The Search for Bridey Murphy (10 page)

Meanwhile I was keeping Dr. Rhine at Duke informed on our work, and the correspondence between the doctor and myself began to assume hefty proportions. Dr. Rhine asked an extraordi
nary number of questions: Was the door closed between the two rooms during the experiment?… Was there any communication between trials as to the success of the trial just finished?… Will you make a comparative series of tests in which you have the same receiver in the hypnotic state go through the same number of runs with the same sender but with the sender in the normal state?… Do you have in mind also having the sender hypnotized and the receiver normal? There were many more, and most of these questions were concerned with precautionary measures to insure the accuracy of the experiments.

The hypnotic experiments continued until we had fourteen runs of twenty-five targets each, or a total of 350 individual trials. At this point Hazel and I decided to visit Dr. Rhine at his Duke laboratory. There were many questions he could answer for us, and besides, we wanted to meet personally this courageous scientist who had undertaken such a mammoth pioneering project.

At the airport, where Dad was seeing us off, his parting comment was, “I’ll bet this Rhine isn’t even listed in Dun and Bradstreet.” As the plane took off, I was still trying to figure out whether he had been serious.

The following day Hazel and I were in Durham, North Carolina, more than two thousand miles from Pueblo, waiting in a high-ceilinged, book-lined room. While we were looking over Dr. Rhine’s library, he walked in. Tall, handsome, and well built, he hardly fitted the picture that one imagines when thinking of the typical college professor. He wasn’t even wearing glasses! Over his alert eyes were bushy black brows, revealing that his thick white hair had once been black.

Since I had already prepared a list of typewritten questions I wasted no time in asking them. And the doctor lost no time in answering; he seemed to have a prepared list of answers. I wanted to know about everything from experiments with prayer to his experience with Lady, the Wonder Horse. Hazel added questions too, and since we spent almost a week with Dr. Rhine we thought of more as we went along. One question which inevitably pops up during a meeting between two people interested in parapsychology is “How did
you
become interested in these phenomena?” Naturally this was one of my questions for Dr. Rhine, and one night while we were having dinner together, he related an episode (also recorded in one of
his books) which was a factor in his decision to plunge into the whirlpool of psychic mysteries. “When I was a graduate student at a large university,” Rhine told us, “one of my most respected science professors related a typical psychic occurrence to which he had been in part an eyewitness:

“They went to the barn and found the horses unharnessed. They climbed to the hayloft, and there was the body in the spot the sister had described from her dream. The pistol was lying in the hay, where it would have fallen if it had been used as she had indicated and if the body had afterward rolled down the incline. It seemed as though she had dreamed every detail with photographic exactness. I was only a boy then, but it made an impression on me I’ve never forgotten. I can’t explain it and I’ve never found anyone else who could,” the professor concluded.

Rhine continued, “His story puzzled and impressed me when I heard it, and it has remained in my mind long years after most of the things he taught in class have been forgotten. It is not the story alone that I have remembered, but the fact that the man who told it, himself a teacher and a scientist, though clearly impressed by the occurrence, had no explanation whatever to offer; that he had lived all the years of his manhood believing such a thing had occurred and had done nothing, even to satisfy his own curiosity, about it.”

When I, in turn, was asked to account for my own interest in these matters, I realized that I had never taken much time to give
myself reasons. I supposed that my interest was something like that of the mountain climber in the novel,
The White Tower
. When asked why he insisted upon climbing a peak which had not yet been reached by man, he answered, “Because it is there.”

Likewise, I just can’t dismiss this stuff. It is there.

Our visit to Duke gave us an intimate glimpse of one of the world’s most important scientists. Probably more than any other one person, Joseph Banks Rhine has managed to pry an opening under the most ponderous of all iron curtains, the mystery of man’s own nature. His evidence is revolutionary; it calls for—indeed, it necessitates—a revision of many basic scientific concepts. The implications cut across psychology, medicine, philosophy, religion; they offer man, for the first time, an opening wedge in his efforts to understand himself and his fellow man.

And what a battle Rhine and his cohorts have encountered every inch of the way! During the early years, in fact, the research reports from his laboratory were far outnumbered by the articles of criticism directed against them. The first targets for criticism were the mathematical methods of evaluation used to determine whether the scores could be explained by chance. The decision which ended this part of the battle came in 1937, during the annual meeting of the American Institute of Mathematical Statistics, when the following press release was authorized:

“… the statistical analysis is essentially valid. If the Rhine investigation is to be fairly attacked, it must be on other than mathematical grounds.”

And a few months later Professor E. V. Huntington, distinguished Harvard mathematician, further clarified the mathematical issues involved in the ESP research in an article which appeared in the
American Scholar
.

Even so, it should come as no surprise that Rhine’s evidence doesn’t find the welcome mat spread before all the members of his own profession. Why should we expect Dr. Rhine to enjoy an immunity from the ridicule and strife that has plagued almost every pioneer from Giordano Bruno to Alexander Bell? Why should human nature suddenly go into reverse and smile upon a man who points out that all is not just as we have been taught for three centuries? Men of science are, after all, human beings, basically the same kind of beings who opposed Galileo, Mesmer, Newton, Pasteur, Semmelweis. Evidence which does not fit neatly into the
current pattern is regarded, or perhaps disregarded, with disdain.

A Yale professor, Dr. G. E. Hutchinson, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, summarized the situation as follows:

“The reason why most scientific workers do not accept these results is simply that they do not want to, and avoid doing so by refusing to examine the full detailed reports of the experiments in question.”

The skirmishes, issues, and tests surrounding Rhine extended even to his bookselling efforts. The salesmen of his own publishing house had to be convinced. Take, for instance, the following account from a former executive of Farrar and Rinehart, the publisher of Rhine’s first popular book:

“Dr. J. B. Rhine’s first book for the general reader on extrasensory perception, called
New Frontiers of the Mind
, was to be published in the fall of that year [1937]. In spite of a couple of interesting articles in Harper’s Magazine, the knowledge of extrasensory perception at that time was confined to a small number of people who had followed the earlier Duke work with interest. Ninety-nine out of every hundred Americans were highly skeptical, and it became evident to the editorial department that in spite of the book’s selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and in spite of a growing interest in the subject, the half dozen or so key salesmen of the firm’s staff were far from comforted. It was evident that unless something drastic were done, the book would be sold without full confidence and enthusiasm by our representatives. John Farrar’s solution of this problem was characteristically simple. He called me into his office, explained the problem as he saw it, and instructed me to give the sales force a demonstration of the truth of extrasensory perception….

“At the time of sales conference none of the now familiar Duke extrasensory perception testing cards were available and, in any event, any demonstration with them would have partially failed of its object since the cards were unfamiliar to the salesmen and would have been viewed as a piece of magician’s equipment rather than a fair test of the thesis of the book. Accordingly, I summoned the boys into a vacant office and had one of them produce a pack of cards which, like one or two other salesmen in my experience, he happened to have in his desk. I told them that I was going to prove that there was such a thing as extrasensory perception and I asked each of the six to shuffle the pack and cut it. They did
so with a thoroughness which I can remember appallingly as I watched. I then told them the truth that there are fifty-two cards in a standard playing deck such as that one, that the chance that I would correctly identify the top card on the pack by suit was one in four and by suit and number one in fifty-two. I pointed out that the mathematics on the second card were somewhat more complicated. The chance of my being right by suit and number was of course one in fifty-one; the chance of being right by suit was slightly more than one in four. The chance of being right by suit and number of the first two cards in the sequence was, according to me, estimated to be one in fifty-two times one in fifty-one, a very large figure, which would be multiplied again by fifty if I were right about the third card, and so on. They admitted that these figures were correct, and I had them put the pack in front of me, closed my eyes and, as nearly as I can describe the process, learned that the first card was, as I remember it, the jack of diamonds. One of them turned the card over and it was the jack of diamonds, I must confess the fact that I was surprised at this point, but enormously heartened, and with new confidence, I proceeded to call off correctly the next four cards by suit and number. At the end of that time there was a very heavy silence in the room and I realized that the point had been made. Instantly I felt something begin to evaporate from whatever area of the mind is involved in a feat of this sort, and when one of them asked me “just one more to see if I could,” I knew I could not. However, I called the nine of clubs and the card was actually the ten of clubs and at that point I stopped….”

Rhine’s middle name should have been “careful.” He found time during our visit to elaborate on this “careful” principle. In the field of parapsychology, he warned, the word “careful” must be the watchword to an even greater extent than in any other endeavor. Parapsychologists, he indicated, must always tack up the “careful” slogan whenever they worked, much in the manner in which Thomas Watson of the International Business Machines company posts his “Think” signs.

Proof that he practiced what he preached was provided when I questioned him on the matter of spirit survival. “What do you think, Doctor—is there any part of a human being that survives after death?”

On his lips I could see the trace of a smile. But all I could hear was “careful” phraseology, which, when summed up, said, “We must reserve final judgment.”

“But at the moment,” I objected, “I’m not asking for a scientific verdict. I’m only asking for your personal opinion.”

This time the smile was more distinct, but the words remained “careful.” Many times, he pointed out, we see a piece of property that we should like to own, but we must not consider that the property belongs to us until the actual purchase has been made. I gave up.

At the time I was quizzing Dr. Rhine on the survival question I hadn’t the vaguest notion that one of my own hypnotic experiments—the discovery of Bridey Murphy—would eventually provide me with interesting evidence on this very issue of survival.

We spent several days at Duke. Then, having made our pilgrimage to the capital of parapsychology, we started home again, fully charged with determination to carry on with our experiments. Hazel had even made sketches of some of the laboratory equipment; maybe, she suggested, we could start our own junior laboratory at home. It sounded like a good idea.

Our intentions were good, therefore, as we arrived home. And we probably would be still running dual hypnosis experiments to this day if it were not for one little incident.

One day a man came walking into my office. He looked very much like any other man. But this fellow sent me racing across the long bridge—and into the biggest adventure of all.

When I was a sophomore in high school I read Maugham’s
Of Human Bondage
. There I found a wonderfully articulate statement of the materialistic philosophy that had been crystallizing within me ever since I had been old enough to ask questions.