MYSTICAL: Bridey Murphy

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Speaker 14 If you've ever been to one of those hypnosis shows, you probably believe that hypnosis is real. In fact, there's not a lot of debate on whether it's possible to be hypnotized.

Speaker 14 The real fight is over what the process can and cannot achieve. Convince a patient to stop smoking? Perhaps.
Recall forgotten memories? Maybe.

Speaker 14 But what about memories from a past life?

Speaker 14 There are plenty of cases of people who are born remembering previous lives. I've talked about some of them on this very show.
But what if everyone has memories like those?

Speaker 14 They're just buried somewhere deep in your subconscious. Wouldn't you want to remember who you were, the people you loved?

Speaker 14 Well, be careful what you wish for. For a young woman named Virginia Tai, her recovered memories of a past life turned her current life into a nightmare.

Speaker 14 This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
This week's story is about a case of recovered memories that sent the whole United States into a tailspin.

Speaker 14 The patient was a young woman born in Chicago who had never even been to Ireland. But under hypnosis, she recalled detailed memories of living and dying in 19th century Belfast.

Speaker 14 I'll have all that and more coming up.

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Speaker 14 In the 1950s, Pueblo, Colorado is everything you'd want from a picturesque mid-century town. A one-screen movie theater, quaint little diners, and light blue teabirds parked on every corner.

Speaker 14 You may as well be walking through with a set of happy days. This proverbial slice of apple pie is where a young man named Maury Bernstein chooses to start a family and build his career.

Speaker 14 Shortly after high school, he's given a management position at the family business, a heavy equipment supplier.

Speaker 14 Thanks to massive construction projects all over southern Colorado, it's doing extremely well, and Maury quickly proves himself to be a pragmatic young man with a knack for business.

Speaker 14 It seems like one day he'll take over the company and follow in his father's footsteps. Until one night in the late 1940s, when he sees something that completely changes the course of his life.

Speaker 14 Like any good mystery, it begins on a dark and stormy night. Maury is alone in his office catching up on work when the phone rings.

Speaker 14 He usually doesn't answer the phone after five, but given the bad weather, he figures it might be important.

Speaker 14 On the other end is a man named Jerry Thomas. He and Maury have never met, but Jerry explains he's a cousin of George Taylor, Maury's biggest client.

Speaker 14 Jerry says he's stuck in Pueblo, the storm grounded his plane, and the hotels in town are all full.

Speaker 14 Given how much revenue George Taylor generates for the company, Maury doesn't think twice about helping Jerry out.

Speaker 14 He picks him up from the airport and brings him home where his wife Hazel is readying the guest room.

Speaker 14 Now, Maury isn't usually a fan of unannounced house guests, but as far as unannounced house guests go, Jerry is great. He turns out to be charming and a great conversationalist.

Speaker 14 Maury and Hazel even ask if he wants to tag along to the party they're going to that night, and Jerry is down.

Speaker 14 At first, everyone at the party loves him, but when the subject of hobbies comes up, Jerry takes a hard left turn. He proudly announces that he's a hypnotist.
He asks for a volunteer to demonstrate.

Speaker 14 There's a moment of reluctant silence, but eventually a young woman agrees.

Speaker 14 Jerry sits her down on the couch, takes off his ring, and tells tells her to stare at the ring intently until it becomes hazy.

Speaker 14 She does. Everyone waits and waits.
Nothing happens. They're all just silently staring at this girl who's staring at the ring until eventually she just falls dead asleep on the couch.

Speaker 14 At this point, Mori is about to step in and save his house guest from himself, but just then, Jerry starts talking to the woman.

Speaker 14 He tells her that when she wakes up she'll be starving and that after she eats two bites of food she should take off her left shoe. Then he wakes her up.

Speaker 14 The woman seems to have no memory of the past 10 minutes, but just as Jerry predicted, she heads straight for the kitchen. She starts in on her plate of food and two bites later, her left shoe is off.

Speaker 14 When someone points it out to her, she looks around confused and is surprised to find her shoe in her hand. That's right, she took it off without even consciously realizing it.

Speaker 14 The whole room is impressed, except for Maury, who doesn't believe it for a second. He asks Jerry if he can put her back under so they can run a few more tests, just to prove she's truly hypnotized.

Speaker 14 So, Jerry puts her into a trance again.

Speaker 14 The woman's fiancé tries to make her burst out laughing by sitting next to her and attacking her face with little kisses, which admittedly sounds really cute, but the woman doesn't stir.

Speaker 14 Then Maury suggests they prick her hand with a sewing needle. One might think this is taking things a little too far, but they go for it.
And once again, she doesn't so much as flinch. She is out.

Speaker 14 By the end of the party, Maury goes home astonished. The next day, he starts digging into the research and he's shocked at how little scientists have actually studied the phenomenon.

Speaker 14 Because if hypnosis is real, it could be a powerful tool to help people for example maury's wife hazel suffers from chronic headaches she's been to a dozen doctors and hospitals including the mayo clinic and every medical professional assured her that there was no physical reason for her condition like kidney stones or blood disease the headaches are purely a psychological problem

Speaker 14 So when Hazel sees her husband poring over books on hypnosis, she suggests that he should try to hypnotize her to try and release the pain. Maury is happy to try.

Speaker 14 He puts her into a trance using some of the techniques he's learned and according to Hazel, it works like a charm. She wakes up completely free of pain.

Speaker 14 Even Maury doesn't believe it. He wonders whether she's putting on a front to appease him.
But Hazel tells everyone what happened and the word gets around quick.

Speaker 14 Pretty soon, friends and family are asking Maury to help them quit smoking or get rid of a bad habit. And each time, it works.
In one instance, he even helps a teenage boy overcome a stutter.

Speaker 14 And as time goes on, Maury grows interested in more advanced forms of hypnotherapy, specifically regressive hypnosis, a practice that can supposedly help a patient recover lost memories, especially from childhood.

Speaker 14 From his research, Maury knows that regressive hypnosis works best on people who experience total amnesia during sessions, meaning they remember nothing about being in a trance, and he knows exactly the right patient.

Speaker 14 There's a 29-year-old woman who came to him for help curing her allergies. Her name is Virginia Ty, but everyone calls her Ginny.

Speaker 14 Maury has hypnotized her twice before, and both times he was struck by how little she remembered from their sessions.

Speaker 14 Maury convinces Ginny to be his guinea pig, and on November 29th, 1952, she and her husband Hugh arrive at Maury's house ready to see what he can do.

Speaker 14 Ginny settles into a reclining position on the couch, then Maury lights a candle and turns off all the lights.

Speaker 14 He turns on a tape recorder and then hypnotizes Ginny by having her stare at the candle's flame until it becomes fuzzy.

Speaker 14 Once she is fully under, he takes her back through a few memories of childhood, going younger and younger until she recalls moments from infancy.

Speaker 14 At that point, in his words, he's ready to take her over the hump.

Speaker 14 Maury tells Ginny to go back, back, back and back until oddly enough, you find yourself in some other scene, in some other place, in some other time.

Speaker 14 Ginny's breathing slows as she sinks deeper into a trance.

Speaker 14 Then a warm smile crosses her face, like she's smelling the most wonderful bouquet of flowers. Maury moves his tape recorder closer and asks what she sees.

Speaker 14 She yelps in a slight Irish accent, scratch the paint off all my bed. Maury laughs a little and asks her for more context.

Speaker 14 In a childlike voice, Ginny explains that she's just been spanked for misbehaving. To get back at her parents, she scratched the fresh coat of paint off her metal bed frame.

Speaker 14 Maury asks if this spunky little kid had a name. Ginny nods and says, Bridie Murphy.

Speaker 14 We'll meet Bridie coming up.

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Speaker 14 Now back to the story.

Speaker 14 According to Ginny, Bridie Murphy is an eight-year-old Protestant who lives in the meadows just outside of Cork, Ireland.

Speaker 14 Now, even though Bridie is speaking through Ginny during her hypnosis session, I'll just be using Bridie's name to refer to her from here on out.

Speaker 14 Anyway, Maury leads Bridie through a series of questions.

Speaker 14 He finds out that she was born around 1798, has a brother named Duncan, is named after her grandmother Bridget, and that her father works as a lawyer in town.

Speaker 14 This is already a clear and vivid recollection, so much so in fact that Maury barely believes it. He decides to keep pressing for more details, and this is basically the life story he gets.

Speaker 14 He asks Bridie to remember something from when she was a little older. When she next starts speaking, she's 17 and going to etiquette school.

Speaker 14 She tells Maury about one night in particular when she arrives home from school and starts helping her mother with dinner.

Speaker 14 Just after sundown, Bridie's father comes home with two other men, a fellow lawyer from work and his 19-year-old son, Brian. Brian is tall and stately, but rigid.
To Bridie, he seems humorless.

Speaker 14 She doesn't have time for people who took themselves too seriously. Granted, part of her distaste might be because she secretly knew why he was invited for dinner.

Speaker 14 She's 17, he's 19, and they're both single. Her theory is confirmed when Brian sits down next to Bridie and starts asking her questions about herself.

Speaker 14 Bridie tries to be polite, but honestly, she doesn't like the man one bit.

Speaker 14 She asks Brian questions in return and learns that he doesn't live in Cork. In fact, he's going to school way up north in Belfast.
That strikes her as a surprise.

Speaker 14 Bridie likes the idea of a man who travels and studies and seems to be going places. She still isn't quite sold, but Brian is intent on pursuing her.

Speaker 14 And over the weeks that follow, Brian's prickly shell softens and Bridie sees the gentle, loving heart that's beneath it. Gradually, the pair fall in love.
They married a year or two later in Cork.

Speaker 14 Soon after the wedding, Bridie moves to Belfast with her new husband so that he can finish school.

Speaker 14 The The newlyweds move in with Brian's grandmother, living in a small cottage behind her home, kind of like a guesthouse. The pair never have children, but their marriage is full of love.

Speaker 14 Bridie says they rarely fight, and when they do, it's over little things.

Speaker 14 Brian is an attentive husband, and he never fails to make her feel happy and safe.

Speaker 14 Eventually, Brian is offered a job as a professor at the Queen's University in Belfast, and thanks to his new salary bump, he's able to buy a two-story townhouse.

Speaker 14 Bridie is a little sad to move out of grandma's cottage, but she loves having her own place. She dresses it up and it feels like home.

Speaker 14 She and Brian fill the house with happy memories, growing old together under that same roof. Which brings the conversation to a solemn place.

Speaker 14 One morning, when Bridie is 66 years old, she falls down the stairs and breaks several bones in her hip. Bridie is put on bedrest for months.

Speaker 14 Brian has to carry her around on the few occasions she leaves the room. To make matters worse, that winter, she catches a deathly cold.
Between that and the broken hip, Bridie knows she's dying.

Speaker 2 But that's okay, really.

Speaker 14 She had a good, long life. She isn't scared.
She just hopes death will come soon. The next time Bridie speaks, she's distant and confused.

Speaker 14 She's still in her home, but she's staring down at her own body. She's dead.
She lingers in the house for long enough to watch her funeral. Then she drifts into an infinite nothingness.

Speaker 14 She's surrounded by hundreds of souls all drifting around without purpose.

Speaker 14 No one seems to be in charge, no one knows where to go, but through the crowd, Bridey sees someone she hasn't thought about for years, her little brother who had died when he was just a baby.

Speaker 14 Yet here he is in the spirit world able to talk fully aware of who Bridey is.

Speaker 14 She can't remember much of what they talked about in the afterlife, just that it was nice to see him. Bridie remembers staying in the spirit world for some time.
She isn't sure how long.

Speaker 14 It seems like she keeps drifting between her home in Belfast and the nothing place.

Speaker 14 Then one day, She's a person again, an infant learning how to speak. And her mother calls her Ginny.
By this point, Ginny's consciousness has returned to her body.

Speaker 14 It's then that Maury decides to end the session and slowly brings Ginny out of her trance. When she wakes up, Ginny feels light and well-rested.

Speaker 14 She's startled to see Maury and her husband staring at her in disbelief. Ginny doesn't remember anything about the session.
And when they tell her what she said, she's at a loss for how to explain it.

Speaker 14 She'd never been to Ireland or or gone out of her way to learn anything about the country.

Speaker 14 No one is more surprised than Maury. Until then, he'd always considered himself an atheist.

Speaker 14 But after his session with Ginny, he can't help but wonder whether the spirit really does live on after death.

Speaker 14 I mean, if Bridie turns out to be a real person, and that's still a big if, what other explanation is there?

Speaker 14 Maury is so intrigued, he schedules at least five more follow-up sessions over the next 10 months.

Speaker 14 He asks Ginny, or Bridie, about every little aspect of her life, and the amount of detail she provides is frankly pretty astounding.

Speaker 14 She describes the house she lived in, the meals she cooked, trips she and her husband took. She names the priest who officiated her wedding.
And session after session, her story never falters.

Speaker 14 Even when Maury tries to trick her, she never misses a beat.

Speaker 14 Personally, Ginny isn't fully convinced that she's the reincarnated soul of anybody, Bridie Murphy, or otherwise.

Speaker 14 She's just going along with the experiments, but she can't explain how she's able to give such eerily accurate descriptions of places she's never seen.

Speaker 14 What's also notable is Bridie was apparently a pretty average woman, which is pretty unusual for a situation like this. Turns out, our subconscious minds tend to be pretty self-aggrandizing.

Speaker 14 Those who believe in past lives are more likely to remember themselves as, for example, King James IV of Scotland or the best friend of Empress Josephine Bonaparte.

Speaker 14 But Bridie's story is completely free of narcissism. Her marriage is sweet and passionate, but hardly a love story for the ages.
Her death was fairly normal too.

Speaker 14 And the extensive details she recalls can easily be fact-checked to see if they're accurate or not.

Speaker 14 Which Maury doesn't do. In 1956, he publishes a book called The Search for Bridie Murphy, which is largely a transcript of his sessions with Ginny.

Speaker 14 And there's practically no fact-checking before it hits the press, which means it's up to the public to decide whether the story is true or not. And the skeptics are already sharpening their knives.

Speaker 14 Coming up, I'll look at the evidence for and against Bridie Murphy.

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Speaker 14 Now back to the story.

Speaker 14 When the search for Bridie Murphy hits the shelves in 1956, the country dips into what Life magazine called a hypnotizy. The book is a bestseller for 26 weeks.

Speaker 14 There are several pop songs about Bridie. There are reincarnation-themed parties where people come dressed as their past lives.
A film based on the book is released within less than a year.

Speaker 14 You have to understand, people in the 50s are already really into the paranormal, UFOs, ESP, and all that. So, this is the perfect moment for a past life regression craze.

Speaker 14 But not all the attention is positive. There's a huge backlash from skeptics who want to debunk the story.

Speaker 14 Psychologists attack hypnosis as pseudoscience, and reporters from all over the world pour money into investigating the details of Bridie's supposed life.

Speaker 14 The Denver Post sends a journalist to scour Ireland looking for documentation to verify her birth or marriage, her hometown, or literally anything that could prove that she was a real person.

Speaker 14 And what they find is basically a huge blank.

Speaker 14 The Post claims they can't find any evidence of a woman named Bridie Murphy living in Cork or Belfast during the time she was supposedly alive.

Speaker 14 But this doesn't necessarily mean anything. I mean, for one thing, public record keeping in 19th century Ireland wasn't great, so it's really not surprising they can't find anything.

Speaker 14 For another thing, Bridie might not have been her legal name. At the time, Bridie was a popular nickname for Bridget.

Speaker 14 And that's kind of a dead end too, because there isn't a town in Ireland that doesn't have a Bridget Murphy in the books. That'd be like finding a mall without a Sabarro.

Speaker 2 It's not happening.

Speaker 14 But here's something that's a little harder to explain away.

Speaker 14 The Post also isn't able to find any records on Bridie's husband or father-in-law who were supposedly lawyers and who probably would be mentioned in at least a few court documents.

Speaker 14 They can't find the street Bridie lived on or the parish priest she named. They do find a church with the same name Bridie mentioned, but it was built after Bridie's death.

Speaker 14 There are a few other details that can't fully be debunked, but do seem a little odd. Bridie claimed to live live in a white wooden house, but wooden houses were super rare in Ireland at the time.

Speaker 14 And the very first thing Bridie said under hypnosis about scratching the paint off her bed, metal bed frames were also super rare at the time. They were usually made of wood.

Speaker 14 Then again, it's not like metal was that hard to find in cork. Who's to say Bridie's bed wasn't made out of some leftover metal piping or something?

Speaker 14 But in the end, the Denver Post discredits most of Bridie's story, but they they do admit that she gave creepily accurate descriptions of the places around Ireland that she did mention, especially given that she'd never been to the country before.

Speaker 14 Without a definitive answer either way, other newspapers keep investigating, and the next search takes place a little closer to home.

Speaker 14 So when the search for Bridie Murphy was published, Ginny Ty wanted nothing to do with it. She still wasn't fully convinced that her supposed memories weren't all nonsense.

Speaker 14 So the book uses a pseudonym so Ginny can stay anonymous. But the Chicago American newspaper does some digging and they find out Ginny's real identity.

Speaker 14 And by looking into her past, they uncover some details that do match the story of Bridie Murphy. At one point in her childhood, Ginny lived in a white wooden house.
She had a metal bedframe.

Speaker 14 And according to her relatives, she'd been punished as a child for scraping the paint off of it. Brian, the name of Bridie's husband, was also the middle name of Ginny's husband.

Speaker 14 And most interesting of all, Ginny once had a neighbor across the street named Bridie Murphy Corkell.

Speaker 14 Now, some of that could be a coincidence, like Brian is hardly an uncommon name. And for her part, Ginny remembers a Mrs.
Corkell, but she claims she never heard her first name or maiden name.

Speaker 14 But the Chicago American has their their own theory. Most of Bridie's happy childhood memories might actually come from Ginny's own childhood in Illinois.
That doesn't mean Ginny is making it up.

Speaker 14 She might not even be aware that these memories are her own. In fact, studies have shown that memories of past lives are usually the result of something called source monitoring error.

Speaker 14 Basically, this is when you have a clear memory of some event or information, but you forget where that memory came from.

Speaker 14 For example, say you read about a current event in the newspaper, but then later on you think that you learned about it from watching the news on TV.

Speaker 14 Or say you have a few vague memories from early childhood without being able to place them in context. A white wooden house, scratched paint on a metal bed, a woman named Bridie.

Speaker 14 If you're put under hypnosis and primed to believe that those memories are actually from a past life, well, that's what your brain is going to believe.

Speaker 14 Now, is that enough to debunk Bridie's entire story? For a lot of skeptics, yes. But for believers, there's still no real proof that Bridie wasn't real.

Speaker 14 There's enough evidence on both sides to sustain the argument for generations.

Speaker 14 As for Ginny, she never decided what to believe. After her identity was published, she mostly tried to stay out of the spotlight.

Speaker 14 She wanted the truth, sure, but more than that, she wanted her privacy. And the Chicago American article destroyed that.
The entire nation's attention and fury was directed at her.

Speaker 14 She once said, if I had known what was going to happen, I would never have lain down on the couch.

Speaker 14 Although later in life, she's quoted as commenting, well, the older I get, the more I want to believe in it. And maybe that's the most important takeaway from the Brighty Murphy craze.
Death is scary.

Speaker 14 It's perfectly natural to want to believe that death is just the beginning of a new life, a new way to start over, find a new soulmate, and create more happy memories that, at least under hypnosis, we'll always be able to remember.

Speaker 14 Stories like Brady Murphy's give us hope that the end is not the end.

Speaker 14 And whether reincarnation is real or not, if that hope makes this life easier to enjoy, maybe it's worth believing in.

Speaker 14 Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode.
To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all Audio Chuck originals.

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