The Search for Bridey Murphy (7 page)

Aside from the fact that it was a particularly clear dream, I paid no attention to it other than to comment about it to Hazel.

The following week, as I was about to start dictating, in came Mr. Haines, the general manager. He thrust his papers under my nose, asked whether the check on top was satisfactory, then started toward the door with his customary swiftness. But as he turned he saw a customer’s order on my desk. “Hey, I’ve been looking for this,” he said, picking up the order and taking it with him.

I reflected about this for a few moments, then I answered it with my old “necessity-of-coincidence” argument and got back to my dictation.

Within ten days I had another dream concerning our company and its general manager. This one was also crystal-clear, and more involved than the previous one. I dreamed that I walked into my office one morning and found my mother waiting for me. Before I even had a chance to express my surprise at this unexpected visit, the ubiquitous Mr. Haines swept into my office. He looked at my mother and then at me. He went back to the door, still having said nothing, and looked out of the doorway as if surveying the whole situation, apparently making sure that no one was listening. Then he slammed the door tightly shut.

As he turned from the door he reached into his inside coat
pocket and took out a letter. He walked toward me, holding the letter out for me. There the dream ended.

A week later I was discussing both of these dreams with my wife and a visitor from Denver. I explained how the first dream had subsequently materialized. “But if this second one comes to pass,” I admitted, I’ll have to give some real thought to this whole business. The first one, after all, could have been nothing more than an accident. The manager is always popping into my office, and he frequently brings papers and occasionally a check.

“But this second dream. That won’t happen. In the first place my mother wouldn’t be sitting in my office early in the morning. And there would be no business at my office which would require the secrecy of closed doors. There haven’t been any secrets at that office for more than sixty years. I can’t possibly imagine what kind of letter the manager would be hiding in his inside coat pocket and why he would take the precaution to make certain that nobody overheard us discussing it.”

The very next morning it happened.

As I turned into my office, there was my mother sitting by my desk. Somehow this failed to trigger the recollection of the dream; I wasn’t thinking about it. We had scarcely had time to greet each other when Mr. Haines burst into the office and proceeded to reenact all the details of my dream. As he shut the door and turned, the dream scenes vividly came alive in my mind and I knew exactly what would happen next. He would reach into his inside coat pocket, pull out a letter which was still in an envelope, and walk toward me with his right hand outstretched, holding the letter. He did precisely that.

At any rate, I would finally learn what was in the letter. Prior to taking it out of the envelope, however, I exclaimed, “Wait! Wait a minute! Before I even look at this letter I’ll have to explain how I already witnessed this whole scene last week!”

They stared at me for a few moments; my mother seemed genuinely alarmed at this weird comment. I finally managed to throw some light on what I was talking about. Then I read the letter.

It was a medical report on my father. Our manager, it seems, had referred him to a physician for a medical check-up, and afterward Mr. Haines had asked the doctor for a report in order that our family might know the facts. All the ritual about shutting the door
and making certain that nobody was listening was to insure against my father’s overhearing his own report.

“Why are you afraid to let him know about this?” I asked after finishing the letter.

“Because it says that he’s got something—a hiatus something,” answered our worried manager.

“Hiatus hernia,” I said. “That’s not very serious. I was fearing the worst after the way you sealed the door.”

Here it was again—a precognitive dream, one that predicted events which as yet had no existence. In this case the dream concerned a letter—one which had not even then been written. But these isolated cases by themselves would never have led me to a personal investigation. The incidents, however, kept right on piling up.

Next in the plot came Hazel’s mother, Mrs. Higgins. She stopped at our house one Sunday morning just long enough to ask Hazel to join her. She was on her way to the ranch, she explained, to get a calf which had been missing for almost a week. “While I was working in the garden this morning,” she went on, “your grandfather suddenly appeared to me in a sort of dream, even though I was wide awake. He told me that the calf would be found in a hole that had been washed out by floods at the edge of the big arroyo running through the ranch.” Hazel’s grandfather had been dead for more than two years.

Mrs. Higgins announced all of this in a matter-of-fact way, as though she actually expected to find the calf as the result of this incident. Hazel put on her jacket and left with her mother, but not before I scoffed at their willingness to waste their time.

When they returned within a few hours, the calf had been found in the exact spot that had been indicated. It had apparently been dead for several days. I muttered something to Hazel about her mother’s probable use of deduction to decide where the animal was likely to be—and then attributing it to a “vision.” Hazel didn’t bother to answer.

Then even Hazel’s cat got into the act. It’s a Siamese cat named Tai. Somewhere along the line the cat had a litter of kittens; and through an indiscretion on Tai’s part, the kittens were not exactly thoroughbreds. So Hazel’s mother encountered no argument when she asked permission to take the kittens to her ranch about sixteen miles south of Pueblo.

The second day after Mrs. Higgins had left with the kittens, Hazel told me that Tai was missing; we couldn’t find her anywhere. But the next afternoon the mystery was solved. Mrs. Higgins came to the house and told us that when she had gone out that morning to give the kittens their milk, who should be there on the doorstep, also awaiting breakfast, but the old gal, Tai herself.

Now Tai had never at any time been to the ranch. And if it makes any difference, she had never been in Mrs. Higgins’ car, nor had she possibly been able to see even the direction in which Mrs. Higgins drove off that day with the kittens; Tai had been locked in the basement. Nevertheless, she had promptly found the way to her kittens, sixteen miles distant. No dope, this cat!

I learned never to relate these incidents to others, because they would inevitably respond with episodes which made my own look pretty slim. Very few people have had any experience with hypnotism, but it seems that almost everyone has encountered some form of extrasensory perception, whether it concerned animal stories or the death of a relative, which cannot be explained by ordinary principles. The complacent manner in which others accepted these things never failed to amaze me—it still does to this very day.

Meanwhile odd phenomena began to enjoy a current boom in newspapers, magazines, and books.
Readers Digest
, for instance, printed an article entitled “Tales of the Supernatural,” and later followed it up with “The Man Who Dreamed the Winners.”Newspapers were telling the story of Lady, the Wonder Horse, an old mare who was demonstrating telepathic ability, finding missing people, and generally performing in a manner most unusual for both horses and people.

But the last straw, the final push that started me digging into the problem of extrasensory perception, came about accidentally and as a result of a hypnotic session. With a deep trance subject Bill Moery and I were conducting an experiment in age regression. When we were almost through, but before the subject had been awakened, I unconsciously toyed with a book on the shelf behind our subject. As I prepared to speak I inadvertently took the book into my hand.

“You have a book in your hand.” This came from our hypnotized subject. Then he told me the name of the book.

Bill and I stared at each other, wondering who had asked him
and—what was more important—who was giving him the answers. Since, however, the books had been in view before the subject had been hypnotized, I tried something else, something he could not have seen.

“What do I have in my hand now?”

“Newspaper,” he answered.

“What’s the name of it?” I asked. I was standing behind him; his eyes, of course, were closed, and there was little possibility that he had seen this paper before the session or on any previous visits, With little hesitation he answered, “
Wall Street Journal.
”

I looked at Bill across the room as I said to our subject, “Bill will hold up a certain number of fingers on his right hand; tell me how many fingers he is holding up.” Taking the cue, Bill put up his right hand (out of the subject’s sight). He held up four fingers.

“Four!” shouted our subject.

After a few more striking demonstrations he abruptly announced, “That’s all I know!”

When I inquired as to what he meant, he explained that when he knew something he simply knew it. “Then all of a sudden I don’t know and it’s all over,” he said.

Bill and I relentlessly closed in; we wanted to get at the mechanics of this thing. What sort of signal tells you that you do know? Describe what takes place. Can you actually “see” these things, or are you picking up our thoughts? By what method can the mind be trained to do what you have just done? What is the sensation when this ability leaves you? We wanted any possible clue that we could extract.

But our subject’s parlor performance was finished for that night. And during the few sessions we had with him at later dates, he was never again able to duplicate it. “When I know, I just know. Then all of a sudden it’s all over.”

Even after putting all these incidents together I could not be positive that they added up to anything. On the other hand, no genius was required to realize that here, at the very least, was a matter worthy of investigation.

Indeed, if these phenomena are real, regardless of how rare or how difficult to classify they may be, then they can change our entire concept of human nature. If these are realities which have been overlooked or omitted simply because they do not fit into the
picture which modern science has painted, then we had better take another look at that picture. Maybe the picture’s frame has been so dazzling as to have blurred our vision.

At any rate, I decided to stop being a blind skeptic. True science, after all, tests hypotheses; it is not supposed to cast aside any ideas which do not, at first glance, appear to fit our modern scheme of things.

Besides, it was clear that science, while solving the mystery of everything from the shape of our planet to the splitting of the atom, is still confounded by one of the most baffling of all puzzles: What is the human mind?

And so the bell rang for round number two. First had been hypnosis. Now came extrasensory perception, a term which refers to the ability to perceive things without using the senses.

I started with two questions: Were there any investigators seriously examining this problem? If so, what had they found?

At this point I recalled that one of my college instructors, back in the days when I was a freshman, had told us briefly about a fellow at Duke University who was performing experiments with a number of students in order to determine whether there was any scientific evidence in favor of telepathy. According to my instructor, this man was using specially designed cards and, in strict accordance with scientific method, was testing the ability of students to identify these cards without actually seeing them in any way. “The results seem to indicate,” continued the instructor, “that we ordinary human beings actually have telepathic powers. Interesting.”

Now, about fourteen years later, I was beginning to agree with my old teacher. It was interesting, all right. But I figured that this man at Duke had probably made a one-shot test merely to satisfy his curiosity, or to gather material for a magazine article. The odds were heavily against the possibility, it seemed to me, that this investigator would still be concerned with the same problem.

Just the same, I started inquiring about the “man with the cards” who had done telepathic experiments back in the thirties. I drew blanks until I came to my young medical friend.

“Oh! You must mean Dr. J. B. Rhine,” he answered.

That was the first time that I had ever heard the name. But from that moment Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine became one of the most important names in my personal file.

“He’s still at Duke University,” added the doctor.

“But I suppose that, after all these years, he’s no longer concerned with extrasensory perception,” I said.

“Your guess is 100 percent wrong,” corrected the doctor. “Rhine has devoted his whole life to those studies; he’s probably recognized as the world’s number one authority ou the subject, and his last book,
Reach of the Mind
, is generally regarded as a classic in this field. And Rhine is not the only one; there are scientists all over the world dedicating themselves exclusively to research in extrasensory perception.”

And so I learned that there were indeed, both here and abroad, scientists keenly interested in these matters. As early as 1882, in a lonely protest against general indifference, a group of scholars in England had formed the English Society for Psychical Research for the purpose of investigating telepathy, telesthesia (clairvoyance), hypnotism, spiritualism—odd and unexpected phenomena which they felt it their duty to explain or to abandon as inane absurdities. This organization, fostering scholarly methods, is more active today than ever before, and has piled up an imposing record of experimental studies.

Following the lead of the British society, other scientists and explorers decided to tackle the same problem. And in 1930, together with three other members of the Duke University Psychology Department, the man who now appears to be the undisputed leader in this arena, J. B. Rhine, launched a full-scale attack. It was the first time in history that a group of university staff members had given so much attention to this subject.