Word: ruth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...RUTH WHIPPLE FERMAUD Ville d'Avray, France...
Last January, with some manuscript advice from Newsman Barker, Morey Bernstein, 36, a Pueblo businessman who sells farm and mining equipment, told the story again in his book (TIME, Feb. 20). Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist, had put Housewife Tighe, who uses the name Ruth Simmons to avoid publicity, into a trance in which she conjured up an earlier incarnation as Bridey, a redheaded lass born in Cork. What made the story chillingly persuasive was the mass of circumstantial detail about people, places and customs that Mrs. Tighe recounted in a brogue and in words that seemed utterly foreign...
...this research disproved reincarnation? I'll leave that to you. All I think we've proved definitely is that memory (any kind of memory) is unreliable. And that we know less than nothing about our brains and our souls. I do think Morey and Ruth owe the world one more hypnotic session with somebody present who's accustomed to interviewing people. That somebody ought also to know Ireland. I volunteer...
Through hypnotism he learned that Ruth Simmons (1923- ) of Pueblo, Colorado was, in her previous life, Bridey Murphy (1798-1864) of Cork, Ireland. Before that she had died while still a baby in New Amsterdam--the thing has endless possibilities! After his hypnotic sessions with Miss Simmons, Bernstein was persuaded to write it all up. He has not done badly by the enterprise; in seven weeks The Search for Bridey Murphy has climbed to the top of The New York Times booklist...
Structurally, the account has a rather odd appearance. The first hundred pages describe the author's introduction to hypnosis, extrasensory perception and, finally, reincarnation. Then come a hundred pages of interview in which Ruth Simmons becomes Bridey Murphy. The book ends with an impressive-looking thirty pages of appendix (twelve appendices). In the first part Bernstein's technique is clever. Setting himself up as a "real skeptic," he plunges into each subject with the determination of a bloodhound. Of hypnosis he had thought, "That's strictly for the lunatic fringe." However, by ecclectically drawing from whatever sources he can find...