A Gust from Another World

It was at the lowest of decibels that the voice of Bridey Murphy—muffled, groggily articulated—leaked into America. Bridey first made herself heard on the night of November 29, 1952, in a living room in Pueblo, Colorado, elicited from Virginia “Ginni” Tighe through the ministrations of Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist. Ginni was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of a local Oldsmobile dealer; Morey, when not engaged with his hobby, ran a profitable family business specializing in heavy equipment for farms and ranches.He had been enthralled with hypnosis for a decade. At first applying it to the treatment of headaches, insomnia, and stuttering, he was drawn gradually into uncharted realms: precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, and finally reincarnation, something he had once regarded as “preposterous” but was now eager to investigate and, if possible, document. He had tried his hand at hypnotic age regression and was confident that he had taken subjects back to early childhood. Now he wondered whether the process could be pushed further, perhaps into a previous existence. Ginni, a casual acquaintance, seemed an ideal candidate for the experiment. In a few earlier sessions he had be...