The Search for Bridey Murphy (34 page)

After the subject awakened I walked over and turned on the television set. The screen lighted up, but nothing, of course, appeared; all this time the subject was watching intently. Suddenly she looked over at her husband and exclaimed, “Why, there’s Jack Benny on television!”

“Is that so?” asked the husband. “What’s he doing?”

“Can’t you see?” She was wondering at his blindness while she gestured toward the television set. “He’s talking to Rochester!”

“Well, what is he saying?” asked the startled husband.

“I don’t know; I can’t hear any sounds.” Then she turned to me and asked me whether I wouldn’t please go to the TV set and bring in the sound too. I explained that it would be a mighty good trick if I could do it.

The negative hallucination, which is probably the most fantastic of all, occurs when the subject, as the result of a post-hypnotic suggestion, insists upon being blind to a particular person or object very much within the conscious observation of all other witnesses. Such an instance
developed after I told a deep-trance subject that she would observe, upon awakening, that her husband was not wearing a tie. Soon after I wakened her she turned toward her husband, whose bright red tie was probably the most glaring thing in the whole room, and asked, “Darling, how did you get into the restaurant tonight without your tie?”

At this point the husband yanked out his tie so that it lay across the front of his suit coat. “You don’t see my tie?” he asked.

“How can I see your tie if you don’t wear one?” she said, somewhat piqued at what seemed to her a foolish answer.

Many other cases of post-hypnotic negative hallucinations are reported, but probably the most striking are those that concern the “disappearance” of a person in the room.

Let us assume, for instance, that there are several people in a room, including the hypnotist, the subject’s wife, and the subject. The latter is told, during a somnambulistic trance, that his wife will be absent from the room after he awakens, that she had left the room while he was sleeping and will definitely not be present when he awakens. After the husband awakens he will look around the room and see everyone but his wife, even though she is still sitting in the same place. He will probably ask, “What happened to my wife?” It is explained that she has left the room and will return later. She can then walk around the room at will, but the husband will still fail to take notice of her. If she moves a table or drops a book, the husband will be alarmed at the curious behavior of the animated table or book. Furthermore, should she start smoking a cigarette, the husband may exclaim, “You may think I’m crazy, but I actually see a lighted cigarette moving through the air all by itself.”

An interesting incident, demonstrating the compulsive nature of the post-hypnotic suggestion, developed one night after an experiment. I told the subject, who was engaged in a dual hypnosis test, that he would ask, after he awakened, for a sheet of my stationery, as he would want to write a friend in California later that night, using my stationery. I repeated the suggestion and later awakened him.

As he was very much interested in the experiment in which he had just participated, he promptly joined the rest of us in examining the results of the test he had just taken while under hypnosis. But we hardly had a chance to get started on the scoring when he suddenly asked me for a sheet of stationery. “I want to write a letter to a friend in California later tonight,” he explained, “and I’m not sure that I have stationery at home.”

At this I smiled and pointed out that this had been a post-hypnotic suggestion; I now assured him that he could forget about it, because
after all it had been designed only to help determine the depth of his trance.

“Let’s get back to the results of the experiment,” I urged, as we were all anxious to learn the outcome. He should have been particularly anxious to do so, because he had been the best subject and usually was eager to learn whether he was maintaining his high score. Nevertheless, he would not return to the score pads, nor would he permit me to do so. Instead, he pulled me aside, saying, “I want that piece of stationery.”

So once again I explained, this time in considerably more detail, that I had inculcated this desire for stationery during the trance, that it was only a post-hypnotic suggestion, that he should now forget about it, as it would be pointless to carry it out. “Now let’s get back to the tests. After all, these experiments are important.”

As I turned again toward the tests, he grabbed my shoulder and said, “Now look, I’m not kidding. I want that piece of paper and I want it now!”

I finally realized that, test or no test, I had to get this lad his paper—and promptly, too. As soon as I gave him the sheet of stationery he folded it, put it in his pocket, and relaxed. Then he resumed his interest in the experiment.

Later that night he wrote to his friend in California!

The strength of a post-hypnotic suggestion can be increased by repetition during one session, and it can be further reinforced by additional sessions. The cumulative effects, therefore, can expand to overwhelming proportions, an excellent reason why hypnosis can be so powerful from the standpoint of therapy.

There are a few post-hypnotic suggestions that have become standard practice with most hypnotherapists. One is concerned with assuring the subject that all his functioning will be restored to normal after the trance period, that he will feel fine in every respect. Another suggestion is designed to increase the depth of the trance during subsequent sessions; and still another, to set up some signal in the subject’s subconscious which will shorten the time required for inducing the next trance.

As an instance of the latter, the subject may be told that in the future he will enter the trance whenever the hypnotist counts to five and then snaps his fingers twice. This is often further abridged by omitting the counting; the hypnotist merely snaps his fingers and the subject passes at once into the trance state. This is a principle often used by stage performers, who may use as a signal anything from the ringing of a telephone to a picture of Joe Louis.

There are so many instances of telepathy and clairvoyance which developed with subjects under hypnosis that some of the most famous cases might well be cited here. For instance, Dr. E. Azam, a French physician, found that one of his patients apparently could, when hypnotized, taste substances which Dr. Azam had put into his own mouth. Consequently Azam carried out a series of tests in which he tasted various substances without giving any clues whatsoever to his patient. The astonishing results convinced the doctor that there must have been some inexplicable transmission of sensory experience.

Two experimenters at Cambridge University, taking a considerable amount of precaution to prevent the transmission of cues by any sensory means, attempted the transfer of pain sensations from the hypnotist to the subject. The blindfolded subject was told that the hypnotist, standing behind his subject, would be pinched somewhere on his body. The subject would feel the pain, he was told, in the corresponding part of his anatomy. A striking degree of success was reported.

Several famous cases are concerned with an especially celebrated subject known as Léonie. A day after Léonie had been hypnotized by Dr. Paul Janet she suddenly screamed and rubbed her elbow. It was later shown that the doctor had accidentally burned his elbow at the same instant.

Léonie’s uncanny responsiveness to those who had hypnotized her was further demonstrated by two French physicians, Gilbert and Pierre Janet, when they successfully hypnotized Léonie from a distance of one kilometer (about six tenths of a mile). The doctors attempted, at random times by the clock, to induce a trance in Léonie from this distance. No one in Léonie’s household knew of the plan, but the housekeeper had been asked to record the times when she went to sleep. Janet reported in his autobiography that there were “sixteen times out of twenty when somnambulism exactly coincided with a mental suggestion made at a distance of one kilometer.”

One of the most electrifying combinations of hypnotism and ESP is the phenomenon known as “traveling clairvoyance.” This is another example of the ability of human perception to transcend time and space. In these cases the entranced subject gives detailed reports of scenes or occurrences at a distance, sometimes a very considerable one. The
fabulous Léonie, for instance, was told (in Le Havre) to observe what Dr. Richet was doing at his laboratory in Paris. At this, Léonie became very excited and declared that Richefs laboratory was in flames. A later check confirmed that it had burned to the ground that day.

Two doctors from Sweden have added to the amazing reports of traveling clairvoyance. Years ago Dr. Alfred Backman sent a peasant-girl subject, while she was entranced, to various distant points unfamiliar to both the doctor and his subject. It was claimed, furthermore, that the subject made her “presence” felt by the persons whom she “visited.”

More recently, Dr. John Bjorkhem of Stockholm, a minister-psychologist- physician, has made further contributions to the literature on traveling clairvoyance. This busy explorer of the psychic realm has worked with about three thousand subjects and has performed more than thirty thousand hypnotic experiments.
The Parapsychology Bulletin
¹
describes two of his experiences with traveling clairvoyance as follows:

In one instance of this sort, Dr. Bjorkhem hypnotized the subject, Miss Klaar, and told her to go in her thoughts down from the second floor of the house in which the experiment was taking place onto the first floor and to enter the flat with the name WALGREN on the door. Miss Klaar appeared to act on the suggestion, and although she had never been in the Walgrens’ apartment, she accurately described many of its contents. Among other things she told of the layout of several rooms, noted a mirror mounted in a door and gave its approximate measurements, correctly described the flowered plush covering on a sofa and identified the color of draperies, rug, and books, as well as naming and pointing out the position of half a dozen articles of furniture. When she said she saw a thick album in a dark leather cover on a certain table, Dr. Bjorkhem asked her to open it and look at the photographs.

“Yes, I have done so,” she said. “There is Mr. Walgren without a hat, the eldest daughter Rut is there too on a separate photo and both the right-hand side.” The album was actually a family Bible with a photograph section, and the descriptions of the pictures Miss Klaar gave were right in ail details.

In at least one such case of “traveling clairvoyance” the apparition of the traveler actually appeared in the assigned place. While in Uppsala, Dr. Bjorkhem once had a Lapp girl brought to him for an experiment. After hypnotizing her he told her to visit her family home, which was several hundred miles away, and to tell what was
going on there. She described a scene in the kitchen, told what her father and mother were doing, and mentioned an item in the paper which the father was reading. A few hours later the parents telephoned a friend of the girl in Uppsala to inquire whether anything was wrong with their daughter. They had seen her appear in the kitchen and thought it meant bad news.

At the end of these reports the
Parapsychology Bulletin
adds, “Material of the sort found in these cases is difficult to evaluate, and it was not intended that it should be cited as proof of ESP…. [But it is] an important part of our field of inquiry.”

For those who are unfamiliar with the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine, this very brief discussion may be helpful. In order to facilitate the testing for both telepathy and clairvoyance, Dr. Rhine and Dr. Zener had early devised a deck of special cards. Each card was to bear one of five simple, easily distinguishable symbols: a cross, a circle, square, star, and three parallel wavy lines. The deck consisted of twenty-five cards; this meant that each symbol was included five times. This deck, generally known as the “ESP Cards,” became quite famous; many people found it an interesting pastime to test their own extrasensory capacity.

Although the entire deck of cards is utilized actively when testing for clairvoyance (or a combination of clairvoyance and telepathy), the pure telepathy tests were concerned only with the symbols themselves. The sender would select
mentally
one of the symbols, and the receiver would then try to identify the symbol of which the sender was thinking. As soon as the receiver made his decision, he would mark it on a record sheet, and the sender would then be signaled for the next trial. At this point the sender would record on a separate record pad the image he had held in his mind, and he would then take up (mentally) another symbol. In other words, only
after
the sender received the next signal did he make a record of what he had been thinking; and of course at all times he was unaware of the symbol which the receiver had recorded.

Tests for clairvoyance took several forms; in one the deck of cards,
after a thorough shuffling, was placed face down on a table. The subject was then asked to name the top card, and as soon as he named one of the symbols his call was recorded and the card removed. But it was not looked at. This procedure was repeated until the deck was finished. Then a new “run”—a series of twenty-five individual trials—would be made in similar fashion.

In this manner more than eighty-five thousand individual card-calling trials were amassed, and the scores showed conclusively that something more than chance had been in operation. In addition to the phenomenal general average, wrhich left no doubt as to the significance of the results, there were, furthermore, spectacular individual performances. One man went through the deck of ESP Cards more than seven hundred times, and his score was so high that only an astronomical figure could express the odds against achieving such a score on the basis of chance alone. One subject scored fifteen successive hits, and another tallied twenty-five, a perfect score for one entire run.