The Transparent Hypnotist

One phone call changed one man’s life and as a result affected millions of others. While it may sound cliché-ish, reality is where clichés arise.

Morey Bernstein was a Denver-area hardware dealer. One night in the early 1950’s, while working out a sales campaign, he received a fateful phone call. A young man who introduced himself as Jerry Thomas said he was stranded at the Denver airport and couldn’t find a hotel room. He said that his cousin had told him that if he ever needed help in Denver to call Morey.

Morey recognized the name of Jerry’s cousin: it was one of his biggest customers. The campaign would wait: this had to come first. Morey drove out to the airport, picked up his new guest, and brought him back to stay in his guest room. Then Morey took him over to a party at a friend’s house.

Jerry proved to be a very personable individual. When asked about his hobbies, Jerry responded that his was hypnosis. This being the early 1950’s, hypnosis was not a widely-known subject, mostly disbelieved rather than believed. Challenged, Jerry gave a demonstration of hypnosis, hypnotizing one of the other guests. In addition to the standard tests during trance, he also left a post-hypnotic suggestion for the woman to remove her left stocking and shoe while eating. Everyone watched in anticipation, and she performed the task as suggested. Then, when her stocking-less and shoe-less state was brought to her attention, she was dumbfounded at the sight. To quiet the remaining doubters, she was quickly re-hypnotized and instructed to ignore anything her friends might to do make her laugh: they tried everything they could but the woman was stone-faced in response.

To say that Morey was fascinated at the sights would be an understatement. Being the grandson of the founder and born into the family business, raised and trained to take over when the time came, his life was filled with sales campaigns and straightforward business decisions: he had never experienced anything like remotely this, and was almost consumed with a passion for learning hypnosis. He read every book he could find on the subject and practiced on his neighbors and friends.

One of his practice subjects was a woman named Virginia Tighe (named Ruth Simmons in his book.) During one session, she began talking about herself as another person: Bridey Murphy, a Dublin woman in the late 19th Century. She described her life, her husband and family, and her death. There were other lives, too, but this one was by far the most detailed. In the weeks that followed, Morey questioned Virginia about her life, recording everything she said.

In 1956, Morey Bernstein collected his material and published “The Search for Bridey Murphy” which started a national phenomenon. The book itself became a multi-million copy best-seller and the story became an international sensation. The concept of reincarnation, stripped of any religious connection, resonated in the public consciousness. Reincarnation parties became the rage, even appearing as a photospread in Life Magazine.

But was the story true? Unfortunately, Morey’s own research was pretty spotty, and further investigation discovered alternative ways Virginia could have learned what she reported about Bridey’s life. Books attacking and defending the original book were published, further muddying the waters. No matter, the “Bridey Murphy” phenomenon brought hypnosis back into the national spotlight during a period when it had been lingering at the fringes of discussion, and most likely influenced others to learn about the subject.

It also generated two movies based explicitly on reincarnation: “The Undead”, a Roger Corman film, and “The She Creature.” In “The Undead”, a prostitute is hypnotized in a past-life regression to a time when she was executed for being a witch. The act of the regression changes her own personal history, endangering not only her present life but all of her intervening lives as well. The psychiatrist himself has to be regressed back to that time to correct history, at the cost of his own life. In “The She Creature,” a woman is regressed by a sinister hypnotist and becomes a national celebrity. The hypnotist is also able to use her as a trance medium to evoke a much more distant past life and manifest it in the present, ordering it to kill on his command.