Found: Bridey Murphy

The woman who is creating the biggest stir in the U.S. this week is an attractive, 33-year-old Pueblo, Colo, housewife named Virginia Tighe. Millions of Americans know her in another personality as Bridey Murphy, the necromantic heroine of The Search for Bridey Murphy who has made reincarnation a fad more entrancing than canasta or flying saucers.

Bridey Murphy--born A.D. 1798, died 1864--first appeared in print in the fall DEGf J954, soon after a chance remark by Robert Cast, an attorney of Pueblo (pop. 80,800). Said Cast to his brother-in-law, William J. ("Bark") Barker of the Denver Post's Sunday supplement Empire: "Do you think there might be a story in a guy who has discovered that a woman in Pueblo lived an earlier life in Ireland in the 1800s?" Replied Newsman Barker: "Hell, yes." He wrote the story. Empire ran it in three installments as "The Strange Search for Bridey Murphy," and letters from 10,000 readers gave a glimpse of the national furor to come.

Last January, with some manuscript advice from Newsman Barker, Morey Bernstein, 36, a Pueblo businessman who sells farm and mining equipment, told the story again in his book (TIME, Feb. 20). Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist, had put Housewife Tighe, who uses the name Ruth Simmons to avoid publicity, into a trance in which she conjured up an earlier incarnation as Bridey, a redheaded lass born in Cork. What made the story chillingly persuasive was the mass of circumstantial detail about people, places and customs that Mrs. Tighe recounted in a brogue and in words that seemed utterly foreign to her. $25 an Existence. In two months Bernstein's book shot through eight printings and 170,500 copies into No. 1 spot on U.S. nonfiction bestseller lists overlapping Anne Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea. It has also sold some 30,000 longplaying records ($5.95 each) enabling purchasers to hear Bridey herself as Bernstein recorded her on tape in the first of his six sessions with Housewife Tighe. The book has been bought by the movies (for a reported $50,000), syndicated in 42 U.S. newspapers, and echoed in popular songs (The Love of Bridey Murphy).

More than that, it has created a boom in the occult. A West Coast hypnotist advertised an offer to "establish the prior existence" of all comers (at $25 an existence). Around the country, while hostesses gave "come as you were" parties and restaurants offered "reincarnation cocktails," ordinary Americans began turning up (often on TV screens) in earlier lifetimes as German leather merchants, French peasants, English princesses, and; in one case, a horse. In Shawnee, Okla., Bridey intrigued a 19-year-old newsboy so mightily that he killed himself after leaving a note that he was going to "investigate the theory in person."

The same curiosity drove others to try to check Bridey's story in Ireland. To get the Denver Post back on top of the story it had launched, Post Publisher Palmer Hoyt sent Reporter Barker on a three-week prowl through Irish graveyards and libraries. This week, in its Sunday edition, the Post printed Barker's 20,000-word report. He listed many a point that checked out in Bridey's favor--mostly knowledge of expressions, customs and legends, all of which (though Barker die not say so) could have lodged in Mrs. Tighe's subconscious mind in tales told by her parents, both of whom were partly Irish in extraction.

Bridey & Blarney. But otherwise, Barker's search turned up more blarney than Bridey, even though folklorists, genealogists, historians and language specialists turned themselves inside out to help. Barker found numerous directories and records in which Bridey and several of the characters in her story--lawyers, teachers, a priest--should have been recorded if they had existed. But there was not a trace. Bridey--whose name Barker now spells "Bridie" on the advice of the Irish --had given names of Belfast streets and obscure towns through which she passed on her honeymoon trip and on a journey to the sea as a child. He could find only some of the places, and even they made no sensible pattern of travel.

Despite her brogue, Barker learned, Bridey had shamefully mispronounced Irish words (like the name Sean, which she insisted on pronouncing See-an instead of Shawn), and larded her story with American idioms unheard-of in Ireland, e.g., her hair was "real red," she got an "awful spanking."

There were other discrepancies. Bridey described her metal bed in 1804, but Irish authorities said that metal beds did not arrive in Ireland until 1850. Bridey's father's first name was Duncan, a Scottish name that the Irish found utterly incongruous with Murphy. Bridey had spoken of living in Cork in a wooden house, but the houses in that boggy part of the country were almost invariably made of stone. She had spoken of Cork as a "town" and "village," but it was a big city in the 1800s.

Though nobody could find a scrap of evidence that she ever lived, Bridey died hard--even with Reporter Barker, who was frankly hoping to prove her real. Barker consoled himself and his readers with the thought that the search was really not over.

"What do I think about the whole Bridie business?" he wound up. "Well, it's no fraud, whatever it is ... Has this research disproved reincarnation? I'll leave that to you. All I think we've proved definitely is that memory (any kind of memory) is unreliable. And that we know less than nothing about our brains and our souls. I do think Morey and Ruth owe the world one more hypnotic session with somebody present who's accustomed to interviewing people. That somebody ought also to know Ireland. I volunteer."

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