Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (14 page)

*
I am an unabashed fan of the SPR (which has been around since 1882) and in particular its quarterly journal. Here are peer-reviewed articles addressing in all seriousness the likes of wart-charming and talking mongooses. Here are time-domain analyses of table rappings and field studies of healers’ effects on lettuce seed germination (“Figure 2: the healer ‘enhances’ the seeds, mimicked by the control healer”). I take it as nothing beyond happy coincidence that the SPR membership roster has at one time or another included a Mrs. H. G. Nutter, a Harry Wack, and a Mrs. Roy Batty.

*
Often the medium was using her foot to manipulate the furniture. However, Spirit Table Lifting aids were available for $12 by mail-order through the likes of the Ralph E. Sylvestre Company (“our effects are being used by nearly all prominent mediums,” brags the 1901 catalogue). Other helpful items included Telescopic Reaching Rods, self-playing trumpets, and Luminous Materialistic Ghosts (“appears gradually, floats about room and disappears”).

†
They did not, however, shew the way to a new theory on royalty rates. Dutton courteously rebuffed Crawford’s request to double his royalties to 20 percent.

*
Gynecological preoccupations are a running theme with the Princedom of Wales. Two and a half centuries later, the Prince of Wales would be caught in an intercepted cell phone call voicing his desire to be reincarnated as his lover’s tampon.

†
The man-midwife, with his arsenal of forceps and knives, was a recent arrival on the obstetrical scene and much resented by the gentle guild of midwifery. “Yea, infants have been born alive, with their brains working out of their heads, occasioned by the too common use of instruments,” warned midwife activist Sarah Stone in her 1737
A Complete Practice of Midwifery
.

*
As opposed to the Swallowing Center at Northwestern, or the Swallowing Center at the University of Southern California, or the one at Holy Cross, or the Rusk Institute, or the Nebraska Medical Center. Of course, the original “swallowing center” is a chunk of your brainstem that coordinates chewing, gagging, vomiting, coughing, belching, and licking, all with minimal fuss and no funding from the NIH.

†
I once saw a wax model of a horned human head at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, but I had no idea the condition was sufficiently common for a doctor to pull together one hundred cases for a review paper. But what do I know? Perhaps horns were the plantar warts of their day. Perhaps Sachs held a post at the Horn Center at the University of Padua.

G
ARY SCHWARTZ is an uncommon hash of academe and spirituality. He has a Phi Beta Kappa key from Cornell and a previous tenure at Yale, but he is best known for his laboratory tests of mediums (the subject of his book
The Afterlife Experiments
). He is a psychology professor at the University of Arizona,
*
as well as the founder
of the university’s Human Energy Systems Laboratory. Waiting for him in my hotel lobby, I did not know whether to be looking for a man in a tweed jacket or a man in drawstring trousers or—help me—a man in both. Schwartz further muddied the waters by showing up in a double-breasted suit, with a white Jaguar parked in the lot. Whatever the heck he’s up to, he’s doing well with it.

Schwartz’s experimental data have led him to the conclusion that there are people—rare and gifted mediums—who can communicate with people who have died. Unlike researchers I have met at the University of Virginia, the other American university currently hosting research on the paranormal, Schwartz will comfortably and without reservation voice his conclusions regarding the hereafter. He tells me, as we drive along Tucson’s glarey, succulent-accessorized streets, that he is working on a paper for
American Psychologist
called “Reexamining the Death Hypothesis.” As in, no one has actually
proved
that the death of a human body is the end of the trail for the personality that lived in it. It’s just a hypothesis.

Like the medium researchers of the early 1900s, Schwartz brings to his laboratory only the most talked-about mediums. John Edwards (of
Crossing Over
), for example, was one of his “dream team” of mediums tested in the
Afterlife Experiments
work. His most recent discovery is Allison DuBois (the medium upon whose life NBC’s
Medium
is based).

Perhaps because I’d been reading a biography of the slovenly and bellicose Helen Duncan on the plane to Tucson, it did not cross my mind that a medium could look like a beauty pageant winner. DuBois has long, obedient rust-red hair that turns up just so on the ends and complements her coppery lipstick. Her blush and foundation could have been applied by airbrush, so perfect is the blending. She manages to look made-up at the same time as she looks completely natural and beautiful
without device. I can no more understand how a woman does this than I can understand how a woman communicates with dead people. DuBois is paranormally good-looking.

Before she became a medium, Allison DuBois was on a career track to the Maricopa County prosecutor’s office as a criminal prosecutor. In April 2000, someone got in her way. Well, more than that. “I went downstairs to get the laundry, and a man walked through me,” she told me at lunch. She was mounting an enthusiastic attack on an apple tart as large as her foot, which isn’t large as feet go, but very large as apple tarts go. DuBois’s delicate frame belies a robust enthusiasm for food, which seems to run over into her readings, which often include food preferences of the “discarnate,” as they say in these parts. The discarnate man in the laundry room being no exception: “I knew that he loved clam chowder, and that he’d had a heart attack.” She ran upstairs and told her husband Joe, who is an aerospace engineer. Joe blinked at her, as one might when abruptly confronted by one’s spouse’s possible mental disintegration, and then he said, “That’s my grandfather.”

After a few months of running into dead people, DuBois saw a
Dateline
segment about Gary Schwartz’s medium research. “I thought, ‘I’m going to go see him. I’m going to prove to myself that I’m not really doing this, and then I’m going to get on with my career.’” DuBois impressed Schwartz as having genuine talent. The prosecutor’s office would have to wait.

DuBois is one of four mediums taking part in a research project called the Asking Questions Study. I love this study, because it addresses one of my main beefs with medium-brokered encounters with the dead. Dead people never seem to address the obvious—the things you’d think they’d be bursting to talk about, and the things all of us not-yet-dead are
madly curious about. Such as: Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What’s it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I’m on the toilet? Would you cut that out? If the dead come through at all, they come through in cryptic little impressions: a stout woman with gray hair, a small black dog, the date May 23. It’s a maddening way to communicate. Schwartz and his mediums would reply that that’s the best the dead can manage, that they can’t speak sentences into the medium’s head. Impressions come through, and that’s all.

Julie Beischel, the researcher behind the Asking Questions Study, wondered whether perhaps it was the case that the dead never provide this kind of information because no one ever bothers to ask them. Beischel is a University of Arizona psychology postdoctorate who, like DuBois, contacted Schwartz after seeing him on TV. Beischel was a pharmacology student whose interest in the paranormal was sparked after losing her mother. (This is a common theme among people involved in paranormal research. As she puts it, “Everyone doing this has lost somebody.” Certainly this was the case with some of spiritualism’s less likely converts: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and physicist Sir Oliver Lodge both lost sons during World War I.)

Beischel assembled a list of thirty-two questions about the afterlife, which are being posed to two discarnates, via four mediums. (Each medium takes a turn with each of the two dead folks.) Beischel hadn’t analyzed the data at this point, but she gave me printouts of the answers she had collected. With both discarnates, the answers to a given question usually differed with each different medium. “Do you eat?” for example, garnered an even split of yes’s and no’s. I asked Beischel how she interpreted this. She said, very straightforwardly, as is her manner: “My interpretation is that the mediums are just guessing, or the answer is biased by the medium’s own ideas of what the afterlife is like, or the questions don’t have enough emotional
interest for the discarnate to give a strong answer.” Which more or less covers all the bases. In case the answers are in fact coming from the Beyond, I’ve culled some highlights for you, from various mediums. We’ll start with the good news:

And now, some less good news:

And a point of interest for aspiring writers …

To the formal study data, I feel I must add one last statement about the afterlife, passed along to me by Allison DuBois, who received it from an unnamed discarnate during a private sitting: “I can wear pleated pants now.”

Though Beischel is the first to have addressed these issues in the purview of a modern university-based research study, afterlife investigators and spiritualists have, on occasion over the years, posed these sorts of questions to the dead. Matla and Zaalberg van Zelst, the Dutch physicists who appeared in Chapter 4 with their soul-proving cylinder-in-a-box gizmo, grilled the occasional
homme-force
, as they termed it, via a medium, about conditions on the other side. The hommes
-force
were, like their interviewers, scientifically minded and tended to provide answers that, while marvelously detailed, did not always get at the things we live humans are itching to know. They’d natter on about the density and specific gravity of an
homme-force
, for instance, or the fact that when they need to move briskly, they assume a spiral form thirty-five centimeters in length and with fourteen turnings, which resembles in shape and hopefully nothing else the type of bacteria found in
“les matières fécales
.” You have to wade to the end of the book to find the good stuff, which is nothing short of alarming: Although nearsighted, they can
see through our clothing
and sometimes even through our skin. If the room is quiet, they can read our thoughts.

In the end, I couldn’t decide if being an
homme-force
represented an improvement over life on earth. On the one hand, there are no ailments, no need to work or secure lodgings. You own nothing, and you have no cares or obligations. One of Matla’s respondents confessed that the life of an
homme-force
, despite the novel joys of eavesdropping on thoughts and peering through ladies’ undergarments, soon loses its luster. Because they depend entirely on us for their “distractions,” it
said, they grow bored during the night while we sleep. And, alas, “
il
n’a
pas de sexe
.” There is no sex.

This vision of the afterlife as DMV waiting room differs widely from that of spiritualism bigwig Arthur Findlay, who, over the course of three séances with a medium named Sloane, posed fifty-three questions about the afterlife. Various discarnates chimed in with replies. Following is the transcript of a reply to “Will you tell me something about your world?” taken from Findlay’s 1955 autobiography
Looking Back
. Basically, everything that exists here on earth exists in the Beyond, except possibly composting:

Myself, I am hoping that neither Matla nor Findlay is correct, and that the vision of Reverend Dr. G. Owen represents our true future. In a February 5, 1923,
New York Times
article (“Owen Says Heaven Needs Active Men: Sailing One of Pastimes”), Owen laid out the details:

The reverend concluded with some “scattered facts about the future,” including one that suggests he might have sat down and enjoyed Arthur Findlay’s company: “Flowers do not fade. They melt and disappear.” The article concludes, somewhat abruptly, with the statement, “We keep our mannerisms.”

If that is so, then somewhere, eons from now, Gary Schwartz will be smoothing the tip of his tie over his belly and jingling the change in his pockets. Pacing while he talks. And laughing. Laughing easily, laughing loud, laughing a lot. If the skeptics get under his skin—and I’m sure that they do—he doesn’t let it dampen the obvious fun he is having with his work. For a man who takes an extraordinary amount of professional guff, he is resiliently good-natured, a Pooh bear among the skeptic society Eeyores.

Shortly after Schwartz’s paper detailing the
Afterlife
Experiments
findings ran in the
Journal of the Society for Psychical
Research
, University of Oregon Professor Emeritus of Psychology Ray Hyman published a piece in the
Skeptical Inquirer
entitled
“How Not to Test Mediums.” The article featured a laundry list of criticisms of Schwartz’s methodology. The most damning of these, to my mind anyway, concerned rater bias: Schwartz’s sitters had been allowed to rate the readings, and they knew which one had been their own. This is a serious and long-acknowledged bugaboo in research that aims to test mediums and psychics. One of the first researchers to document rater bias among mediums’ sitters was a London University Ph.D. candidate named John Hettinger. His project, carried out in the late 1930s, is detailed in parapsychologist Sybo Schouten’s excellent “Overview of Quantitatively Evaluated Studies with Mediums and Psychics” in the July 1994
Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research
. Hettinger found that subjects’ judgments of the accuracy of mediums’ statements pertaining to their dead loved ones were strongly influenced by their knowing whether or not the statements were intended for them. Cut out the horoscopes in the next astrology column you see, remove the star signs at the top, and mix them up. You’ll likely find that yours doesn’t stand out the way it usually seems to.

Hyman describes having been a pawn of the phenomenon himself. In his teens, he had earned spending money by reading palms. He started doing it on a lark, and was surprised by his clients’ enthusiastic praises of his talents—so much so that he himself began to believe he had a gift. Eventually a friend persuaded him to try an experiment in which he would deliberately read a client’s palm exactly opposite to what the lines on her palm suggested. The client told Hyman it was the most accurate reading she had ever had.