When this Irish housewife was ‘reincarnated’ in Denver in 1956, America went crazy for her story
Instead of RIP, it was brb for Bridey Murphy
At a dinner party in 1952, a young Colorado housewife named Virginia Tighe reclined on a couch in a candlelit room. A man, Morey Bernstein, had a parlor trick to show his friends. He lifted a candle in front of Tighe’s face. “Keep your eyes on the flame,” he told her. “And while I talk to you, you will become sleepier, and sleepier.” Once she was in a trance, Bernstein said, “I want you to keep going back, back through space and time…” What did she see there?
Tighe, who had never been to Ireland, began speaking in a thick Irish brogue. She told Bernstein that she was born in 1798, was the daughter of a Cork barrister, and had married another. She rattled off her complicated Irish lineage, some Irish folklore, and the names and locations of some shops in Cork. She even spoke a little Gaelic explaining that “lough” meant “lake.” She was, she said, the reincarnated spirit of a 19th-century Irish housewife named Bridey Murphy who had been dead for a hundred years. Her statements would spark an international sensation and a heated debate on the afterlife, making Bridey Murphy a household name.
The story of Bridey Murphy was made public by a three-part series in The Denver Post examining Tighe’s hypnosis. Journalists, genealogists, and historians then flocked to Ireland to investigate her claims. Scientists issued a report. Preachers warned their flocks of fads in faith. A teenager shot himself, saying that he wanted to investigate reincarnation personally. Bernstein wrote a book about it, The Search for Bridey Murphy, which became a movie by the same name. People held Bridey Murphy parties (“come as you were”) and parents greeted their newborns with “Welcome back.” One writer predicted that by 2001, we would be able to scientifically prove Bernstein’s theory. The New York Times would later say that the incident “became a 1950s phenomenon rivaling the Hula-Hoop.”
But the stakes of the investigation into Bridey Murphy were much higher and more revealing of human nature than a plastic toy. If Tighe and Bernstein were telling the truth, everything we thought we knew about human existence was wrong and the world was rich with metaphysical possibilities. If Tighe was lying or confused, then your one life was all you had until your wasted body decayed into nothingness.
Bernstein was a successful Pueblo, Colorado businessman whose fascination with hypnotism began in the ‘40s when he saw a friend hypnotize a “hapless woman,” at a party. He read everything he could on the subject and tried his hand on his wife and neighbors. Initially, he was interested in accessing long-forgotten childhood memories. But quickly he became more ambitious. He thought the human mind might contain “unique creative forces which transcend the space-time-mass relations of matter.”
Bernstein didn’t strike gold — literal gold — until he hypnotized Virginia Tighe, who was a family friend. Initially, his publishers printed a mere 10,000 copies of his book, but two months later, there were 200,000 in circulation and it topped The New York Times Best Sellers list. Bridey Murphy wasn’t just good for Bernstein, she was good for the hypnosis market in general, which experienced a 25-fold increase in sales. People found Bernstein sincere. He believed as if his life — or lives — depended on it.
Of course, skepticism about Bridey Murphy was immediate. Investigators unearthed some pretty damning biographical details. As a young child in Chicago, Tighe had lived across the street from a woman named Bridie Corkell. As if Bridie and Corkell (which sounded suspiciously like Cork), were not enough, the woman’s maiden name was Murphy. Tighe also had a Scotch-Irish aunt, which could explain how Tighe knew so much about Ireland. And most vexingly, no one could prove that anyone named Bridey Murphy had existed.
Tighe herself was unconvinced of her own purported reincarnation. She couldn’t explain what had happened in her hypnosis sessions and back in her lucid state, never claimed definitively that she was the Irish housewife incarnate. When Bernstein told her that he was planning to write a book, she insisted he use a pseudonym, Ruth Simmons. She was wary of the fame the story had brought her. “If I had known what was going to happen I would never have lain down on the couch,” she said.
Bernstein tried to tackle some of investigator’s doubts in the 1965 printing of his book. To the point about Bridie Corkell, Bernstein explained that Tighe had never known the woman’s first name, nor, presumably, her maiden one. The Scotch-Irish aunt lived New York and had no real knowledge of Ireland.
In the end, most researchers settled on a single explanation of the case: Bridey Murphy probably didn’t exist. Tighe’s revelation was likely a case of cryptomnesia, a memory glitch in which a person weaves together forgotten strands of old memories and mistakes them for a new experience.
Bridey Murphy’s story can be read as a curiosity of cultural history, but that would do a disservice to the fact that it revealed a distinctly human truth. “Most human beings are unwilling to face the idea that at death they vanish into husks and the formless ruin of oblivion,” one opinion writer wrote.
It was, after all, the Cold War, and people were being reminded daily that they could be annihilated at the push of a button. What if that button wasn’t non-existence, but a restart? It seems a safer bet that Virginia Tighe was not the reincarnation of a dead Irish housewife, but the incarnation of the existential threat posed by nuclear war. Many found the cryptomnesia theory terribly disappointing. It implied not only that we merely have one life, but also that we are terribly suggestible beings, willing to bark up some pretty outlandish trees in the search for meaning.
Bernstein remained committed to the idea of Bridey Murphy’s reincarnation until he died in 1999. A few years earlier, The New York Times reported that Virginia Tighe had passed away, “perhaps for the second time.”
