Episode 4: Repeat After Me

One night in 1952,

a Coloradan businessman hypnotized a local housewife. Under his spell, she began to recount her past life as a 19th century Irish woman. He caught it on tape. The story of her reincarnation tore out of their Colorado town and across the world. It spawned major motion pictures, an international bestselling book, and a national hypnosis craze. But beneath all the uproar lay a set of questions that revealed a deep worry about the nature of self in the 1950s, the decade’s mishmash of psychology and spiritualism, and an anxiety about gender. This episode of The Last Archive: Who are you, really?

Image: Denver Library

Key Accessible Sources

Read Morey Bernstein’s The Search for Bridey Murphy, Robert Bernstein’s memoir The Sheik and the Shadow, and Hazel Higgins’ memoir My Brother Eddie.

For more on Bridey Murphy story, read Alison Winter’s “The Three Lives of Bridey Murphy” chapter in Memory, or this article.

For more on mesmerism, Freud & hypnosis check out Maria Tatar’s Spellbound or this article in the Public Domain Review.

Read about the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in Stacy Horn’s Unbelievable, and about the Exorcist letter here.

Learn more about the history of behaviorism in John Mills’ Control.

Pages 87-95 of this 1940 issue of LIFE Magazine detail Dr. Rhine’s E.S.P. methods. Read their coverage of the Bridey Murphy craze in the March 19, 1956 article “Bridey Murphy Puts Nation In A Hypno-Tizzy.”

Listen to "Do You Believe in Reincarnation," words and music Lalo Guerrero Barrio Libre Music BMI, as heard in the episode. Also, check out “The Love Of Bridey Murphy” by Billy Devroe’s Devilaries.

Watch the 1966 episode of To Tell the Truth featuring Virginia Tighe.

Audio of The Search for Bridey Murphy can be found here, with full tapes of the sessions at the Pueblo Historical Society.

Watch the film version of Bernstein’s book and the trailer of The She-Creature.