“Hypnotizzy” in the Cold War: The American Fascination with Hypnotism in the 1950s

In early 1956, amidst a burgeoning civil rights movement and a presidential election, swarms of journalists, historians, and genealogists in the United States were frantically searching for biographical information on a nineteenth-century Irish woman named Bridey Murphy who may or may not have actually existed. The "riddle of Bridey Murphy" began in 1954 when the Denver Post published a three-part installment by reporter William Barker concerning the strange experience of 33-year-old Colorado housewife Virginia Tighe who, under hypnosis, had transformed into the personality of a long-deceased Irish woman from Cork. When over 10,000 letters from local readers poured into the newspaper, Morey Bernstein, the Pueblo businessman and amateur hypnotist who had conducted the sessions with Tighe, decided to write his own account of the incident. The Search for Bridey Murphy, published in January 1956 by Doubleday & Company, recounted Bernstein's 1952 hypnotic sessions with "Ruth Simmons," his pseudonym for Tighe. According to Bernstein, he had gained interest in hypnotism after witnessing the cousin of one of his business associates perform a humorous demonstration on a hapless young woman, a demonstration that led him "into a whirlwind investigation of hypnosis, telepathy, and clairvoyance" (15). After a detailed study of the history and technique of hypnotic induction, Bernstein began practicing his art on his wife and neighbors. Bernstein was particularly fascinated by the phenomenon of age regression; the ability of hypnotic subjects to relive or recall past incidents, including those of early childhood. His successful experiments with age regression soon led Bernstein to wonder if he could use hypnotism to pry even deeper into the recesses of the human mind, to determine if the mind might possess "unique creative forces which transcend the space-time-mass relations of matter" (63). After persuading Ruth Simmons, a family friend and one of his former hypnotic subjects whom he had once successfully regressed to early childhood, Bernstein used a hypnotic trance to help Ruth explore her memory for "other scenes from faraway lands and distant places" (111). After several minutes, Ruth Simmons began speaking in an Irish brogue and referred to herself as Bridey Murphy, the reincarnated spirit of a nineteenth-century Irish housewife. Bernstein conducted several more sessions with Ruth Simmons throughout the late months of 1952 in order to record as much information on Bridey Murphy as possible. Born in 1798 in a small wooden house, Bridey was supposedly the redhaired daughter of Duncan Murphy, a barrister living in Cork, and his wife Kathleen. At the age of seventeen, Bridey met and married John MacCarthy, another Cork barrister, and moved to Belfast where they lived in a small cottage on Dooley Road. In her conversations with Bernstein, Bridey painted an image of a simple and pleasant life, learning to play the lyre and dancing Irish jigs, befriending Father John Goran of St. Theresa's church, patronizing a local grocer named Carrigan, and cooking simple Irish meals of boiled beef and onions for her husband. Bridey claimed that she died at the age of sixty-six after a terrible fall down a flight of stairs and lived a transient life-after-death until she was reborn in the United States in 1923 as Ruth Simmons. Believing that his experiments with Simmons had proven that "some persons do retain memories of a previous life" (216), Bernstein concluded his account with enthusiastic speculations about the metaphysical wonders the tool of hypnotism might uncover. Curiosity over the supposed power of hypnotism and the possibility of reincarnation transformed The Search for Bridey Murphy into a national phenomenon. The initial press run of 10,000 copies proved inadequate; by the middle of March, over 200,000 copies had been sold. The book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-six weeks and was eventually translated into thirty different languages in thirty-four different countries. …