Speaker 1: Pushkin. Okay, I think we are recording. Yeah, are you
Speaker 1: controlling the recorder with your butt? Correct? Last summer coronavirus summer,
Speaker 1: the last Archives. Dauntless producer Ben Natt of Haffrey came
Speaker 1: to visit me in Vermont picture woods fields, goats, dogs,
Speaker 1: a barn cat. The state was pretty much locked down,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't let him in the house. So we
Speaker 1: sat as vermontra say, a cow's length apart, on the
Speaker 1: porch of a cabin in the woods. Benn had driven
Speaker 1: up in a pickup truck loaded with all of his
Speaker 1: fancy recording equipment, but in the cabin where there's no electricity,
Speaker 1: the conditions for recording were a little primitive. That's like
Speaker 1: we just need cornea. This is like fully regressed last
Speaker 1: Archive recordings. This is the last archive, nineteenth century edition. Okay.
Speaker 1: So the conditions were grim the way, so much of
Speaker 1: the conditions in the pandemic were grim. But Ben had
Speaker 1: come a long way to tell me a story. It's
Speaker 1: the trappings of a ghost story basically. Also, we see
Speaker 1: we have a chicken in the yard. Don't let the
Speaker 1: chicken in. Wh'll never get the chicken. Yeah, there's a strong,
Speaker 1: no chickens in the Last Archive roll. This episode, Ben's
Speaker 1: going to tell you that story, the story he told
Speaker 1: me on the porch of that cabin in Vermont, a
Speaker 1: ghost story, a story I'd never heard before, but which
Speaker 1: honestly is like the most last archive thing ever. Should
Speaker 1: I do the thing here? Yeah, you tell the people.
Speaker 1: Imagine a place, a cabin in the backwoods of the mind,
Speaker 1: lined with cupboards, stocked with proof, cluttered with weird stuff, magnets,
Speaker 1: a deck of cards with strange symbols, old radios, WI
Speaker 1: on the door, weirdly, even on the door of that cabin.
Speaker 1: Who reads the Last Archive? I'm Jill Lapoor and I'm
Speaker 1: Ben Matafaffrey. This podcast has been going through the last
Speaker 1: century of American history, decade by decade. This season is
Speaker 1: all about doubt, and with this story of Ben's, we've
Speaker 1: reached the nineteen fifties. I think of the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: as an age of conformity and also of persecution for
Speaker 1: the nonconforming. So you've got your suburbs and your Barbie
Speaker 1: dolls and your hula hoops and your heyday of liberalism.
Speaker 1: But you've also got your red lining and your housing
Speaker 1: covenants to keep black people out of those suburbs. The
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties was a time when it seemed somehow important
Speaker 1: to pretend that things were one way when they were
Speaker 1: really another way. That's what grabbed me about Ben's we
Speaker 1: think of the nineteen fifties is a time of intellectual
Speaker 1: consensus and rigidity when actually, well, I don't want to
Speaker 1: give it all away, Okay, Ben, take us there. Step
Speaker 1: through the door to a living room in the town
Speaker 1: of Pueblo, Colorado, ten thirty five pm, November nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: There's a man leaning over a woman. She's lying on
Speaker 1: a couch, and he's speaking into a microphone. Now, we're
Speaker 1: going to turn back. We're going to turn back through
Speaker 1: time and space, just like turning back in the pages
Speaker 1: of a book. And when I next talked to you,
Speaker 1: you will be seven years old, and you will be
Speaker 1: able to answer my questions. That's the voice of Maury Bernstein,
Speaker 1: a thirty three year old business man. He works in
Speaker 1: the farm and industrial equipment business. Handsome, straight laced, he's
Speaker 1: got curled black hair. Now, now you're seven years old,
Speaker 1: are there any nice boys that you like? That voice
Speaker 1: belongs to a twenty nine year old housewife named Virginia Tie.
Speaker 1: She seems ordinary enough at first that night in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two, she could have stayed home with her husband,
Speaker 1: a local businessman, or they could have gone to a
Speaker 1: bridge game, a cocktail party, or a dance. Maybe she
Speaker 1: should have, but instead she's here on the couch in
Speaker 1: Murray Burnstein's pitch black living room. I want you to
Speaker 1: keep on going back and back and back in your mind,
Speaker 1: and surprising as it may seem, strange as it may seem,
Speaker 1: you will find that there are other scenes in your memory.
Speaker 1: There are other scenes from far away lands and list
Speaker 1: in places in your memory. Bernstein's doing something called hypnotic
Speaker 1: age aggression. After the World Wars, it been used as
Speaker 1: a way of helping soldiers deal with trauma. But the
Speaker 1: woman Burnstein was age aggressing, Virginia Tie, didn't have any
Speaker 1: known trauma, And honestly, that's not what burn scene was.
Speaker 1: After he'd read a book that said that hypnotic age
Speaker 1: aggression could help people remember past lives as in reincarnation.
Speaker 1: Now you're going to tell me what scenes came into
Speaker 1: your mind. What did you see scratch the paint offer
Speaker 1: on my bed. It was a little bid. Don't my
Speaker 1: nails on? Harry post into struandess why did you do that?
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's just mad an awful spank. And
Speaker 1: what is your name? Fridy? Your name is what? Fredy?
Speaker 1: Don't you have any other name? Pride Murphy? Where do
Speaker 1: you live? Ireland? Do you know what year it is? Eighteen?
Speaker 1: Ohs Bernstein had done it. He had discovered Virginia tis
Speaker 1: past self. She was named Bridy Murphy, born in Ireland
Speaker 1: in seventeen ninety eight, died in eighteen sixty four, and
Speaker 1: then resurrected in nineteen fifty two and caught on tape
Speaker 1: like a ghost. That tape is incredible to listen to,
Speaker 1: but not as incredible is what happened next. So I
Speaker 1: kind of just don't even get from the start, like
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties businessmen, yeah, and occult, Like I don't even
Speaker 1: see how those two things good? Yeah, exactly, That's what.
Speaker 1: That's what I was really curious about, because it's this Well,
Speaker 1: I'll get to what happened, but this is who more
Speaker 1: he is. Ever since he was a kid, Maury Bernstein
Speaker 1: had led a charmed life. His family ran a successful
Speaker 1: business selling industrial equipment flipping scrap metal in Pueblo Steeltown.
Speaker 1: Bernstein knew one day he'd take over the family business.
Speaker 1: He was a straight a student, star athlete. People said
Speaker 1: he looked like Frank Sinatra. He was so good at
Speaker 1: Yo Yo's that he got a job at the local
Speaker 1: department store, showing them off on the sales floor. I
Speaker 1: guess he saw more doing something you wanted to do
Speaker 1: it too. Bernstein graduated from Wharton in nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: and he headed back to Colorado to help run the
Speaker 1: family business. He got married to a woman named Hazel Higgins,
Speaker 1: a made to order wife, a maid to order life
Speaker 1: until one night Bernstein went to a party with a
Speaker 1: man who said he was a hypnotist. The man asked
Speaker 1: if anyone wanted to try it, and, as Bernstein later wrote,
Speaker 1: a tall, attractive blonde girl spoke up and offered to
Speaker 1: be his subject. So the first scientifically relevant detail in
Speaker 1: this investigation the unknown is that the first time Bernstein
Speaker 1: witness the shypnotism, it involves an attractive blonde lady. That
Speaker 1: the women are attractive in some Doris Day way is
Speaker 1: not incidental to this story. Bernstein's journey began that night
Speaker 1: with that blonde woman. The hypnotist put her so deep
Speaker 1: in a trance that her fiance could do anything and
Speaker 1: she wouldn't flinch. He made loud noises, tickled her, put
Speaker 1: mustard on her face. It's pretty creepy, But the sexual
Speaker 1: politics here are not really subtext so much as like
Speaker 1: bold faced headline text. And honestly, you could make a
Speaker 1: diorama of pseudoscience or even just psychology through the ages,
Speaker 1: and it would be this same scene, men experimenting on
Speaker 1: women over and over again. This was what first got
Speaker 1: Bernstein curious about hypnosis, the control it also raised for him,
Speaker 1: he said, a whole train of questions. He later wrote,
Speaker 1: if this thing is true, if this is a fact,
Speaker 1: then why is it not more widely used? His suggestion
Speaker 1: is so powerful in this state, then is this not
Speaker 1: a powerful weapon for good? If the human mind can
Speaker 1: be so directed, so molded, so impressed, then why does
Speaker 1: not every doctor understand the fundamentals of hypnosis? What is
Speaker 1: the reason that science does not show more interest? But
Speaker 1: science had expressed a lot of interest for a very
Speaker 1: long time. So before we get back to Bernstein and
Speaker 1: his discovery of reincarnation, let's take a brief tour through
Speaker 1: the past lives of hypnotism, beginning specifically in Austria in
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century with a man named Franz Mesmer. Mesmer
Speaker 1: was a physician who believed that there was a mystical
Speaker 1: invisible fluid and all living things that was magnetized by
Speaker 1: the planets and the stars. If the fluid got blocked up,
Speaker 1: you got sick. And I mean, this wasn't all that
Speaker 1: different from a lot of other cutting edge science. The
Speaker 1: late eighteenth century was a time when lots of invisible
Speaker 1: laws were getting discovered, the conservation of mass, the existence
Speaker 1: of oxygen, the power of electricity. Ideas like Mesmer's fluid
Speaker 1: had been around for centuries, but he had invented a
Speaker 1: new therapy that could get the fluids flowing again. He'd
Speaker 1: bring people over to his drawing rooms. He'd wear purple
Speaker 1: robes and move his hands or magnetize iron rods over
Speaker 1: their bodies. He'd send them into trances to cure them.
Speaker 1: This is where the term mesmerized comes from, and Mesmerism
Speaker 1: took off all across Europe as a sort of combo
Speaker 1: party trick and miracle cure. It got really popular during
Speaker 1: the very decades that women were first fighting for the
Speaker 1: right to vote, and then it had a very long afterlife.
Speaker 1: You have he kind of like Mesmer to Freud, to
Speaker 1: bf Skinner of just men who were like, it really
Speaker 1: is bugging me that women are gaining some power outside
Speaker 1: the household, in the family. So I wonder if ict
Speaker 1: I'd just put them to sleep, and then everything will
Speaker 1: be about like their sexuality, and I'll just make suggestions
Speaker 1: to them. Over the next century, all sorts of eminent
Speaker 1: doctors started using trans states to treat hysteria in women,
Speaker 1: a made up therapy for a made up condition. Eventually,
Speaker 1: a fluid free version of Mesmerism got somewhat legitimized under
Speaker 1: a new name, hypnotism. Freud used it on his patients.
Speaker 1: Hypnosis is one of the foundations of psychoanalysis. Maury Bernstein
Speaker 1: he was really just another disciple of Franz Mesmer. A
Speaker 1: couple of centuries after Mesmer conducted his first experiments, Bernstein
Speaker 1: started practicing on his wife Hazel and claimed to have
Speaker 1: cured her over headaches. He said he'd help people with
Speaker 1: all sorts of things migraines, insomnia, stuttering, hysterical paralysis, but
Speaker 1: it didn't stop with hypnosis. Before long, he started getting
Speaker 1: into stranger things, things mainstream science hadn't yet proven, like
Speaker 1: extrasensory perception past lives. In a way, he grew frustrated
Speaker 1: with science. Back on the porch in Vermont, Jill and
Speaker 1: I were batting around a different set of mysteries. What
Speaker 1: lies behind the appeal of all this stuff about the
Speaker 1: human mind esp or clairvoyants or auras or who knows
Speaker 1: what else? Do you ever refer to this stuff as
Speaker 1: yah yah? No? So I had a roommate in graduate
Speaker 1: school he was pretty into this stuff because she was
Speaker 1: in her peachd program in history. There were various like
Speaker 1: slightly occulty things. I mean, I had a lot of
Speaker 1: roommates when I was younger who were into like primal
Speaker 1: scream therapy, like just whatnot. Like I had roommate who
Speaker 1: was a wicked or just just like, I'm so not
Speaker 1: that person, but I like those people, like I like
Speaker 1: the challenge that they present, and I also just like
Speaker 1: their individualism. Anyway, this wonderful roommate and her girlfriend always
Speaker 1: called it yah yah and that everyone has at some
Speaker 1: level a yah ya, like just like it's like just
Speaker 1: like a thing that you do that makes no real
Speaker 1: sense and just reveals that there is no order in
Speaker 1: your mind, like that is also no order in the universe.
Speaker 1: Like like just like it's okay because we all have
Speaker 1: a yaya, but some people have too many of them anyway.
Speaker 1: I like that Marie Bernstein was the guy from yo
Speaker 1: yo's to yaya's. Yeah, a lot of yaya. He did
Speaker 1: have a lot of yahya's. Most of them were harmless,
Speaker 1: but not all Thanks to Maury Bernstein, I'm now forever
Speaker 1: going to think of the nineteen fifties as the age
Speaker 1: not of the Barbie Doll or the yo yo, but
Speaker 1: the age of the yaya. Why so much ya ya?
Speaker 1: I think partly because all sorts of World War two
Speaker 1: technology was making its way in the nineteen fifties into
Speaker 1: modern life. Atomic energy, microwaves, mainframe computers, thinks whose workings
Speaker 1: were invisible. They seemed like miracles, and that made it
Speaker 1: seem as if anything was possible. Knowledge depends on observation,
Speaker 1: but all those innovations, with their invisible workings must have
Speaker 1: made people feel a little doubtful. We think of the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties as a super buttoned up time. But Maury
Speaker 1: Bernstein and his Yahya's kind of shows the lie. Here's
Speaker 1: this put together businessman who learns about hypnosis and then
Speaker 1: basically begins practicing the occult. And he wasn't the only one.
Speaker 1: There were other seekers out there too. Some of them
Speaker 1: were even scientists at serious universities. Back then, it wasn't
Speaker 1: entirely weird to be interested in what Bernstein was interested in.
Speaker 1: In some circles, it was cutting edge. By nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: in North Carolina, a psychologist named doctor J. B Ryan
Speaker 1: was making his own investigations into the unknown. Ryan headed
Speaker 1: up the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, and he'd been doing this
Speaker 1: research for a long time since before the Second World War.
Speaker 1: Bernstein was a big fan. He'd first heard about jb
Speaker 1: Ryan's lab in the nineteen thirties, around when Ryan was
Speaker 1: part of conducting experiments in telepathy using the radio. What
Speaker 1: telepathy dove would have to play a part in personal enters,
Speaker 1: the success controls? These are some of the questions I seen.
Speaker 1: Its foundation seeks to explain. Here's how it worked. Ryan
Speaker 1: had a deck of special cards, each with a different
Speaker 1: symbol on the back. Three wavy lines, a star, a square.
Speaker 1: He'd hold up a card and ask subjects whether they
Speaker 1: knew what symbol was hidden on it. He figured he
Speaker 1: could calculate the probability that someone would randomly guess the shape,
Speaker 1: But if someone guessed correctly more often than probability predicted,
Speaker 1: Ryan thought they must have special powers, and some people
Speaker 1: really seemed like they did. He began to wonder just
Speaker 1: how many he tested his students, kids in his neighborhood.
Speaker 1: But to find out how widespread telepathy truly was, you'd
Speaker 1: have to test a lot of people at once. That's
Speaker 1: where the radio came in. If you wish to test
Speaker 1: or extrasensory perception and telepathy in your own family circles,
Speaker 1: university EESC cards identical with all you in the Amazing
Speaker 1: Test by Doctor J. B. Ryan are now available at
Speaker 1: stores everywhere. The head of the radio company it was
Speaker 1: called Zenith, saw an opportunity. People could use versions of
Speaker 1: Ryan's cards to test themselves at home, and NBC would
Speaker 1: run a version of his test on the air. A
Speaker 1: supposedly telepathic person in the radio studio would look at
Speaker 1: a card and try to communicate to the radio audience
Speaker 1: what was on it, But silently using only telepathy. People
Speaker 1: would write into the show with their answers, and the
Speaker 1: company tallied them up. If you think about it, radio
Speaker 1: already is just a bunch of invisible waves flying through
Speaker 1: the air to tell you things in the first place,
Speaker 1: So why not to let Patheva Radio see if pathodians
Speaker 1: there mine comes through face to you and write down
Speaker 1: your impressions in consecutive order as quickly as you get them.
Speaker 1: Five and dime stores sold out of the esp cards,
Speaker 1: and many many more people, not just scientists, were beginning
Speaker 1: to think for themselves about all the weird possibilities the
Speaker 1: mind might hold. I mean, the other thing that's weird
Speaker 1: about the twentieth century version of this weird possibilities of
Speaker 1: the mind is mass communications allows these practitioners or parapsychologists
Speaker 1: to kind of go to the people with their evidence
Speaker 1: in a way that's different. Yeah, right, And it's a
Speaker 1: thing that scientists haven't dealt with yet. And enough of
Speaker 1: them are kind of cautiously open to the idea that
Speaker 1: maybe there is such a thing as ESPN brain control.
Speaker 1: That they don't write it off. Some of them do,
Speaker 1: but not everyone. Right, Like where you might have like
Speaker 1: the itinerant quack who goes from village to village. In
Speaker 1: the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, it is still kind
Speaker 1: of the royal society that's going to decide whether or
Speaker 1: not that's a legit. But in the twentieth century jb.
Speaker 1: Ryan can have new frontiers of the mind stuff and
Speaker 1: he can go in the radio and somehow the people
Speaker 1: get to decide like whether this stuff is legit. Ryan
Speaker 1: was showing how you make a case for the existence
Speaker 1: of the supernatural to the public, and the public was listening.
Speaker 1: After those radio experiments, Ryan began to get a lot
Speaker 1: of publicity, like this article in Life magazine. By some
Speaker 1: doctor Ryan has been compared to Copernicus, Galileo Newton, Darwin, Freud,
Speaker 1: and other pioneers. By others, he is regarded as a
Speaker 1: misguided crackpot and either a deliberate or an unconscious fraud.
Speaker 1: That article was actually pretty positive about Ryan, but it
Speaker 1: also ran with this gem of an editor's note. Life
Speaker 1: senators did not commit themselves to accept into his point
Speaker 1: of view, nor do they presume to act as jury
Speaker 1: on the matter of whether or not the existence of
Speaker 1: esp is a proven fact. Today, we probably have a
Speaker 1: better sense of where the line falls between kookie and
Speaker 1: legit or do we why is it called like when
Speaker 1: does paris psychology become a thing? Or when is it
Speaker 1: called that? Or when is it like institutional and when
Speaker 1: does it get jettisoned from institutions? Like we do not
Speaker 1: have a department of Paris psychology at Harvard University, but
Speaker 1: Harvard did have William James, the father of American psychology
Speaker 1: at least until his death in nineteen ten, and he
Speaker 1: had some pretty out there beliefs. I think William James
Speaker 1: has a major influence obviously in all of American psychology,
Speaker 1: but especially at the turn of the century. You know,
Speaker 1: when William James dies, he asks Henry James to stay
Speaker 1: in Cambridge for six weeks because William's going to try
Speaker 1: and communicate from the grade beyond, which I love just
Speaker 1: because that was one of the last things that he
Speaker 1: did was take a scientific approach to what was not
Speaker 1: even a philosophical question so much as a religious or
Speaker 1: spiritual one. So I think that there's like a strong
Speaker 1: strain of there wouldn't be a need for parapsychology in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds because it's only just split off
Speaker 1: from philosophy. All psychology was para. It's very hard to
Speaker 1: prove definitively that something's not real, especially when science kept
Speaker 1: expanding the range of things you could believe in. So
Speaker 1: a lot of scientists kept their minds at least tentatively
Speaker 1: open to things we now think of as Koukie jb
Speaker 1: Ryan's mind was more open than most. People used to
Speaker 1: write to the lab at Duke about strange happenings in
Speaker 1: their lives, and he took them seriously. Here's a letter
Speaker 1: from nineteen forty nine. We have in our congregation a
Speaker 1: family who are being disturbed by Poulter Guy's phenomena. The
Speaker 1: phenomenage present only in the boy's presence. I had him
Speaker 1: in my home, Perrish moved with him, one threw him
Speaker 1: out his bed shook whenever he was in it. Words
Speaker 1: appeared on the boy's body, and he has visions of
Speaker 1: the devil and goes into a trance and speaks in
Speaker 1: strange language. Believe it or not, that letter is about
Speaker 1: the boy, an actual kid who inspired the horror movie
Speaker 1: The Exorcist. Anyway back to would be Paris psychologist Maury
Speaker 1: Bernstein from his home in Pueblo Bernstein wrote letters to
Speaker 1: Ryan and sent him reports on the hundreds of experiments
Speaker 1: he'd run. In nineteen fifty two, Ryan invited Bernstein and
Speaker 1: his wife to visit the Paris Psychology Lab and stay
Speaker 1: for a week. For Bernstein this really was like meeting
Speaker 1: Copernicus or Galileo. But to a lot of actual scientists
Speaker 1: there wasn't much daylight between A jb Ryan and a
Speaker 1: Maury Bernstein. A lot of Ryan's fellow scientists did not approve,
Speaker 1: including one of the most famous psychologists of the twentieth century, B. F. Skinner.
Speaker 1: Skinner is the behaviorist who, among other things, like putting
Speaker 1: rats in complicated cages. He didn't have time for Ryan's pseudoscience. Also,
Speaker 1: he figured out that under the right conditions you could
Speaker 1: see through the mass produced sp cards they were printed
Speaker 1: on super thin cardstock. Skinner, in front of his students,
Speaker 1: guessed one hundred out of a hundred cards correctly. He
Speaker 1: tore Rhine apart in reviews, and he also wrote him
Speaker 1: privately to damn his work. This is only another example
Speaker 1: of the kind of thing which is responsible for the
Speaker 1: failure of many of us to take your work seriously.
Speaker 1: I say that in all friendliness. Skinner and his fellow
Speaker 1: behaviorists were reacting to the messiness of theories like Rhins
Speaker 1: or Freud's. They thought there was only one way you
Speaker 1: could know scientifically what was going on inside another person's mind.
Speaker 1: That was to observe their behavior. A lot of behaviorists
Speaker 1: studied animals and then applied those lessons to humans. Their
Speaker 1: experiments hugely influential, but they ran on principles that seem
Speaker 1: to ignore the very things that distinguish humans from rats.
Speaker 1: Most people want to believe in something more than what
Speaker 1: they can see with their own eyes. Maury Bernstein certainly did.
Speaker 1: He wrote, now, at last, there is scientific evidence that
Speaker 1: men are something more than bodies, that they have minds
Speaker 1: with freedom from physical law, freedom from the physical That's
Speaker 1: why back in Pueblo, Bernstein decided to run a different
Speaker 1: set of experiments to find out what happens to us
Speaker 1: after we die. Your name is what Freddy? Just months
Speaker 1: after Bernstein left Ryan's lab, Virginia Ties had for that
Speaker 1: first faithful hypnosis session, an experiment to explore whether we
Speaker 1: live once or over and over again? Do you know
Speaker 1: what year it is? Bernstein pushed, improbed, and eventually out
Speaker 1: of a twenty nine year old American's mouth came a
Speaker 1: nineteenth century Irish woman. What are you studying? Oh to
Speaker 1: be a lady? What are some Irish words? What's great?
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Oh? So a little cup that
Speaker 1: you drink out of and you wish shot it? Very
Speaker 1: very Irish. From these bits and pieces, Bernstein tried to
Speaker 1: discern the very fabric of the universe. You remember the
Speaker 1: day you died? That was awesome day. I remember this.
Speaker 1: Brie was to church and observed. Truly. I was so
Speaker 1: excited when I found out that Bernstein had recorded his
Speaker 1: hypnosis sessions. But then listening to the tapes felt invasive, voyeuristic.
Speaker 1: Bernstein thought of himself as communing with the dead, But
Speaker 1: the more you listen, the creepier it sounds. Can you
Speaker 1: tell us what happened after your death? How? What was
Speaker 1: it like? Would you like where you were? Yes? Was
Speaker 1: it better than your life on earth? Oh? It wasn't.
Speaker 1: Oh that primal scene woman on couch, man leaning over
Speaker 1: her mesmer Freud's skinner. Bernstein the sexual politics of the
Speaker 1: psychological laboratory. All these men experimenting on all these women,
Speaker 1: like there's this um. I remember when Harvard brought over
Speaker 1: the German experimental psychologists. You go Munsterberg to found its
Speaker 1: experimental psychological Laboratory, because William James was all, I don't
Speaker 1: do that kind of thing. He would do all this
Speaker 1: experiments on women. Gertrude Stein was at Radcliffe. Then she
Speaker 1: knows and she writes this thing she chose, like I
Speaker 1: think doing like a senior thesis or something. She's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but he just likes to tie up women. It is
Speaker 1: literally infantilizing. What do you say when you want a
Speaker 1: drink of water? Oh? Well, like other than Stein, aren't
Speaker 1: they like? Do we have to wait until Betty Freedan
Speaker 1: before someone is like all right, guys, the jig is up?
Speaker 1: Like maybe that's what Bridie Murphy is. Yeah, we decided
Speaker 1: we should try to flip the script. Jill read up
Speaker 1: on how to hypnotize people, or at least she claimed
Speaker 1: that she read up on it, but I don't really
Speaker 1: think she did. I honestly was not wild about getting hypnotized,
Speaker 1: but I figured I'd go along with it. Turn about
Speaker 1: is fair play. So one buggy summer night, Jill came
Speaker 1: out to the cabin holding a candle in this like
Speaker 1: eighteenth century candle holder, which I guess she just has
Speaker 1: lying around the house Benjamin Franklin style. And she tried
Speaker 1: to put me under. And now I want you to
Speaker 1: begin as you continue breathing slowly and deliberately, looking at
Speaker 1: the candle flame on a single candle in front of you,
Speaker 1: and I want to ask you now. I want to
Speaker 1: ask you now to fall asleep at the count of three, three,
Speaker 1: two one. All right, We gave it our best shot.
Speaker 1: It was really good. It's just like there was a
Speaker 1: mosquito on my forehead, and Vermont Midsummer lots of mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: Our hypnosis session was a total bust. But Maury Bernstein's
Speaker 1: Search for Bridey Murphy took a lot longer than ours
Speaker 1: to peter out. Virginia Tie sat for six sessions and
Speaker 1: then stopped. She wanted to get on with her life,
Speaker 1: her future life, not her past. But Bernstein wanted to
Speaker 1: make a name for himself. He got written up in
Speaker 1: a Denver magazine. Then he signed a book deal. The
Speaker 1: Search for Bridie Murphy was published in January nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1: The evening before it came out, Bernstein and his wife
Speaker 1: went for a walk. They headed downtown they stopped in
Speaker 1: the cold outside of bookstore and peered through the window
Speaker 1: at a display of Bernstein's book, all set up for
Speaker 1: the next day. But even a published paras psychologist couldn't
Speaker 1: have known what that book would lead to. Oh the
Speaker 1: love in my heart? Do you believe reincarnation? That you
Speaker 1: have lived in the day of God? In nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: when the search for Bridie Murphy hit bookstores, people went crazy.
Speaker 1: Life magazine said the country was in a hypnotizzy. The
Speaker 1: book was serialized in newspapers across the country, then translated
Speaker 1: into thirty languages in thirty four other countries. It became
Speaker 1: the number one bestseller in America. All told, it sold
Speaker 1: six million copies. In Houston, a bartender started making a
Speaker 1: reincarnation cocktail. I will now read the recipe. Please write
Speaker 1: into the show if you can figure out how this
Speaker 1: in any way relates to reincarnation. A jigger of vodka,
Speaker 1: half a jigger of Maraschino liqueur, shaken with lemon juice
Speaker 1: and crushed ice, and topped with a cupful of flaming rum.
Speaker 1: Paramount Pictures bought the Bridy Murphy movie rights, And then
Speaker 1: there were the songs, plus it on the banks of
Speaker 1: the Nile. Oh what s hello? Triple le put me
Speaker 1: in a dress for a while, Hit helo, come back
Speaker 1: to me. Bridy Murphy was everywhere, but Virginia Tie wanted
Speaker 1: to disappear. She asked not to be publicly identified in
Speaker 1: Bernstein's book or the press. She tried to hide behind
Speaker 1: a pseudonym. But Bernstein was loving it. He wouldn't do
Speaker 1: radio and TV interviews because he felt he couldn't control them,
Speaker 1: but that didn't stop him from talking endlessly at parties
Speaker 1: and newspaper reporters about his great discovery. He'd say stuff like,
Speaker 1: we may have opened a hidden door for just a second,
Speaker 1: and without fully understanding what we have seen, we've had
Speaker 1: an exciting glimpse of immortality. He worked the book, film
Speaker 1: and audio angles. He released a record an LP of
Speaker 1: that first hypnotism session. The Search for Bridie Murphy is
Speaker 1: the true story of a skeptical young businessman who learned,
Speaker 1: much to a surprise, that the wonders of hypnosis are
Speaker 1: very real. Indeed, people listened, sometimes seriously, sometimes in a
Speaker 1: kind of tongue in cheek way. They threw come as
Speaker 1: you were parties. They wrote to Bernstein to tell them
Speaker 1: about who they'd been centuries before. A hypnotist offered to
Speaker 1: find people's past lives for twenty five bucks a pop.
Speaker 1: He discovered one local woman had been a horse in
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred, which maybe she should have asked for her
Speaker 1: money back. People even used the Bridey Murphy story to
Speaker 1: sell cars. He is hod end your search for Bridey Murphy.
Speaker 1: This is real text from a real ad that ran
Speaker 1: in a real newspaper. If you're looking for something out
Speaker 1: of this world, see Bill Murphy. Selection of used cars
Speaker 1: at prices that won't put you in a trance. These
Speaker 1: cars are not a reincarnation, they're real cars at reuse savings.
Speaker 1: But then America's reincarnation craze quickly shaded into nightmare. In Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: a nineteen year old boy shot himself and left a
Speaker 1: note under the windshield wiper of his truck, saying he
Speaker 1: wanted to find out if he'd be reincarnated like Bridey Murphy.
Speaker 1: Christians began to rail against Bernstein's book as sacrilegious. Ty's
Speaker 1: family was curious at her for the same reasons she
Speaker 1: couldn't keep the press away. Newsmen published her real name,
Speaker 1: but some people just sent letters made out to Bridie Murphy. Pueblo, Colorado.
Speaker 1: Reporters clamored for her to speak. Her marriage began to
Speaker 1: fall apart. She went into hiding, hoping it would die down.
Speaker 1: None of this made Paramount feel particularly good about the
Speaker 1: film they were making. Flame means Fee Flames Sleep. Paramount
Speaker 1: began tweaking the Bride Murphy story. They changed it so
Speaker 1: the plot would make hypnotism look dangerous enough that people
Speaker 1: wouldn't try it at home. And they wrote in a
Speaker 1: scene where a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister reject
Speaker 1: the idea of reincarnation. I have to say the result
Speaker 1: is one of the worst movies I have ever seen.
Speaker 1: And I've seen the other film about Bridie Murphy that
Speaker 1: came out in nineteen fifty six, The She Creature. Under
Speaker 1: his spells, she would both herself and another bee, the
Speaker 1: She creature seeking life sustenance from the sullen hot piece
Speaker 1: of OBUs. Legend has it that Hollywood's iconic creepy guy
Speaker 1: character actor Peter Laurie, fired his agent for signing him
Speaker 1: onto that project. Anyway, the Bridey Murphy phenomenon was completely
Speaker 1: off the rails back in Vermont. In true last Archive fashion,
Speaker 1: all these Bridey Murphy movies got us wondering about a
Speaker 1: different film from nineteen fifty six. I really am a
Speaker 1: sucker for the idea that science fiction tends to really
Speaker 1: reflect what's really going on deeply in his society. But
Speaker 1: Invasion of the Body Snatches is kind of a Bridey
Speaker 1: Murphy story, right, Like it's the anxiety that we might
Speaker 1: not be who we think we are. Suddenly, while you're asleep,
Speaker 1: they love so of your minds, your memories. As the
Speaker 1: unimaginable becomes real, the impossible becomes true. Okay, I am
Speaker 1: hijacking this episode here for a minute, because I love
Speaker 1: this movie. At first glance, everything looked the same. It
Speaker 1: wasn't something evil had taken possession of the town. Invasion
Speaker 1: of the Body Snatchers is a movie about a small
Speaker 1: town in California where one by one, people are being
Speaker 1: replaced by heartless aliens who look just like them but
Speaker 1: aren't them because they're aliens. It's like Bridie Murphy showing
Speaker 1: up in Virginia Tie's Body. The hero, Myles, is a
Speaker 1: medical doctor, but in the end it's a psychiatrist, a
Speaker 1: guy like BF Skinner, the behaviorist who tries to convince
Speaker 1: myles to give in there's no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep,
Speaker 1: they'll absorb your minds, your memories, and you're born into
Speaker 1: an untroubled world where everyone's the same exactly. People take
Speaker 1: invasion of the Body Snatchers as an allegory for two
Speaker 1: completely different things. Either it's about the perils of communism,
Speaker 1: or else it's about the Red Scare, where Americans accused
Speaker 1: each other of being secret communists. But really those are
Speaker 1: just two versions of the same anxiety, that fear that
Speaker 1: people can be remolded like rats and cages, sapped of
Speaker 1: their individuality, turned into mindless conformists. Wake up, sheeple, Except
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six people didn't say wake up, sheeple.
Speaker 1: They said don't get brainwashed. Brainwashing was a new term then.
Speaker 1: It had come out of the Korean War. People thought
Speaker 1: of brainwashing as a kind of hypnosis that could take
Speaker 1: American soldiers and turn them into communist robots. Let us
Speaker 1: review once again the weaknesses in the American character. That's
Speaker 1: an American documentary film made after the Korean War about
Speaker 1: how communists in China and North Korea had found it
Speaker 1: so easy to brainwash Americans. You, as instructors of American prisoners,
Speaker 1: can exploit these weaknesses in order to control them. So
Speaker 1: as I was trying to put all the pieces together,
Speaker 1: it began to look to me like this. Men get
Speaker 1: brainwashed as an active war. Women get hypnotized as a
Speaker 1: parlor trick. But at the end of the day, everybody
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties is doubting that they have a constant,
Speaker 1: stable self. Your name is what, Freddie? It's the same
Speaker 1: set of questions the psychologists were asking about people, and
Speaker 1: people were asking about Bridie Murphy. Who are you? Who
Speaker 1: are you? Or maybe in Bridie Murphy's case, who is
Speaker 1: the real impostor? Because ever since Maury Bernstein first brought
Speaker 1: the story of Bridie Murphy to the press, people had asked,
Speaker 1: was Bridie Murphy of fake? Eventually newspaper editors sent reporters
Speaker 1: to Ireland to fact check. Turns out, the kind of
Speaker 1: iron bed she said, she scratched the paint off in
Speaker 1: eighteen o two. There weren't beds like that in Ireland
Speaker 1: for almost fifty more years. He went on like that,
Speaker 1: detail after detail struck down until the final blow. A
Speaker 1: reporter discovered that Virginia Tye had grown up across the
Speaker 1: street from an Irish woman named bride Murphy Corkle, and
Speaker 1: Ty had even had a crush on her son. The
Speaker 1: search for Bridie Murphy started to come to an end,
Speaker 1: Maury Bernstein wouldn't let it go. After the articles to
Speaker 1: bunking Bridey Murphy came out, he began warring with everyone
Speaker 1: who doubted him. He said those debunking reports got it
Speaker 1: wrong and ignored all the strange knowledge Ty had about
Speaker 1: nineteenth century Ireland. He met with a lawyer and asked
Speaker 1: Ty if she'd give interviews, but she refused. She'd fallen
Speaker 1: out with her family, her home life was in shambles,
Speaker 1: and look, I don't think Tie was lying about Bridie
Speaker 1: Murphy or about being hypnotized. I think she was just
Speaker 1: semi conscious and stitching together a story at Bernstein's suggestion,
Speaker 1: combining stray details from the past. But then again, things
Speaker 1: do have strange afterlives. What is your name? Please? My
Speaker 1: name is Virginia Tie. My name is Virginia Tie. My
Speaker 1: name is Virginia Tie. Final least three ladies all claimed
Speaker 1: to be Virginia Tie's got to cost examination with That's
Speaker 1: a TV game show popular in the sixties called to
Speaker 1: Tell the Truth Very Last Archive. In each episode, three
Speaker 1: people all claim to be the same person, but only
Speaker 1: one of them really is. The panelists have to guess
Speaker 1: who none of three was the times that two went
Speaker 1: into it in it was on purpose to find out
Speaker 1: something like this or did it just happened? A first
Speaker 1: trance was accidental? Accidental? And number two, how did you
Speaker 1: happen to fall into this accidental first trance? I mean
Speaker 1: other than hypnosis? Yes, yes, well I was it a
Speaker 1: social contact the man that we knew personally? Ah, and
Speaker 1: it just happened. And the number one was at the
Speaker 1: time then that you began. It's not much fun if
Speaker 1: you can't see them, so I'll just tell you that's
Speaker 1: the real Virginia Tie. Number two, how extraordinary? Number two?
Speaker 1: Did you remember anything when you came out of the
Speaker 1: drandella and nothing? Well, how do you know they weren't
Speaker 1: just putting you on when you woke up? Their shud
Speaker 1: go what you should? I'd like to think they did.
Speaker 1: This tape ten years after Bernstein's book came out. Is
Speaker 1: the only non hypnotized audio that I could find of Tie.
Speaker 1: Well there, Virginia Tie, please stand You hardly ever get
Speaker 1: to hear Tie speak for herself in this story, just
Speaker 1: Bernstein speaking Bridie Murphy through her. So I had high
Speaker 1: hopes for the game show. But after the real Virginia
Speaker 1: Tie stood up, finally stood up in front of a
Speaker 1: mic her own self, the host just ended the segment.
Speaker 1: I guess that's how the game is played. A fascinating story.
Speaker 1: We thank you for bringing a dulas and hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed it too. Good night, and God left you. Tie
Speaker 1: and her husband got divorced not long after that game
Speaker 1: show aired. She moved on to a new life, but
Speaker 1: she never lived the past one down. She died from
Speaker 1: cancer in nineteen ninety five. I don't know what happened
Speaker 1: to her after death. Maury Bernstein became a millionaire trading stocks,
Speaker 1: but he became more and more withdrawn, angrier, and more controlling.
Speaker 1: His wife divorced him. He moved into a small apartment
Speaker 1: and never really left it. He stopped cutting his hair,
Speaker 1: left stains on his shirt. People called him the Howard
Speaker 1: Hughes of Pueblo. He liked to say that people didn't die.
Speaker 1: They just went to Brideyville. But he did die in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety nine. His brother said it was malnutrition. But so,
Speaker 1: the thing that I'm still struggling with trying to understand
Speaker 1: this story and the whole of the twentieth cent true
Speaker 1: which I am still babbled by, is what happened to
Speaker 1: a tolerance for just uncertainty, Like, what about the kind
Speaker 1: of mystical unknowability of why we do things? Jill and
Speaker 1: I batted the meaning of this story around for a
Speaker 1: long time out in that cabin, like in one of
Speaker 1: those late night conversations in the hallway of your dorm room,
Speaker 1: except in the middle of a global pandemic waiting for
Speaker 1: the world to end. I'm not sure that the search
Speaker 1: for Bridey Murphy produces a lot of doubt. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like it's an artifact of our growing intolerance for uncertainty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to nail this one down. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: you don't want to be uncertain about what happens to
Speaker 1: you after you die? Yeah, who you really are? I
Speaker 1: don't think Bridie Murphy proved anything about who we really
Speaker 1: are or about what happens to us after we Die.
Speaker 1: Americans in the nineteen fifties never did settle those questions,
Speaker 1: because those questions can't ever be settled all the way.
Speaker 1: They're like a window you can't quite shut and the
Speaker 1: draft keeps getting in. But I guess the thing about
Speaker 1: all of these stories, Bridie Murphy, brainwashing, body snatchers, even
Speaker 1: Freudiani is um just looking hit to the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1: It doesn't fare for to get to conspiracy theories from here.
Speaker 1: We'll find out more on the next thrilling episode of
Speaker 1: The Last Dark Eve from the Kevin in the Woods,
Speaker 1: My Heart All the Time. This episode was written by
Speaker 1: Ben Natt of Halfrey. It's produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon
Speaker 1: and Ben Natt of Halfrey. Our editor is Julia Bartner
Speaker 1: and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Martin Gonzalez is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Back checking by Amy Gaines's original music by
Speaker 1: Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinett. Our research
Speaker 1: assistants are Olivia Oldham and Oliver Riskin. Cuts are full
Speaker 1: Proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bosse, Dan Epstein,
Speaker 1: Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Perella, Robert Ricotta, and
Speaker 1: Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Head Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz,
Speaker 1: Harley Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rost, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig and Daniella Lacan Special thanks to Simon Leak,
Speaker 1: Vicky Merrick and the Pueblo Historical Society. Many of our
Speaker 1: sound effects are from Harry Janet Junior and the Star
Speaker 1: Jenett Foundation. If you like the show, please remember to rate,
Speaker 1: share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, Listen on
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: I'm Jillapoor Bride. Speak to me, Briday, Speak Boya. Eyes
Speaker 1: are full of the love for you, and this song
Speaker 1: in my heart must be heard. Speak Briday, Yes, my love,
Speaker 1: Bright Bright are you here? Yes, my love? What do
Speaker 1: you see? Briday? Will we be together soon and for always? Always?
Speaker 1: My love? Away, eternity, forever and ever. Oh, I've got
Speaker 1: a feeling that I'm moving on from the soldier Thompson
Speaker 1: gone and She'll be there right by my side when
Speaker 1: I crossed the Great line. For the love of bright
Speaker 1: in my heart all the time you list in my
Speaker 1: heart a time