It was at the lowest of decibels that the voice of Bridey Murphy—muffled, groggily articulated—leaked into America. Bridey first made herself heard on the night of November 29, 1952, in a living room in Pueblo, Colorado, elicited from Virginia “Ginni” Tighe through the ministrations of Morey Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist. Ginni was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of a local Oldsmobile dealer; Morey, when not engaged with his hobby, ran a profitable family business specializing in heavy equipment for farms and ranches.
He had been enthralled with hypnosis for a decade. At first applying it to the treatment of headaches, insomnia, and stuttering, he was drawn gradually into uncharted realms: precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, and finally reincarnation, something he had once regarded as “preposterous” but was now eager to investigate and, if possible, document. He had tried his hand at hypnotic age regression and was confident that he had taken subjects back to early childhood. Now he wondered whether the process could be pushed further, perhaps into a previous existence. Ginni, a casual acquaintance, seemed an ideal candidate for the experiment. In a few earlier sessions he had been struck by “how quickly and deeply she had become entranced…. Furthermore, she had remembered absolutely nothing afterward…. She was, in short, a somnambulistic subject.”* Ginni had agreed to hypnosis as a treatment for allergies and had no interest in revisiting past lives.
With his tape recorder running, Morey led her “back through time and space, just like turning back in the pages of a book,” all the way to age one, before venturing “over the hump,” as he later described it (using the World War II term for the trans-Himalayan route from India to China), instructing her that “there are other scenes from faraway lands and distant places in your memory…and when I talk to you again you will tell me about it.” Within moments she identified herself as what sounded at first like “Friday Murphy,” a small child living in Cork in Ireland in “eighteen something…1806.” Her hair was red; her father was a barrister; her younger brother had died of “some kind of black something”; she had muffins and jam for breakfast; her husband’s favorite dish was boiled beef with onions. So it went on, for this and five further sessions, as Morey teased out details of Bridey’s fairly uneventful life one fragment at a time: her childhood amusements, her marriage, her relocation from Cork to Belfast, her death in 1864 after a fall down the stairs (“Seems I broke some bones in my hip too”), her funeral (“I watched them ditch my body”), her lingering in the house alongside her husband, who couldn’t see or hear her, her subsequent stay in a place where time “doesn’t mean anything…no night or no day.”
Shared at first among acquaintances for whom Morey was eager to play the tapes, news of the sessions spread to a wider audience through a series of articles in TheDenver Post. When his own account, The Search for Bridey Murphy, was published with great fanfare in January 1956, it quickly became the best-selling book in America. The paperback edition, rushed into print soon after, splashed across its cover the question “DOES THIS BOOK PROVE LIFE AFTER DEATH?”
The details about Bridey that Morey had elicited were not very exciting—in fact they were unrelievedly drab, pieces of an obscure life without great drama and with only minor pleasures, in a country more monochrome and sullen than the Ireland of movies. This made the book all the more plausible. Its most devoted readers were women, whose interest in prenatal regression, Morey noted, “is definitely keener than that of men.” Some may have found comfort in the idea that a life so enclosed and frustrated was not the end but merely a prelude to something better: something perhaps like Ginni’s as a reasonably affluent housewife in the Sun Belt whose weekly round of bridge games and cocktail parties may have seemed as much a fantasy as her phantasmal former existence.
The phenomenon of Bridey Murphy—a gust of wind from another world—for a moment nudged aside communism, juvenile delinquency, and the ascendancy of Elvis Presley. Hypnotists were suddenly much in demand, and a good many readers lined up to uncover their own past lives. At least one death was blamed on the book, the suicide of a nineteen-year-old Oklahoman who wrote that he was “curious about the Bridey Murphy story” and was going to investigate. There was a flurry of novelty songs: “The Ballad of Bridey Murphy,” “The Bridey Murphy Rock and Roll,” “Do You Believe in Reincarnation.” Liberace incorporated a Bridey routine into his stage show. Bernstein released excerpts from the hypnotic sessions on LP. A movie version starring Teresa Wright and Louis Hayward (“A Sensational Story of Hypnosis from the Year’s Best Seller”) was released by Paramount in October, with other films about reincarnation and hypnotism tagging along (Richard Bartlett’s I’ve Lived Before, Edward L. Cahn’s The She-Creature, Roger Corman’s The Undead).
Traces of Bridey Murphy turn up everywhere in the archives of 1956. There was something for everybody to feed on. The scandal magazine Uncensored asks the question “Phoney or Phenom?,” while Top Secret promises to expose “The Bridey Murphy Hoax.” Detractors and debunkers (scientists, theologians, investigative reporters) emerge on all sides. John R. Cavanaugh assures readers of The Catholic Standard and Times that “the solid reality of the truths of the Catholic Faith” offers a sure defense against “such an ancient superstition as metempsychosis.” The Catholic intellectual William F. Buckley, on the other hand, in his newly founded National Review, hopes that the Bridey revelations might put a dent in America’s “Age of Materialism.” William Bernard Ready, in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, decries “the downright dullness and tastelessness that emanate…like an effluvium…. It is a grave reflection upon the state of society.”
Mockery abounds. Time describes Ginni’s voice on the recording as “somewhat like a savagely beaten gun moll who is being quizzed by the opposition gang.” In a parody of TV Guide, Mad magazine has Bridey starring in the movie drama You Only Live Twice. The Bowery Boys comedy Hold That Hypnotist exposes the best-selling author of The Previous Life of Sally Klingle (“We’ve all lived before. Who were you?”) as a scam artist in league with gangsters. Disney’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck is “levitated” to a past life by a financially strapped hypnotist whose bookshelves include Quest for Tidie Brophy, Search for Lydie Burfee, and Paging Gracie Macy. The pop satirist of the hour, Stan Freberg, releases the hit comedy record “The Quest for Bridey Hammerschlaugen,” with Freberg’s hypnotist sounding suspiciously like Senator Joe McCarthy (“Remember you’re under oath here”). But the book sold and sold.
A year later the fever had subsided. The movie—a glum and threadbare production—had flopped. Research in Ireland had turned up little to confirm and much to cast doubt on the Bridey narrative, and when the Chicago American tracked down a childhood neighbor of Ginni’s named Bridie Murphy Corkell, it looked like a definitive indication that the story’s specifics came from nowhere but Ginni’s own past and imagination. Her past turned out to be more troubled and complicated than the book had revealed—she had been raised by relatives after her parents (both in fact part Irish) split up when she was three, and a brief first marriage had ended with her husband’s death in World War II. Estranged relatives, some offended by the religious implications of the story, went public with discrediting information. As for her imagination and the reading that fed it, it was evidently more extensive than Morey had let on or even suspected. At the time he had written in a private letter, “She just can’t be making these things up…. How could a hypnotized gal—just an everyday young married gal, with no special education or theatrical turn of mind—dream up this stuff?”
Cryptomnesia was the deflating term deployed to explain where those details had come from. Hypnotic subjects were obedient; they wanted to please the hypnotist. Ginni was simply dreaming out loud, with an external dream master providing the cues and steering her improvisations along more or less regulated pathways. The Bridey Murphy story drifted away, ceding the spotlight to another narrative uncovered by hypnosis, again a best seller turned rapidly into a movie, The Three Faces of Eve (1957), with its unsettling and sexually charged revelations of multiple personalities (“Three Women in One Body!”).
I was seven when Bernstein’s book was published and can recall the stir it made among my contemporaries, as it filtered down from the adult world through kitchen conversations and magazine covers. The tale spread by word of mouth, just as it must have been retold and embellished all over the country. We couldn’t easily shake off its suggestion of a spooky underworld in which people migrated from one life to another through a gray intermediary zone inhabited by a transient population of the temporarily dead. It seemed as if the story had to be true—Ginni remembered things she could not possibly have known about—since the details were alleged in the retelling to match up uncannily with verified facts.
For my father, when I asked him about it, the answer was simple: “They’re all fakes.” All of them: mediums, mentalists, fortune-tellers, faith healers, charismatic preachers, door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. He had come of age in the 1930s and had no use for the otherworldly. A hard-edged skepticism had been in the American air for a long time, pushing against the recurring prevalence of one credulous enthusiasm after another. The debunking spirit could be found in Mark Twain, in H.L. Mencken, in pulp detective stories in which all seers and swamis were invariably fraudulent, and in a good many early 1930s movies—Warren William as the carnival psychic Chandra the Great (a name borrowed from the label on a cookie wrapper) in The Mind Reader (1933), Barbara Stanwyck as the fake evangelist in The Miracle Woman (1931), Boris Karloff as the tabloid reporter disguised as a minister in Five Star Final (1931). Himself an entertainer (his morning radio show had become popular), my father saw the realm of mystical rigmarole as at best another branch of show business. At worst it was systematic fraud or something even more sinister, the kind of delusional doctrine that could send nations down evil paths.
In truth no adult males I knew showed much interest in the eerie or irrational. We lived in a community grounded in practicalities, reassured by material things that functioned: fuse boxes, automobile engines, lawn mowers, power drills, reel-to-reel tape recorders. Popular Mechanics was sold in every drugstore. In a world brightly lit and logically organized there was nowhere for ghosts to hide. Death itself seemed to exist elsewhere, in a kind of exile. For the voice of Bridey Murphy to slip into that world suggested a blast from the country of the dead through a gap not even suspected.
What seemed to authenticate it, at least in children’s eyes, was a long article in Life: “Bridey Murphy Puts Nation in a Hypnotizzy.” The title was whimsical, and the small print laid out the debunking counterarguments, but for us Life was all about the pictures. Each week, in photos and meticulously detailed paintings, we were given beauty contests and battlefields, rock-and-roll parties and H-bomb tests, dinosaurs and Kim Novak, Winston Churchill and lunar craters. No columns of half-understood prose (“Here Are Facts…Here Are Opinions of Scientists”) could undermine the photograph of Morey Bernstein leaning over Ginni Tighe with a lighted candle. Morey’s shadow was cast on the wall like a night-wandering doppelgänger, and the candle radiated hypnotic power from the very paper on which the magazine was printed. If this was happening in a living room, it was not like any living rooms we knew.
So many dark and ancient currents converged in such an image. Reincarnation was ungraspable. How could we conceive of it when death itself was unreal? Of hypnotism we knew only a few trappings, which we incorporated into playground games. The archetype of the hypnotist with his sonorous incantations (“Look into my eyes…. You are getting sleepy”) melded in imagination with the magician in top hat and cape. (Mandrake the Magician was still to be found on the funny pages in those days.) There was no ignoring the ads in the back of comic books: “Want the thrill of imposing your will over someone? Of making someone do exactly what you order? Try hypnotism!” “Amaze friends—Exert your Hypnotic Power over others—Be POPULAR and WANTED!” The suggestiveness of the crude drawing of a pop-eyed young man directing his gaze toward a woman in a low-cut red dress, with a convenient couch in the background, may have been a bit lost on us. But the sinister aura of the mesmerist’s commanding eyes was inescapable, even if we only vaguely sensed what ends that command might serve.
One would have to regress like a somnambulist to trace these figures back to their buried sources. The desire to do that became strong; it might be a project for a lifetime, with a marvelous or terrifying secret uncovered at the end. Hints were scattered everywhere. I became aware that my Irish grandmother—who was nine years old when George du Maurier’s Trilby was published in 1894—still shivered at the name of Svengali, the very prototype of the malevolent hypnotist, who had turned the untalented working girl Trilby into a world-famous singer through the power of suggestion before vengefully wrenching the gift away. The worldwide fascination stirred by Trilby had embedded Svengali in the language and kept him alive in plays and movies, while the character’s elements of explicit antisemitic caricature were gradually scrubbed away.
Meanwhile my Hungarian grandmother, who had a taste for uncanny explanations, subscribed to Fate magazine, with its “true stories of the strange and the unknown”; the November 1956 cover story was “Bridey Murphy in Ireland: A Personal Investigation.” Rummaging in the back of a closet I found a Ouija board that had been hers and learned that my mother and her sister when young had experimented in contacting spirits with it. There was no end of histories to be excavated: the lore of spells and séances, hexes and black sabbaths, the magic circles of Faust and Dr. Dee, the magnetic wonders of Cagliostro and Mesmer, the newly revealed wisdom of Madame Blavatsky and the Hidden Masters, exotic cults of Africa and Asia, buried scrolls of drowned civilizations, occultists calling up pagan and demonic powers, obsessed scientists stumbling on undreamed-of metamorphoses.
They melted readily into a grand olio that generated infinite variants, whether in the fantastic novels of H. Rider Haggard and Sax Rohmer and Dennis Wheatley or the extravagant horror and fantasy comic books that by 1956 had been suppressed by censorship. Cinema above all was the natural domain for this infusion of the unreal into the visible. Movies did not merely depict trances, they induced them. The hypnotist continually returned, his entrancing stare in close-up holding the audience itself enraptured. The gazes of hypnotist and subject were riveted together in a frequently replicated two-shot—subject (generally female) leaning backward, hypnotist (almost exclusively male) bending forward in a predatory crouch—that mirrored the relation of spectator to screen. From the Central European homeland of Mesmer and Freud came Dr. Caligari—sinister sideshow entertainer, master of mind control, deranged psychiatrist—traveling through splintered streetscapes with his murderous coffin-dwelling somnambule Cesare.
The “real” Caligari, as clarified in the film’s epilogue, was a benevolent asylum director who had become the subject of his patient’s paranoid delusions. But the confusion hardly mattered; the story could just as easily be turned around, as it would be so often, laying bare the malice and madness of outwardly respectable psychological theorists. Whatever distinctions might exist among science and the supernatural and the merely fraudulent—among psychoanalysis, mesmerism, yoga, demonic mischief, astral projection, fairground trickery, and elaborate criminal conspiracy—were blurred sufficiently to disappear. Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse in 1922 is at once psychoanalyst, hypnotist, occultist, charlatan, crime lord, and finally certified lunatic; by 1933, in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, he does not even need a body, the power of suggestion having made his clinical custodian the vehicle of his will operating beyond the grave. Irresistible disembodied will permeates space.
When Morey Bernstein was in his teens, movie theaters were full of suggestive hints. Marian Marsh succumbed to the mesmeric power of John Barrymore in Svengali (1931). Madge Bellamy in White Zombie (1932) and Dorothy Burgess in Black Moon (1934) became the mental slaves of voodoo practitioners. Myrna Loy in Thirteen Women (1932) was a Eurasian woman unleashing hypnotic skills to avenge the snubs of her racist sorority sisters. In Supernatural (1933) Carole Lombard was possessed by the spirit of a dead murderess. These were not fantasies entirely divorced from surrounding realities. Speaking in Munich in 1936, Adolf Hitler declared, “I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” The mass spectacles of fascism suggested to some Americans an emerging army of blindly obedient somnambules. During the war years a corresponding legion of ritualists, amnesiacs, and zombies stalked the shadow realm of movies. Irrational forces exercised their power through inexorable European curses (Cat People, Cry of the Werewolf), unholy medical experiments (Captive Wild Woman, The Lady and the Monster), and diabolist cults (The Seventh Victim, Weird Woman).
Mind control in one form or another continued to haunt the postwar dreamscape, with scientists as likely to be perpetrators as saviors. A psychologist is possessed by the mind of an executed killer (The Phantom Speaks, 1945); the director of a prestigious sanatorium is a deranged murderer (Spellbound, 1945); a psychiatrist conspires with a carnival mentalist whom she ultimately destroys (Nightmare Alley, 1947); a hypnotist drives an innocent man to commit murder (Fear in the Night, 1947). In Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1950), a new synthesis emerges with José Ferrer as David Korvo, a hypnotist, astrologer, multilingual wit, urbane womanizer, and murderous blackmailer far more sophisticated than the psychoanalyst whose wife he hypnotizes into crime: a fashionable Caligari of the cocktail lounge.
Young Morey was perhaps too involved with the hardheaded practicalities of the family firm—a scrap metal business founded in 1890 by his immigrant grandfather that Morey’s business acumen helped to grow into a nationwide enterprise—to linger on such matters. The straightforward tone of his book suggests as much, as it skirts any hint of Svengali or Caligari. The Search for Bridey Murphy presents itself as the adventures of an all-American businessman from Pueblo, Colorado, with a no-nonsense approach to life. The opening finds him at work sometime in the early 1940s: “When the phone rang, it was night—a stormy night, at that—and I was at the office, in the middle of picking a winner in our slogan contest.” The call is from a traveler stranded by the storm, a client’s cousin. Morey takes him to a party, where it turns out that the traveler’s hobby is hypnosis, something Morey considers “beneath my intelligence.” A young woman consents to be hypnotized, and the ensuing demonstration demolishes his skepticism: “I was licked…. This girl was neither a fake nor a fool…. She filled all the specifications for the intelligent, normal, healthy, wholesome female.”
Here as elsewhere, normality, and whatever “specifications” might certify it, is the measuring stick for what can or cannot be believed. The normal world, as depicted, is a surface so thin as barely to be there. The client’s cousin is “pleasant, and personable…a real charmer”; Ginni Tighe is “a normal twentieth-century woman” with “normal duties as a housewife.” These silhouettes who work in offices, gather after hours in living rooms where they exchange “chatter…of the usual cocktail-party variety,” and are occasionally inconvenienced by thunderstorms resemble nothing so much as line drawings in an early 1950s advertisement in Life.
The incident at the party is a conversion experience, setting the materialistic Morey on a new path. He stops reading novels, even cuts back on trade journals: “I just couldn’t tear myself away from the hypnotism books; I was utterly enchanted.” His book is the relation of a progressive enchantment, marred only by one great disappointment: he finds he is incapable of being hypnotized. He is thus barred from experiencing a state in which a subject can “transcend his normal mental capacity, anesthetize any portion of his body, control pain.” (He makes no mention of one powerful reason for this: the lifelong aftereffects of a brutal high school prank in which he was tossed into shallow water, breaking his neck.) Despite extraordinary efforts—everything from narcosynthesis to shock therapy—he remains unable to “become master of his mind.”
Merely to be the hypnotist is to stay on the outside looking in. Morey seeks other paths, moving forward with boyish enthusiasm as one astonishing revelation follows another. He is steered on his way by unexpected guides: a Wall Street securities analyst, a government bureaucrat, an industrial engineer, all part of an underground of enlightened searchers. He learns of the legendary psychic healing powers of the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce and finds wisdom in the pages of The Power Within and Phantasms of the Living. Dwelling on the notion of “imperishable conscious beings” migrating from one body to another, he is dazzled by the inescapably logical conclusion that “the mind must…be capable of reaching through time, because time, as we know it, is a function of space.”
Yet amid these speculative flights he never abandons his practical instincts. He wants tests, demonstrations, verified percentages: specifications, as for an electrified corral fence. He’s impatient to start tinkering, like Tom Swift building a spaceship in the backyard. Designing an experiment in telepathy, he selected five objects—“a drinking glass, a knife, a bar of soap, a coin, and a cigarette”—that are a condensed ode to modern American materiality, clues left over from a private eye novel. A veteran of sales pitches, he wants to sell the paranormal like a new model tractor, removing from hypnosis all trace of “the hocus-pocus variety: Svengali-Trilby; the ridiculous antics of stage performers; witchcraft and sorcery.”
The America of that moment wants to believe that the horrors of the war years have been left behind. Scientists are not mad; hypnotists are benevolent therapists. Morey wants to bring clairvoyance and trance into the hygienic light of day, Americanize and update them, strip away inherited European associations, the lore of necromancy and fortune-telling, the witch burnings, the heritage of antisemitism embodied in the figure of Svengali, the Russian pogroms from which his grandfather fled, all the warning shadows of the old continent. In that spirit he undertakes to lead Ginni Tighe into her prenatal life: even the journey backward along the pathways of reincarnation will be accomplished in a comfortable living room where death will be liberated from any hint of grief or fear. A thousand myths and folktales suggest that such a path cannot be traveled without cost, but not to a high-spirited experimenter equipped with a reel-to-reel tape recorder to anchor him in his own century.
We can read The Search for Bridey Murphy as a novel of the supernatural, written by a character in such a novel, a character under the illusion that he’s writing a how-to manual. For any outside observer the situation would be eerie—a direct communication from the dead could hardly be otherwise—but Morey insists that all this is not so uncanny, just an exciting opportunity. Yet he has tapped into something he can’t control, like an apprentice wizard inadvertently invoking a spirit. At midpoint, asthe book becomes a dialogue in which a living interlocutor is privileged to ask questions of the dead, Bridey achieves an insidious dominance. Disembodied utterances become more real than the room where Morey listens to them, more real than the person uttering them. Bridey seems somehow still alive, “a saucy, rather flippant Irish girl…who manifested a distinct personality.”
He is delighted when Ginni, triggered by a posthypnotic suggestion, executes the “Morning Jig” that Bridey had talked about: “Her body became vibrantly alive; her feet were flying in a cute little dance.” Is this Ginni, or Bridey possessing Ginni? His reaction turns to panic when she resists emerging from the trance: “I was badly frightened…. It seemed as though she was going to insist upon retaining her identity as Bridey.” It is Morey who seems to have lost his way tiptoeing around in the astral plane. Bridey Murphy has become the true author of the book, with Morey her awed amanuensis: the hypnotist hypnotized.
Ginni registers only faintly in these pages. Introduced as “a vivacious brownette on the smallish side…trim, attractive, and one of the most sought-after partners at every dance,” she remains the perfect somnambule; after a session she “was not even aware of the words she had just spoken.” Meanwhile her husband accedes only reluctantly to the project and grows increasingly uneasy: “I just want to…be a regular guy; I don’t want to be dubbed a crackpot or a screwball.” He intervenes to keep the sessions short and is on hand to monitor what goes on. If this were a different kind of movie, one could envision Morey drawn into an erotic and controlling obsession with his subject, while her jealous husband edges toward violent confrontation.
But the implicit romance turns out to be of a more ghostly sort made for mist and theremin music, playing out—as in movies like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) or Portrait of Jennie (1948) or I’ll Never Forget You (1951)—across a hauntingly unbridgeable gulf of time. The persistence of memory beyond death cannot erase the underlying sadness, as Bridey is beaten down by life, comes at last to desire death, watches her own burial, and hovers among a shifting crowd of departed souls in “a place of waiting.” Morey does not acknowledge how dismal a vision is unfolding. The dead unknowingly persist along a hidden thread of continuity, but what does it connect to? As he questions Bridey about whether the living could possibly hear what the dead were saying, she interjects: “They won’t listen!” The emphatic punctuation marks this as the crucial moment: a voice is indeed breaking through a wall, whoever the voice might belong to and wherever it might be situated in time and space.
“I think it ruined both their lives,” a Pueblo resident speculated years later. No second book followed, nor any further publicly revealed explorations of reincarnation. Morey did not, as many another might have, found a cult or establish an institute of paranormal studies. Ginni, who had never sought publicity, was troubled by the hordes of intruders into her private life, the religiously motivated attacks, the accusations of fraud. Her marriage fell apart. She turned down countless commercial offers at the height of the Bridey mania—TheColgate Comedy Hour wanted her to reenact the trances on TV—although she can be seen as a guest on a 1965 episode of the game show To Tell the Truth. This long-running program featured three individuals each claiming to be the same person; a panel of celebrities quizzed them to weed out the two impostors. She maintains a dignified, confident air, but elsewhere admitted there had been difficult times: “Probably the main reason I’ve kept my cool is that I’m not convinced I was Bridey Murphy or anyone else.”
Morey was convinced. Heartened by floods of correspondence from readers eager to share their own experiences and theories, he threatened those who accused him of fraud with lawsuits. But the Bridey phenomenon triggered a personal disintegration, or perhaps more precisely laid bare what had always been there. His wife divorced him, alienated by abusive harangues and obsessive and sometimes outrageous behavior. (A visitor described him as “lying on the floor, ignoring his guests while restlessly clicking a TV remote, ‘just surfing the channels and cursing.’”) He sold the family business, devoted himself to investing, and became very rich. He also withdrew, moving into a small apartment he left rarely and finally not at all. Locals called him “the Howard Hughes of Pueblo.” The officially recorded cause of his death in 1999 was malnutrition. All he had ever needed from others, according to a memoir by his younger brother, “was respect, adoration, and a kind of Pavlovian submission to his control.” To shut the world out entirely may have been the final imposition of control.
Bridey never went away. Although in 1956 the debunkers seemed to have prevailed, a decade later she remained a beacon for a culture awash in the uncanny. The subterranean influence of The Search for Bridey Murphy, a book much investigated, much mocked, and rarely if ever out of print, outlasted Ginni and Morey. For a child in the Bible Belt it was “the first forbidden book I ever read.” For another early reader it led to a career of past life regression work. It opened many doors—to narratives of alien abduction, the recovered memories of innocents abused by Satanic cults, the sinister conspiracies of lizard-brained infiltrators. It had signaled a deep and pervasive yearning to leap, whether into the future or the past, beyond the intolerable constraints of cause and effect and materiality itself. And yet how many otherwise doubtful readers have not thought, if only for an instant, “What if, after all, it were really so?” The temptation is stubbornly persistent.