Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (8 page)

Theory the Second: Macdougall’s experimental protocols were as lame as his poetry. Let’s look a little closer at his findings.

Macdougall weighed six patients in all, but only the first, the one described earlier, stands as a strong example of the
phenomenon. Macdougall threw out Patient 6’s data because the man died just as they had put him on the cot and were adjusting the beam. Number 4’s data he discounted because, Macdougall wrote in
American Medicine
, “our scales were not finely adjusted and there was a good deal of interference by people opposed to our work.” The doctor makes several references to “friction on the part of officials,” and states that only the first patient was run under ideal conditions, i.e., sans friction. He doesn’t specify what form this friction took, but if it affected the tests to the extent that some were thrown out, it seems reasonable to assume that the officials were there in the room, hectoring Macdougall or trying to bring a halt to what he was doing. Hardly ideal conditions for a test that requires concentration and enough quiet to listen for a heartbeat.

That leaves four subjects. With the exception of Number 1, the data for all were compromised in one way or another. Number 2 stopped breathing at 4:10 a.m., but the scale didn’t budge for another fifteen minutes (whereupon it registered a half-ounce drop). “We had great doubt, from the ordinary evidence,” writes Macdougall in his
American Medicine
paper, “to say just what moment he died.” If you can’t tell when the man died, you can’t very well claim that he lost a half ounce at the moment of death.

Number 3’s weight loss happened in two phases: a half-ounce loss at the moment of death, and then an additional loss of an entire ounce a few minutes later. Macdougall explains that the second loss might have been caused by a jarring of the scale, caused when one of his colleagues listened to the subject’s heart. If pressing a stethoscope to a patient’s chest disturbs the balance, as of course it would, then how did Macdougall and his colleagues presume to know the moment of death in
any
of these cases?

Number 5’s data were tainted by a peculiarity of the scale.
Following a three-eighths-ounce loss, three-eighths ounces of weight was added to the scale to bring it back to zero; however, the beam didn’t budge for fifteen minutes. Macdougall had no explanation. Was his scale dodgy? Did Fairbanks make a reliable scale? Was it really accurate to one-fifth of an ounce? Where was a Fairbanks scale historian when you needed one?

PEGGY PEARL OVERSEES the Historical Collection of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, where Franklin Fairbanks began manufacturing scales in 1830. The collection includes 30 or so antique Fairbanks scales, as well as farm implements, “tools of yesteryear,” 103 years of Northern New England Weather Center records, and the Carlton Felch diaries. Peggy fielded my call with a vigor that suggested things were pretty quiet around the Historical Collection office. The Fairbanks company’s scales, she said, were ubiquitous from 1830 through the first half of the twentieth century. They were the Rolls-Royce of platform scales. When I told her Macdougall used a silk scale with a capacity of 300 pounds, she faxed me two pages of Fairbanks Silk Scales from a Macdougall-era catalogue.

“It combines great sensitiveness with the increase in capacity and platform,” said the proud Fairbanks copy. “Very handsome in appearance.” Indeed, as Macdougall had said, his scale was accurate to one-fifth of an ounce. I told Peggy the story of Macdougall and the dying consumptives, hoping she might have some nugget of Fairbanks scale minutiae that would explain the good doctor’s three-quarter-ounce drop. She initially wondered whether the platform might have been inlaid, in which case, you couldn’t have a cot sticking out over the sides of the platform without rendering the results, as she
put it, “screwy.” But the scale in the drawing had a standard suspension platform.

“That’s about as far as I can take you,” said Peggy. You could hear the disappointment in her voice. Peggy Pearl could tell me what the weather was on April 10, 1901, and she could tell me what Carlton Felch was up to that day, but she could not tell me whether Macdougall’s cot contraption had somehow compromised the Fairbanks’s renowned accuracy.

MACDOUGALL SEEMED AWARE of his study’s weaknesses, and he encouraged others to try to extend and replicate his work. He wanted to do more trials himself, but was stymied by the earlier-cited frictions with officials. Overtures to “positioned and entrenched scientific authorities” at other facilities, he writes in a letter to R. Hodgson of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), were met by rebuffs. His best bet would have been the ASPR itself. Indeed, the ASPR’s scientific officer, Hereward Carrington, upon hearing of Macdougall’s study, wrote at length and with great gusto, in an issue of the society’s journal, about the possibility of outfitting a condemned prisoner in an airtight glass hood, and placing him, electric chair and all, onto a platform scale.

In the end, Macdougall resorted to weighing some dogs on a scale he set up in his barn. Owing to the difficulty of finding dogs dying from a disease that rendered them exhausted and motionless, he immobilized and then killed them via injection—fifteen dogs in all. Not one evinced a drop in weight as it died. Macdougall’s spin on this rather striking batch of conflicting data was that of the churchgoing Christian: Animals don’t have souls—or anyway, sayeth the Bible, not the eternal variety—and therefore we should expect this.

Not everyone in the soul-weighing business would agree with Macdougall there. Ten years after the
American
Medicine
paper was published, a physics teacher at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School self-published a book called
The Physical Theory of the Soul
, which included a chapter detailing his adventures in mouse-soul-weighing. H. LaV. Twining, as he appears on the title page, didn’t seem to like animals much, as we will see, but he gave them credit for arriving in this world with the same spiritual accoutrements as humans. “It is reasonable to conclude …” he wrote, “that all forms of life have accompanying souls … and that animals would form fit subjects … since they could be killed at will and under any chosen conditions, while human beings could not.”

Over the following four pages, H. LaV. offs thirty mice on his scale, using every condition the Polytechnic supply closet would support. He suffocated them in test tubes melted shut by Bunsen burners (no weight loss). He smothered them in flasks sealed with rubber stoppers and flasks sealed with parafinned corks (no loss, and no loss). He gassed them in open flasks with cyanide pellets. Here at last he witnessed a loss: one to two milligrams “at its last kick.” H. theorized that the poison had caused the mice to “perspire violently at death,” and that the lost milligrams were evaporated mouse sweat. I did a little reading on the subject of cyanide poisoning, in the form of a paper by Dr. John M. Friedberg, which helped prompt the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to deem cyanide executions cruel and unusual. Death by cyanide does appear to be moderately aerobic—panic, retching, seizures, violent head extension, grimaces—though excessive perspiration isn’t specifically mentioned as a symptom. Excessive salivation is, however. Perhaps some seizure-flung drool escaped the confines of the flask.

A colleague suggested that the lost weight might have been air expelled from the dying rodent’s lungs. No slouch, H. decided to test for this, too, a process he describes, with his characteristic flair for insensitivity, like this: “A mouse was thrown into a tank of water.” A test tube was slipped over the head of the drowning mouse to catch the air it expelled as it died, and this was weighed and found to be negligible.

H. quickly moved on to more pressing matters, such as the author of a book on Rosicrucian theory who had misstated some of H.’ s conclusions and misspelled his name. “This is inexcusable,” he crabbed. If humans, like mice, could be killed at will, I know just who would have been found in a tank with a test tube over his head. And along with him, the animal rights advocates who chastised Twining for his cruelty. (An account of his work had run in a local newspaper.) Here is Twining in defensive overdrive:

The point to take away from H.’ s work is that if you put a dying mouse in a sealed container—such that moisture, expelled breath, drool, et cetera, are trapped—its weight won’t change. So H. LaV.’ s work with mice is in line with Duncan Macdougall’s dog findings, neither showing evidence of a departing soul.

IN 1998, DONALD Gilbert Carpenter published a whole book about soul-weighing (
Physically Weighing the Soul
). It’s a long book but lightweight, as light as a soul, for it exists only in cyberspace, available by download at 1stBooks.com. According to Carpenter, the reason the dogs and the mice might have shown no weight loss at death is that their souls are so light they were below the scales’ detection thresholds. Macdougall said his dog-weighing scale was accurate to one-sixteenth of an ounce (1.8 grams), but a dog’s soul weighs less than 1.8 grams. How do we know this is the weight of a dog’s soul? Because Donald Gilbert Carpenter has calculated it. (I love this guy!) Using Macdougall’s findings for human beings—that the soul weighs about 20 grams—Carpenter calculated the ratio of soul-weight to body-weight-at-birth: 1 to 140. Applying this to a typical puppy birth weight, he deduced that the average dog soul weighs one gram—about half the 1.8-gram sensitivity of the scale. Same problem with Twining’s mouse souls—too light to register. (But not Jesus’ soul. The discarnate Jesus is calculated in Chapter 17 to weigh 364 grams—close to a pound!)

Elsewhere, Carpenter calculates the volume of the human soul—or Mac, as he prefers to call it, in honor of Duncan Macdougall. Here is how he came up with his volume amount. The smallest infant to survive at birth, he
says, weighed ten ounces and had a volume of three-tenths of a quart. (I do not know the formula for calculating the volume of a premature baby; perhaps he hired H. LaV. Twining to throw one into a graduated cylinder and note how much water it displaced.) The volume of the baby’s Mac would be identical to its birth volume because, quoting Carpenter, “if the volume of its … Mac had been bigger than that, it would have stuck out of the child’s body.” Once again, Jesus is the exception. His Mac had a volume of 5.25 quarts, meaning that half a quart’s worth of excess soul stuck out of his body when he was born. Carpenter surmises the protruding material took the form of a glow, rather than the more pedestrian hump or goiter that leapt into my mind.

Carpenter points out that leprechauns have a volume similar to that of the human Mac. “This makes me suspect,” he writes, “that Leprechauns … are most likely discarnate humans.” This makes me, in turn, suspect that Donald Gilbert Carpenter is most likely not the staid scientist that his many equations and tables suggest. (Carpenter’s bio says he knows more about materialistic research on the soul than anyone else alive, but it doesn’t say what kind of degree he has or what he does for a living.)

Carpenter had not, at the time his book was published, undertaken any soul-weighing experiments himself, but he had some intriguing ideas. Rather than put dying people on scales, he thought it would be instructive to do the experiment with pregnant women, and look for a sudden weight gain around the moment the Mac enters the fetus—which he figures happens at forty-three days, when brain waves can first be detected. Carpenter outlines a variety of unique uses for pregnant women. On page seventy-seven he tells us, “An excellent way to de-haunt a house would be to make it the residence of
newly fertilized women just prior to normal entry of the Mac into the fetus.”

LEWIS E. HOLLANDER, JR., is a sheep rancher in Bend, Oregon. Sometime in 2000, Hollander, intrigued by Duncan Macdougall’s work, became the second man in history to set up a soul-weighing operation in his barn. He rigged a seven-by-three-foot platform to a Toledo model 8132 electronic digital indicator, a quartet of load cells, and a computer. His subjects were eight sheep, three lambs, and a goat, all of which were sedated and then euthanized, and all of which, he assures us, were headed that direction anyway. The animals were wrapped in plastic to, as he put it, contain any voiding. This was important because (a) voided material might drip off the weighing surface, creating a spurious weight loss, and (b) you try getting sheep urine out of your load cells.

Though his goals march lockstep with Twining’s, the similarities stop there. Hollander is a kindly, soft-spoken guy, and he genuinely likes sheep. “They’re easy to deal with,” he told me, “and there’s a whole lot of warm things about them.” Hollander did not relish extinguishing that warmth. “I don’t know if you’ve ever killed anything, but it’s a very traumatic thing to do. To sit and watch this animal …” That was why his subject pool was limited to twelve. (He had actually contacted local doctors about the possibility of weighing end-game hospital patients, but ethical issues proved insurmountable.)

Here is the odd thing. All the sheep Hollander tested showed a temporary weight
gain
at death—most between 30 and 200 grams. One notable ewe put on 780 grams: nearly two pounds (or 37 Macs, or two discarnate Jesuses). The gain lasted from one to six seconds and then it disappeared. The
three lambs did not, however, gain any weight, and neither did the goat. I called Hollander and asked him what he thought this meant.