Past life regression (PLR) can be both an experimental technique and a form of therapy, but it has scientific credibility only if reincarnation is scientifically proven to exist. The existence of reincarnation is not yet a scientific truth. Recent studies indicate that reincarnation deserves to be recognized as a scientific hypothesis because it can be falsified or confirmed through scientific research. For this reason, Dr. Ian Stevenson’s international field studies are immensely important. Any idea that has a clinical character has clinical validity, but the clinical validity of PLR has not yet been convincingly demonstrated.
The most famous case of past life regression (PLR) is undoubtedly that of Bridey Murphy. It is a historical case. In the mid-20th century, Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman who had been practicing hypnotism for ten years on hundreds of different people, decided to try to take someone back to one or more past lives. He chose as his subject a woman named Virginia Tighe, knowing that she had the ability to go into a deep trance with ease. Between November 29, 1952 and August 29, 1953, Bernstein made six attempts to facilitate Virginia’s regression. During those sessions he recalled a brief life as a baby who died. Then came the figure of Bridey Murphy, more formally Bridget Kathleen Murphy.
After her first experience as Bridey, Virginia mutated into her alter ego whenever she was invited to do so in a trance state. She offered a significant amount of information about Ireland, none of which she had an explainable way of knowing like Virginia Tighe. She said that she was born in Cork in 1798, the daughter of a Protestant barrister named Duncan Murphy and his wife Kathleen. She had a brother named Duncan Blaine Murphy, who had married Aimee Strayne. Another brother had died in infancy. At the age of twenty, Bridey said, she was married in a Protestant ceremony to a Catholic, Brian Joseph McCarthy, the son of another Cork barrister. Brian and Bridey moved to Belfast, where he attended school, eventually moving on to teach law at Queen’s University. They had no children, and Bridey lived to be sixty-six.
No record of any of these events in Ireland has been identified. However, during the narration of her experiences as Bridey, Virginia mentioned the names of two Belfast grocers, Farr’s and John Carrigan. It was possible to verify that two grocers with those names operated retail businesses in the city at the appropriate time. She said that her address in Cork was The Meadows, and it was established that there is an area in that city called Mardike Meadows. Queen’s University Belfast is, of course, a renowned educational establishment. Virginia used certain distinctive words which research showed to be in use in Ireland at Bridey’s time, such as ‘abandoned’ for ‘buried’, ‘linen’ to mean a handkerchief, and ‘lough’ for river or lake. Those who were convinced of the veracity of Virginia’s memories pointed out that a girl born and raised in the United States, as Virginia was, would probably not have been familiar with these terms. Investigative reporters concluded that there was some evidence of ‘something’, still unexplained. Credible hypnosis experts claim to have debunked this case, but the late Professor Ian Stevenson, who has investigated many cases of children remembering past lives, deemed it worthy of closer scrutiny.
“Looking For Carroll Beckwith” (Robert L. Snow, 1999, Looking for Carroll Beckwith. Pennsylvania: Daybreak Books) is an interesting case of past life regression. Carroll Beckwith was a minor portrait painter who lived and worked in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He had never done anything outstanding that would make him immortal as an artist. Captain Robert L. Snow is Commander of the Homicide Branch of the Indianapolis Police Department. He discovered under hypnosis that he was Carroll Beckwith in a previous life. Snow wanted to refute the images he had experienced under hypnosis as a form of cryptomnesia. Snow was already disenchanted with hypnotherapy procedures in child sexual abuse cases. The regression took place in 1992 and Captain Snow was able to find 28 details of his regression that could be proven or disproved.
Instead of disproving the veracity of his images, Mr. Snow showed that most of the memories he had while hypnotized actually took place nearly 100 years earlier. While on vacation in New Orleans, Captain Snow walked into an art gallery on a dark side street where he came across the painting from his memory: the hunchbacked woman. He learned that Beckwith’s personal diaries and an unpublished autobiography existed in a local New York library. For a detective, that was definitive evidence to close or prove the case. From Beckwith’s journals, he found that 26 points out of 28 matched the life of Carroll Beckwith. His recollections included Beckwith using a cane even though he was not disabled, visiting France, drinking wine (whiskey was the popular drink in the US), a hunchbacked woman, mother died of a blood clot, wife Berth was sons, Berth used to play the piano or sing for his friends, etc. Captain Snow got the wrong name from the previous personality’s wife, but his frank admission adds to his credibility Mr. Snow claims he has more proof of his earlier life than most murder cases and he is convinced that he carries some of Carroll Beckwith’s memories. Parapsychologists could offer alternative explanations even for those apparently true memories. Captain Snow simply concludes in his book: “I can’t accept that, with the billions of people who have inhabited the Earth, my case is unique, that mine would be the only case since John the Baptist, that some say that Jesus describes in Matthew c It’s like a rebirth of Elijah.”
Extreme skeptics of past life regression might explain flashbacks of hypnotic past life memories as a “gateway” phenomenon that has not been discussed in the scientific literature of parapsychology.
