting for the speaker to say grace.

I think I feel something, but then again, I’m looking for it. Tandy says he can’t usually feel it while it’s on, but that he notices the room feels different when he shuts it off. So we turn the infrasound off, then back on, and then off again. It’s hard to say. It’s certainly subtle.

Lynne comes in to set the table for dinner. After she leaves, I ask Tandy to put the infrasound on one last time. He leans over, presses some keys. Is there a mild buzziness in my brain? A faint, indescribable weirdness? It’s there, I think it’s there. “I can feel something already,” I whisper.

Tandy looks up from his keyboard. “I haven’t got anything on yet.”

IF YOU ASK me which is the more likely explanation—infrasonics or spirits—I will tell you to apply the wisdom of Occam’s
razor,
*
a principle which holds that the simplest, the least farfetched, of two competing theories is the place to put your money. But depending on who’s shaving, Occam’s razor yields manifestly different views. To those who believe in an afterlife, the most straightforward explanation for hearing your dead dad is that you’re hearing your dead dad’s spirit. Infrasonics and vibrating eyeballs and fight-or-flight responses would, given this particular worldview, seem to be needless and unlikely complexities. But to those of a less spiritual bent, the concept of a consciousness leaving a body and persisting in some ordered form that is able to interact with living beings is a notion that demands an even more elaborate and unnecessarily complex explanation.

Perhaps it’s time for a break from the tail-chasing complexities of scientific method. Perhaps some other learned pursuit has something to offer us. Has anyone, for instance, tried to prove the existence of ghosts in a court of law? In fact they have. In the farm belt of central North Carolina, some eighty years ago.

*
A gripping moment that capped an otherwise drab existence. A proponent of what
Encyclopædia Britannica
calls “a plain style of writing,” Greville failed to publish much of anything while alive. Well-born but repeatedly passed over for appointments, he was eventually dubbed Knight of the Bath. (The Knights of the Bath are an official Order of Her Majesty the Queen, who does not take enjoyment from Monty Python–style send-ups thereof. Or possibly she does: John Cleese was offered—and declined—an Order of the British Empire.)

*
Tandy is speaking metaphorically. Humans don’t have erectile hair or feathers on the backs of their necks. Looking into this, I learned that hackle feathers are popular for fly-tying. It took a while to figure this out, because the Google entries would say things like, “This is a Metz Grizzly Hen Neck hackle. It could be used for a Matuka-style streamer wing, however, and it’s a top choice for streamer collars, as it’s soft and pulses when the barbules are ‘unzipped.’ ”

*
The principle known as Occam’s razor was not, curiously enough, William of Occam’s idea. Occam simply used it—frequently and “sharply,” to quote the
Encyclopædia Britannica
entry—so much so that it became known as his razor. The entry goes on to say that “he used it to dispense with relations, which he held to be nothing distinct from their foundation in things; with efficient causality, which he tended to view merely as regular succession,” a sentence that cries out for Occam’s editing pencil.

I
N THE SUMMER of 1925, the ordinary life of a Mocksville, North Carolina, farmer shifted a few acres shy of ordinary. James Pinkney Chaffin lived with his wife and daughter in a four-room house on a stream in a field that he planted with sugarcane and cotton. Chaffin picked and baled his own cotton and made molasses from the sugarcane he grew. He carried the molasses in jugs on his back to sell to his neighbors and the townspeople in Mocksville. He did the same with the butter his wife made and the axe handles that he carved and sold for twenty-five cents. On Sundays he walked two miles with his family to the Ijames
Baptist Church, where he sat each week in the same seat, beside an open window—“so he could spit his tobacco,” recalls his grandson Lester. Evenings, James Pinkney Chaffin sat by the fire and greased his boots and sharpened his blades. He did not drink or smoke. He was, says Lester, “just as plain as an old shoe.”

One morning in June 1925, James Pinkney Chaffin announced to his wife that his father—who had been dead four years—had appeared to him at his bedside. Chaffin was not given to dreams of prophecy or to ghost stories or practical jokes, and one can imagine that the breakfast mood that morning was a bit strained. He confided to his wife that several times over the past month, he had dreamed of his father, James L. Chaffin, appearing at his bedside with a sorrowful expression. The previous night, his father had appeared in a black overcoat,
*
which the son recognized from when his father had been alive. James Senior stepped closer to the bed and opened up one side of his overcoat, in the manner of a man selling purloined watches. “He pointed to the inside pocket,” Chaffin is quoted as saying in Mocksville’s
Davie
Record
, “and he said: ‘You will find something about my last will in my overcoat pocket.’”

At the time, as far as anyone knew, the last will of James L. Chaffin was the one on record in the Davie County Clerk’s Office, dated 1905. In a perplexing act of filial betrayal, the old farmer had directed that his entire estate—farmland amounting to one hundred and two acres—go to his second-youngest son, Marshall. Nothing was left to James Pinkney Chaffin or his elder brother John, or to the youngest of the four sons, Abner. To John, especially, it was an egregious slight, as land in that day was typically bequeathed to the eldest son. Though the three sons must surely have been bitter about the will, they did not contest it.

After some searching, Pink, as he was known to his family and friends, located the old man’s overcoat, in the attic of his older brother John. “On examination of the inside pocket,” his testimony goes, “I found the lining had been sewed together. I immediately cut the stitches and found a little roll of paper tied with a string which was in my father’s handwriting and contained only the following words: ‘Read the 27th Chapter of Genesis in my daddie’s old Bible.’” (Chapter 27 is a parable of two brothers, one who cheats the other out of his rightful inheritance.) With his daughter Estelle and his neighbor Thom Blackwelder along as witnesses, Pink proceeded to his mother’s house, where they found the old Bible in the attic. Blackwelder opened the dilapidated book to Genesis and discovered that the facing pages that make up Chapter 27 had been folded over to embrace a single piece of ruled yellow tablet paper. It was a second will, dated 1919 and dividing the land equally among the four children. Marshall was by now dead—he died from a faulty heart valve less than a year after inheriting his father’s land—but his wife Susie, described by grandson Lester as a more “downtown” sort of person than any of the Chaffin brothers, immediately contested the second will. A date for a trial was set.

The story spread—as stories combining ghosts and large chunks of money and feuding relatives will—and by the time the day for the trial arrived, members of the press were thick as the flies in Pink Chaffin’s unscreened living room. Pink arrived in court with ten witnesses in tow—family, friends, and neighbors—all prepared to attest that the signature on the second will was indeed that of James L. Chaffin. (The will itself bore no witness signatures.) After the jury was sworn in, the judge called a lunch break. Apparently Susie and the brothers reached a deal during the recess. In a move that stunned and deeply disappointed the gathered crowds of reporters and townsfolk, Susie stated that the signature was genuine and withdrew her opposition. The widow and three brothers had agreed to share the estate equally. The court thus formally decreed that the document in question—a paper whose secret location had been pointed out by an apparition—was indeed the last will and testament of James L. Chaffin.

Though the reporters were denied the gleefully anticipated spectacle of shouting, finger-pointing loved ones, they left with an even better story. “Dead Man Returns in Dream,” ran a local headline. “Can the Dead Speak from Grave?” asked another.

About a year later, Britain’s Society for Psychical Research got wind of the case and hired a local lawyer to interview the parties involved and submit a report. The lawyer, J. McN. Johnson of Aberdeen, North Carolina, said he held “scant respect” for the beliefs of SPR members, but promised to pursue his task with mind held open. He obtained sworn statements by James Pinkney Chaffin and Thomas Blackwelder, the man who had driven Pink and Pink’s daughter in his Model T on the twenty-mile journey to find the old coat and, later, the grandfather’s Bible. Johnson was impressed with the sincerity of the Chaffin clan. “I believe I am safe in asserting that if you once
talked with these honest people and looked into their clear, unsophisticated countenances, your criticism would vanish into thin air, as did mine.” He wrote these words in a 1927 letter to the SPR, and concluded that the will was genuine and the farmer’s ghost story improbable but true.

Johnson ruled out the possibility that the second will was a fake on the grounds that not only the witnesses but the defendant herself, Marshall’s widow Susie, agreed that the handwriting on the second will was that of James L. Chaffin.

You would think that the SPR would need no more convincing. You would think that a letter like this, following a courtroom victory, would be trumpeted in the pages of the SPR’s journal as proof positive of the soul’s survival after death. But you would be wrong. In response to his report, Johnson received a contrary ten-page letter from SPR honorary officer W. H. Salter, which remains to this day in the Chaffin Will file in the SPR archives. Salter felt—and you’d have to agree with him—that the case presented puzzling irregularities. If the old farmer had changed his mind and now wanted his land divided among all four sons, why would he hide the new will so carefully and not tell any of his sons—indeed anyone at all—about it? Wrote Salter: “There is, I admit, no limit to the folly of testators or the secretiveness of farmers, but the present testator seems to have pushed both these characteristics to the limit. But for the apparition, his testamentary wishes would never have been carried out, and one can hardly suppose that during his life he counted on being able to appear as a ghost.”

The SPR party line on apparitions is outlined in SPR cofounder Frederick Myers’s seven-hundred-page opus
Phantasms of the Living
(which includes a chapter on phantasms of the dead). Myers felt that most are the products of the
viewer’s own mind. Especially suspect is “an apparition which seems to impart any verbal message,” as did the ghost of James L. Chaffin; these are described as “very rare.”

 Attorney Johnson replied to Salter’s letter with a possible explanation. Johnson had been told by a neighbor that the old farmer lived “in mortal terror” of his daughter-in-law Susie, who had in her possession the 1905 will. Changing his will would have meant confronting her, a task James L. was no doubt loath to undertake. So perhaps he hid the new will and planned to tell his three sons about it in his dying moments, so that in death he might escape the wrath of Susie. And then, I suppose, he misjudged his timing, and died before he could tell them. “This man J. P. Chaffin is an honest man and he thoroughly believes his father’s spirit appeared to him and gave him the clue to the 1919 will,” concludes Johnson’s letter. “And his manner appeared to me to be entitled to such respect that to doubt him would be to sin against light.”

Salter didn’t buy it. He came up with his own scenario, which held the will to be a fake, yet salvaged the innocence of James Pinkney Chaffin. He imagined that the eldest son, John Chaffin, perhaps with the help of his brother Abner, faked the will and the slip of paper in the overcoat pocket. James Pinkney Chaffin was made the unwitting pawn in the plot, for it was he who would be moved to discover the will. This would be accomplished by making Pink believe he’d seen his father’s ghost, when what he’d really seen was
his brother John
dressed up in his father’s overcoat.

And there the mystery lay. Until April 2004, when yours truly decided to take a trip to Mocksville. I would talk to the descendants of the Chaffin brothers and unearth the two wills. I would hire a forensic document examiner, the best in the business. I would let science decide, once and for all, if the
second will was a forgery and our overcoat-wearing ghost a fabrication.

THE DIRT ROAD along which James Pinkney Chaffin walked with his molasses and his axe handles is now four lanes wide. Yadkinville Road grew up to be the shopping mall strip, the predictable, just-outside-town plop-down of Burger Kings and BoJangles. My room in the Mocksville Comfort Inn looks out onto this road, and I try to picture old Pink shambling along with his load, vest fronts flapping in the after-blast of passing four-ton Chevys.

There are fewer farms in Mocksville today, and no farmers at all in this branch of the Chaffin clan. Pink’s grandson Lester Blackwelder is a retired Ralston-Purina salesman. He has a salesman’s smile, accessorized with a wink and a toothpick. His sincere, clap-you-on-the-shoulder congeniality served him well in his career; he and his wife Ruby Jean live comfortably in a roomy house on an upscale street. Pink’s grandson Lloyd is an engineer with Ingersoll-Rand. Neither man so much as grows lemons in the backyard. This all came as a surprise to me, having spoken to Lester and Ruby Jean by phone and having placed them—mostly because of their accents and the “might-coulds” in their speech—in homey farm kitchens with gingham curtains and eggs in wire baskets on the counter.

This afternoon, Lester and Ruby Jean and I have gone visiting. We’re sitting in Lloyd Blackwelder’s living room, and the two men are reminiscing. (Lester and Lloyd are James L. Chaffin’s oldest living descendants; Marshall and Abner have no living descendants, and John’s living descendants are the
next generation down—too young to recall any details.) Lester was a teenager when Grandpa Pink used to tell him the story of the dream and the will. His mother Estelle rode in the Model T with her daddy Pink the twenty miles to John’s house, to look for the overcoat. “Dirt roads the whole way,” Lester is saying. “No windows on the car. Mama said she remembered what the coat looked like. The pocket was hand-sewed and there was dirt dobber nestin’ all over it.”

I don’t know what this means and apparently they can tell, because Ruby Jean sets down her iced tea and says, “Wasps’ nests, Mary.” Sometimes it’s just the accent that loses me. “Pie safe” required four repetitions and a trip to the kitchen.

I ask them what James Pinkney Chaffin looked like. “He was real thin,” says Lester. “Six foot. Rugged. Mustache. Not a good-looking man.”

Ruby Jean twirls the ice in her glass. “He didn’t have no mustache, hon.”

Lester considers this. He juts his lower lip. “I thought he had a mustache.”

Later, Ruby Jean finds a photograph for me: Pink Chaffin and his wife and baby daughter posing in their Sunday clothes. Pink’s striped shirt looks new and his hair is combed and pomaded, but you can see the dirt worn into the rims of his fingernails. He confronts the camera with a calm, somber, baldly direct gaze, probably the same one that so impressed attorney Johnson. He doesn’t have a mustache.

Lloyd is the younger of the two grandsons. He is dressed in Levi’s and a corn-colored polo shirt. His memories of Pink are a child’s memories; he recalls the time he sat in his grandfather’s lap, the rocker rocking so hard it flipped over backward, and the toy horses Pink made out of pieces of dried cornstalks, with tufts of cotton for the manes. Lloyd crosses the room to a glass-fronted curio cabinet and takes down a glass walking stick,
twisted at the neck and bobbed into a rounded handle. “Here’s his Sunday cane,” he says. The glass is ribboned with red and blue, like stick candy. Having seen only posed sepia photographs of these people, I find it hard to add this colorful, foppish item to the grimy, monocolor tableaus of James Pinkney Chaffin that I’ve built in my mind. They might as well have shown me the man’s floral nosegay and spats.

Neither Lester nor Lloyd remembers his great-uncle Marshall, the original recipient of James L. Chaffin’s entire estate. Lloyd recalls a vague aura of ill will surrounding Marshall’s wife Susie. Susie, to refresh your memory, is said to have been the one in possession of the earlier will, the one that left everything to Marshall. Interestingly, the first will was written the year after Marshall married Susie. Perhaps Susie pressured her father-in-law into drafting the will. Lester says Grandpa Pink loved to tell the story of the apparition and the secret will, but he can’t recall hearing him say anything at all about Marshall and his wife, or the circumstances of the first will. The one thing he recalls is that James L. Chaffin lived with his son Marshall after his own house burned down, so perhaps the father felt beholden to his son. Indeed, Marshall is listed on the “informant” line of James L. Chaffin’s death certificate, which suggests a closeness between the two.

Lloyd and Lester are not open to considering that Grandpa Pink might have made up the dream and been part of a plot with his brothers to forge a new will and take back the land. That the ghost and the overcoat and the Bible were all just elements of an imaginative scam dreamed up by the three spurned brothers.