Repeat After Me

porch of a cabin in the woods. Benn had driven up in a pickup truck loaded with all of his fancy recording equipment, but in the cabin where there's no electricity, the conditions for recording were a little primitive. That's like we just need cornea. This is like fully regressed last Archive recordings. This is the last archive, nineteenth century edition. Okay. So the conditions were grim the way, so much of the conditions in the pandemic were grim. But Ben had

come a long way to tell me a story. It's the trappings of a ghost story basically. Also, we see we have a chicken in the yard. Don't let the chicken in. Wh'll never get the chicken. Yeah, there's a strong, no chickens in the Last Archive roll. This episode, Ben's going to tell you that story, the story he told me on the porch of that cabin in Vermont, a ghost story, a story I'd never heard before, but which honestly is like the most last archive thing ever. Should

I do the thing here? Yeah, you tell the people. Imagine a place, a cabin in the backwoods of the mind, lined with cupboards, stocked with proof, cluttered with weird stuff, magnets, a deck of cards with strange symbols, old radios, WI on the door, weirdly, even on the door of that cabin. Who reads the Last Archive? I'm Jill Lapoor and I'm Ben Matafaffrey. This podcast has been going through the last

century of American history, decade by decade. This season is all about doubt, and with this story of Ben's, we've reached the nineteen fifties. I think of the nineteen fifties as an age of conformity and also of persecution for the nonconforming. So you've got your suburbs and your Barbie dolls and your hula hoops and your heyday of liberalism. But you've also got your red lining and your housing

covenants to keep black people out of those suburbs. The nineteen fifties was a time when it seemed somehow important to pretend that things were one way when they were really another way. That's what grabbed me about Ben's we think of the nineteen fifties is a time of intellectual consensus and rigidity when actually, well, I don't want to

give it all away, Okay, Ben, take us there. Step through the door to a living room in the town of Pueblo, Colorado, ten thirty five pm, November nineteen fifty two. There's a man leaning over a woman. She's lying on a couch, and he's speaking into a microphone. Now, we're going to turn back. We're going to turn back through time and space, just like turning back in the pages of a book. And when I next talked to you, you will be seven years old, and you will be

able to answer my questions. That's the voice of Maury Bernstein, a thirty three year old business man. He works in the farm and industrial equipment business. Handsome, straight laced, he's got curled black hair. Now, now you're seven years old, are there any nice boys that you like? That voice belongs to a twenty nine year old housewife named Virginia Tie.

She seems ordinary enough at first that night in nineteen fifty two, she could have stayed home with her husband, a local businessman, or they could have gone to a bridge game, a cocktail party, or a dance. Maybe she should have, but instead she's here on the couch in Murray Burnstein's pitch black living room. I want you to keep on going back and back and back in your mind, and surprising as it may seem, strange as it may seem, you will find that there are other scenes in your memory.

There are other scenes from far away lands and list in places in your memory. Bernstein's doing something called hypnotic age aggression. After the World Wars, it been used as a way of helping soldiers deal with trauma. But the woman Burnstein was age aggressing, Virginia Tie, didn't have any known trauma, And honestly, that's not what burn scene was. After he'd read a book that said that hypnotic age aggression could help people remember past lives as in reincarnation.

Now you're going to tell me what scenes came into your mind. What did you see scratch the paint offer on my bed. It was a little bid. Don't my nails on? Harry post into struandess why did you do that? I don't know, it's just mad an awful spank. And what is your name? Fridy? Your name is what? Fredy? Don't you have any other name? Pride Murphy? Where do you live? Ireland? Do you know what year it is? Eighteen? Ohs Bernstein had done it. He had discovered Virginia tis

past self. She was named Bridy Murphy, born in Ireland in seventeen ninety eight, died in eighteen sixty four, and then resurrected in nineteen fifty two and caught on tape like a ghost. That tape is incredible to listen to, but not as incredible is what happened next. So I kind of just don't even get from the start, like nineteen fifties businessmen, yeah, and occult, Like I don't even see how those two things good? Yeah, exactly, That's what.

That's what I was really curious about, because it's this Well, I'll get to what happened, but this is who more he is. Ever since he was a kid, Maury Bernstein had led a charmed life. His family ran a successful business selling industrial equipment flipping scrap metal in Pueblo Steeltown. Bernstein knew one day he'd take over the family business. He was a straight a student, star athlete. People said he looked like Frank Sinatra. He was so good at Yo Yo's that he got a job at the local

department store, showing them off on the sales floor. I guess he saw more doing something you wanted to do it too. Bernstein graduated from Wharton in nineteen forty one, and he headed back to Colorado to help run the family business. He got married to a woman named Hazel Higgins, a made to order wife, a maid to order life until one night Bernstein went to a party with a

man who said he was a hypnotist. The man asked if anyone wanted to try it, and, as Bernstein later wrote, a tall, attractive blonde girl spoke up and offered to be his subject. So the first scientifically relevant detail in this investigation the unknown is that the first time Bernstein witness the shypnotism, it involves an attractive blonde lady. That the women are attractive in some Doris Day way is not incidental to this story. Bernstein's journey began that night

with that blonde woman. The hypnotist put her so deep in a trance that her fiance could do anything and she wouldn't flinch. He made loud noises, tickled her, put mustard on her face. It's pretty creepy, But the sexual politics here are not really subtext so much as like bold faced headline text. And honestly, you could make a diorama of pseudoscience or even just psychology through the ages, and it would be this same scene, men experimenting on

women over and over again. This was what first got Bernstein curious about hypnosis, the control it also raised for him, he said, a whole train of questions. He later wrote, if this thing is true, if this is a fact, then why is it not more widely used? His suggestion is so powerful in this state, then is this not a powerful weapon for good? If the human mind can be so directed, so molded, so impressed, then why does not every doctor understand the fundamentals of hypnosis? What is

the reason that science does not show more interest? But science had expressed a lot of interest for a very long time. So before we get back to Bernstein and his discovery of reincarnation, let's take a brief tour through the past lives of hypnotism, beginning specifically in Austria in the eighteenth century with a man named Franz Mesmer. Mesmer was a physician who believed that there was a mystical invisible fluid and all living things that was magnetized by

the planets and the stars. If the fluid got blocked up, you got sick. And I mean, this wasn't all that different from a lot of other cutting edge science. The late eighteenth century was a time when lots of invisible laws were getting discovered, the conservation of mass, the existence of oxygen, the power of electricity. Ideas like Mesmer's fluid had been around for centuries, but he had invented a new therapy that could get the fluids flowing again. He'd

bring people over to his drawing rooms. He'd wear purple robes and move his hands or magnetize iron rods over their bodies. He'd send them into trances to cure them. This is where the term mesmerized comes from, and Mesmerism took off all across Europe as a sort of combo party trick and miracle cure. It got really popular during the very decades that women were first fighting for the right to vote, and then it had a very long afterlife.

You have he kind of like Mesmer to Freud, to bf Skinner of just men who were like, it really is bugging me that women are gaining some power outside the household, in the family. So I wonder if ict I'd just put them to sleep, and then everything will be about like their sexuality, and I'll just make suggestions to them. Over the next century, all sorts of eminent doctors started using trans states to treat hysteria in women,

a made up therapy for a made up condition. Eventually, a fluid free version of Mesmerism got somewhat legitimized under a new name, hypnotism. Freud used it on his patients. Hypnosis is one of the foundations of psychoanalysis. Maury Bernstein he was really just another disciple of Franz Mesmer. A couple of centuries after Mesmer conducted his first experiments, Bernstein started practicing on his wife Hazel and claimed to have

cured her over headaches. He said he'd help people with all sorts of things migraines, insomnia, stuttering, hysterical paralysis, but it didn't stop with hypnosis. Before long, he started getting into stranger things, things mainstream science hadn't yet proven, like extrasensory perception past lives. In a way, he grew frustrated with science. Back on the porch in Vermont, Jill and

I were batting around a different set of mysteries. What lies behind the appeal of all this stuff about the human mind esp or clairvoyants or auras or who knows what else? Do you ever refer to this stuff as yah yah? No? So I had a roommate in graduate school he was pretty into this stuff because she was in her peachd program in history. There were various like slightly occulty things. I mean, I had a lot of roommates when I was younger who were into like primal

scream therapy, like just whatnot. Like I had roommate who was a wicked or just just like, I'm so not that person, but I like those people, like I like the challenge that they present, and I also just like

their individualism. Anyway, this wonderful roommate and her girlfriend always called it yah yah and that everyone has at some level a yah ya, like just like it's like just like a thing that you do that makes no real sense and just reveals that there is no order in your mind, like that is also no order in the universe. Like like just like it's okay because we all have a yaya, but some people have too many of them anyway. I like that Marie Bernstein was the guy from yo

yo's to yaya's. Yeah, a lot of yaya. He did have a lot of yahya's. Most of them were harmless, but not all Thanks to Maury Bernstein, I'm now forever going to think of the nineteen fifties as the age not of the Barbie Doll or the yo yo, but the age of the yaya. Why so much ya ya? I think partly because all sorts of World War two technology was making its way in the nineteen fifties into modern life. Atomic energy, microwaves, mainframe computers, thinks whose workings

were invisible. They seemed like miracles, and that made it seem as if anything was possible. Knowledge depends on observation, but all those innovations, with their invisible workings must have made people feel a little doubtful. We think of the nineteen fifties as a super buttoned up time. But Maury Bernstein and his Yahya's kind of shows the lie. Here's this put together businessman who learns about hypnosis and then basically begins practicing the occult. And he wasn't the only one.

There were other seekers out there too. Some of them were even scientists at serious universities. Back then, it wasn't entirely weird to be interested in what Bernstein was interested in. In some circles, it was cutting edge. By nineteen fifty two, in North Carolina, a psychologist named doctor J. B Ryan was making his own investigations into the unknown. Ryan headed up the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory, and he'd been doing this research for a long time since before the Second World War.

Bernstein was a big fan. He'd first heard about jb Ryan's lab in the nineteen thirties, around when Ryan was part of conducting experiments in telepathy using the radio. What telepathy dove would have to play a part in personal enters, the success controls? These are some of the questions I seen. Its foundation seeks to explain. Here's how it worked. Ryan had a deck of special cards, each with a different symbol on the back. Three wavy lines, a star, a square.

He'd hold up a card and ask subjects whether they knew what symbol was hidden on it. He figured he could calculate the probability that someone would randomly guess the shape, But if someone guessed correctly more often than probability predicted, Ryan thought they must have special powers, and some people really seemed like they did. He began to wonder just how many he tested his students, kids in his neighborhood. But to find out how widespread telepathy truly was, you'd

have to test a lot of people at once. That's where the radio came in. If you wish to test or extrasensory perception and telepathy in your own family circles, university EESC cards identical with all you in the Amazing Test by Doctor J. B. Ryan are now available at stores everywhere. The head of the radio company it was called Zenith, saw an opportunity. People could use versions of Ryan's cards to test themselves at home, and NBC would

run a version of his test on the air. A supposedly telepathic person in the radio studio would look at a card and try to communicate to the radio audience what was on it, But silently using only telepathy. People would write into the show with their answers, and the

company tallied them up. If you think about it, radio already is just a bunch of invisible waves flying through the air to tell you things in the first place, So why not to let Patheva Radio see if pathodians there mine comes through face to you and write down your impressions in consecutive order as quickly as you get them. Five and dime stores sold out of the esp cards, and many many more people, not just scientists, were beginning to think for themselves about all the weird possibilities the

mind might hold. I mean, the other thing that's weird about the twentieth century version of this weird possibilities of the mind is mass communications allows these practitioners or parapsychologists to kind of go to the people with their evidence in a way that's different. Yeah, right, And it's a thing that scientists haven't dealt with yet. And enough of them are kind of cautiously open to the idea that maybe there is such a thing as ESPN brain control.

That they don't write it off. Some of them do, but not everyone. Right, Like where you might have like the itinerant quack who goes from village to village. In the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, it is still kind of the royal society that's going to decide whether or not that's a legit. But in the twentieth century jb. Ryan can have new frontiers of the mind stuff and he can go in the radio and somehow the people

get to decide like whether this stuff is legit. Ryan was showing how you make a case for the existence of the supernatural to the public, and the public was listening. After those radio experiments, Ryan began to get a lot of publicity, like this article in Life magazine. By some doctor Ryan has been compared to Copernicus, Galileo Newton, Darwin, Freud, and other pioneers. By others, he is regarded as a misguided crackpot and either a deliberate or an unconscious fraud.

That article was actually pretty positive about Ryan, but it also ran with this gem of an editor's note. Life senators did not commit themselves to accept into his point of view, nor do they presume to act as jury on the matter of whether or not the existence of esp is a proven fact. Today, we probably have a better sense of where the line falls between kookie and legit or do we why is it called like when does paris psychology become a thing? Or when is it

called that? Or when is it like institutional and when does it get jettisoned from institutions? Like we do not have a department of Paris psychology at Harvard University, but Harvard did have William James, the father of American psychology at least until his death in nineteen ten, and he had some pretty out there beliefs. I think William James has a major influence obviously in all of American psychology,

but especially at the turn of the century. You know, when William James dies, he asks Henry James to stay in Cambridge for six weeks because William's going to try and communicate from the grade beyond, which I love just because that was one of the last things that he did was take a scientific approach to what was not even a philosophical question so much as a religious or

spiritual one. So I think that there's like a strong strain of there wouldn't be a need for parapsychology in the early nineteen hundreds because it's only just split off from philosophy. All psychology was para. It's very hard to prove definitively that something's not real, especially when science kept expanding the range of things you could believe in. So a lot of scientists kept their minds at least tentatively open to things we now think of as Koukie jb

Ryan's mind was more open than most. People used to write to the lab at Duke about strange happenings in their lives, and he took them seriously. Here's a letter from nineteen forty nine. We have in our congregation a family who are being disturbed by Poulter Guy's phenomena. The phenomenage present only in the boy's presence. I had him in my home, Perrish moved with him, one threw him

out his bed shook whenever he was in it. Words appeared on the boy's body, and he has visions of the devil and goes into a trance and speaks in strange language. Believe it or not, that letter is about the boy, an actual kid who inspired the horror movie The Exorcist. Anyway back to would be Paris psychologist Maury Bernstein from his home in Pueblo Bernstein wrote letters to Ryan and sent him reports on the hundreds of experiments

he'd run. In nineteen fifty two, Ryan invited Bernstein and his wife to visit the Paris Psychology Lab and stay for a week. For Bernstein this really was like meeting Copernicus or Galileo. But to a lot of actual scientists there wasn't much daylight between A jb Ryan and a Maury Bernstein. A lot of Ryan's fellow scientists did not approve, including one of the most famous psychologists of the twentieth century, B. F. Skinner. Skinner is the behaviorist who, among other things, like putting

rats in complicated cages. He didn't have time for Ryan's pseudoscience. Also, he figured out that under the right conditions you could see through the mass produced sp cards they were printed on super thin cardstock. Skinner, in front of his students, guessed one hundred out of a hundred cards correctly. He tore Rhine apart in reviews, and he also wrote him

privately to damn his work. This is only another example of the kind of thing which is responsible for the failure of many of us to take your work seriously. I say that in all friendliness. Skinner and his fellow behaviorists were reacting to the messiness of theories like Rhins or Freud's. They thought there was only one way you could know scientifically what was going on inside another person's mind. That was to observe their behavior. A lot of behaviorists

studied animals and then applied those lessons to humans. Their experiments hugely influential, but they ran on principles that seem to ignore the very things that distinguish humans from rats. Most people want to believe in something more than what they can see with their own eyes. Maury Bernstein certainly did.

He wrote, now, at last, there is scientific evidence that men are something more than bodies, that they have minds with freedom from physical law, freedom from the physical That's why back in Pueblo, Bernstein decided to run a different set of experiments to find out what happens to us after we die. Your name is what Freddy? Just months after Bernstein left Ryan's lab, Virginia Ties had for that first faithful hypnosis session, an experiment to explore whether we

live once or over and over again? Do you know what year it is? Bernstein pushed, improbed, and eventually out of a twenty nine year old American's mouth came a nineteenth century Irish woman. What are you studying? Oh to be a lady? What are some Irish words? What's great? What does that mean? Oh? So a little cup that you drink out of and you wish shot it? Very very Irish. From these bits and pieces, Bernstein tried to discern the very fabric of the universe. You remember the

day you died? That was awesome day. I remember this. Brie was to church and observed. Truly. I was so excited when I found out that Bernstein had recorded his hypnosis sessions. But then listening to the tapes felt invasive, voyeuristic. Bernstein thought of himself as communing with the dead, But the more you listen, the creepier it sounds. Can you tell us what happened after your death? How? What was it like? Would you like where you were? Yes? Was

it better than your life on earth? Oh? It wasn't. Oh that primal scene woman on couch, man leaning over her mesmer Freud's skinner. Bernstein the sexual politics of the psychological laboratory. All these men experimenting on all these women, like there's this um. I remember when Harvard brought over the German experimental psychologists. You go Munsterberg to found its experimental psychological Laboratory, because William James was all, I don't do that kind of thing. He would do all this

experiments on women. Gertrude Stein was at Radcliffe. Then she knows and she writes this thing she chose, like I think doing like a senior thesis or something. She's like, yeah, but he just likes to tie up women. It is literally infantilizing. What do you say when you want a drink of water? Oh? Well, like other than Stein, aren't they like? Do we have to wait until Betty Freedan before someone is like all right, guys, the jig is up? Like maybe that's what Bridie Murphy is. Yeah, we decided

we should try to flip the script. Jill read up on how to hypnotize people, or at least she claimed that she read up on it, but I don't really think she did. I honestly was not wild about getting hypnotized, but I figured I'd go along with it. Turn about is fair play. So one buggy summer night, Jill came out to the cabin holding a candle in this like eighteenth century candle holder, which I guess she just has lying around the house Benjamin Franklin style. And she tried

to put me under. And now I want you to begin as you continue breathing slowly and deliberately, looking at the candle flame on a single candle in front of you, and I want to ask you now. I want to ask you now to fall asleep at the count of three, three, two one. All right, We gave it our best shot. It was really good. It's just like there was a mosquito on my forehead, and Vermont Midsummer lots of mosquitoes.

Our hypnosis session was a total bust. But Maury Bernstein's Search for Bridey Murphy took a lot longer than ours to peter out. Virginia Tie sat for six sessions and then stopped. She wanted to get on with her life, her future life, not her past. But Bernstein wanted to make a name for himself. He got written up in a Denver magazine. Then he signed a book deal. The Search for Bridie Murphy was published in January nineteen fifty six. The evening before it came out, Bernstein and his wife

went for a walk. They headed downtown they stopped in the cold outside of bookstore and peered through the window at a display of Bernstein's book, all set up for the next day. But even a published paras psychologist couldn't have known what that book would lead to. Oh the love in my heart? Do you believe reincarnation? That you have lived in the day of God? In nineteen fifty six, when the search for Bridie Murphy hit bookstores, people went crazy.

Life magazine said the country was in a hypnotizzy. The book was serialized in newspapers across the country, then translated into thirty languages in thirty four other countries. It became the number one bestseller in America. All told, it sold six million copies. In Houston, a bartender started making a reincarnation cocktail. I will now read the recipe. Please write into the show if you can figure out how this

in any way relates to reincarnation. A jigger of vodka, half a jigger of Maraschino liqueur, shaken with lemon juice and crushed ice, and topped with a cupful of flaming rum. Paramount Pictures bought the Bridy Murphy movie rights, And then there were the songs, plus it on the banks of the Nile. Oh what s hello? Triple le put me in a dress for a while, Hit helo, come back to me. Bridy Murphy was everywhere, but Virginia Tie wanted to disappear. She asked not to be publicly identified in

Bernstein's book or the press. She tried to hide behind a pseudonym. But Bernstein was loving it. He wouldn't do radio and TV interviews because he felt he couldn't control them, but that didn't stop him from talking endlessly at parties and newspaper reporters about his great discovery. He'd say stuff like, we may have opened a hidden door for just a second, and without fully understanding what we have seen, we've had an exciting glimpse of immortality. He worked the book, film

and audio angles. He released a record an LP of that first hypnotism session. The Search for Bridie Murphy is the true story of a skeptical young businessman who learned, much to a surprise, that the wonders of hypnosis are very real. Indeed, people listened, sometimes seriously, sometimes in a kind of tongue in cheek way. They threw come as you were parties. They wrote to Bernstein to tell them

about who they'd been centuries before. A hypnotist offered to find people's past lives for twenty five bucks a pop. He discovered one local woman had been a horse in eighteen hundred, which maybe she should have asked for her money back. People even used the Bridey Murphy story to sell cars. He is hod end your search for Bridey Murphy. This is real text from a real ad that ran in a real newspaper. If you're looking for something out of this world, see Bill Murphy. Selection of used cars

at prices that won't put you in a trance. These cars are not a reincarnation, they're real cars at reuse savings. But then America's reincarnation craze quickly shaded into nightmare. In Oklahoma, a nineteen year old boy shot himself and left a note under the windshield wiper of his truck, saying he wanted to find out if he'd be reincarnated like Bridey Murphy. Christians began to rail against Bernstein's book as sacrilegious. Ty's family was curious at her for the same reasons she

couldn't keep the press away. Newsmen published her real name, but some people just sent letters made out to Bridie Murphy. Pueblo, Colorado. Reporters clamored for her to speak. Her marriage began to fall apart. She went into hiding, hoping it would die down. None of this made Paramount feel particularly good about the film they were making. Flame means Fee Flames Sleep. Paramount

began tweaking the Bride Murphy story. They changed it so the plot would make hypnotism look dangerous enough that people wouldn't try it at home. And they wrote in a scene where a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister reject the idea of reincarnation. I have to say the result is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. And I've seen the other film about Bridie Murphy that

came out in nineteen fifty six, The She Creature. Under his spells, she would both herself and another bee, the She creature seeking life sustenance from the sullen hot piece of OBUs. Legend has it that Hollywood's iconic creepy guy character actor Peter Laurie, fired his agent for signing him onto that project. Anyway, the Bridey Murphy phenomenon was completely off the rails back in Vermont. In true last Archive fashion, all these Bridey Murphy movies got us wondering about a

different film from nineteen fifty six. I really am a sucker for the idea that science fiction tends to really reflect what's really going on deeply in his society. But Invasion of the Body Snatches is kind of a Bridey Murphy story, right, Like it's the anxiety that we might not be who we think we are. Suddenly, while you're asleep, they love so of your minds, your memories. As the

unimaginable becomes real, the impossible becomes true. Okay, I am hijacking this episode here for a minute, because I love this movie. At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn't something evil had taken possession of the town. Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a movie about a small town in California where one by one, people are being replaced by heartless aliens who look just like them but aren't them because they're aliens. It's like Bridie Murphy showing

up in Virginia Tie's Body. The hero, Myles, is a medical doctor, but in the end it's a psychiatrist, a guy like BF Skinner, the behaviorist who tries to convince myles to give in there's no pain. Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories, and you're born into an untroubled world where everyone's the same exactly. People take invasion of the Body Snatchers as an allegory for two

completely different things. Either it's about the perils of communism, or else it's about the Red Scare, where Americans accused each other of being secret communists. But really those are just two versions of the same anxiety, that fear that people can be remolded like rats and cages, sapped of their individuality, turned into mindless conformists. Wake up, sheeple, Except in nineteen fifty six people didn't say wake up, sheeple.

They said don't get brainwashed. Brainwashing was a new term then. It had come out of the Korean War. People thought of brainwashing as a kind of hypnosis that could take American soldiers and turn them into communist robots. Let us review once again the weaknesses in the American character. That's an American documentary film made after the Korean War about how communists in China and North Korea had found it so easy to brainwash Americans. You, as instructors of American prisoners,

can exploit these weaknesses in order to control them. So as I was trying to put all the pieces together, it began to look to me like this. Men get brainwashed as an active war. Women get hypnotized as a parlor trick. But at the end of the day, everybody in the nineteen fifties is doubting that they have a constant, stable self. Your name is what, Freddie? It's the same set of questions the psychologists were asking about people, and people were asking about Bridie Murphy. Who are you? Who

are you? Or maybe in Bridie Murphy's case, who is the real impostor? Because ever since Maury Bernstein first brought the story of Bridie Murphy to the press, people had asked, was Bridie Murphy of fake? Eventually newspaper editors sent reporters to Ireland to fact check. Turns out, the kind of iron bed she said, she scratched the paint off in eighteen o two. There weren't beds like that in Ireland for almost fifty more years. He went on like that,

detail after detail struck down until the final blow. A reporter discovered that Virginia Tye had grown up across the street from an Irish woman named bride Murphy Corkle, and Ty had even had a crush on her son. The search for Bridie Murphy started to come to an end, Maury Bernstein wouldn't let it go. After the articles to bunking Bridey Murphy came out, he began warring with everyone

who doubted him. He said those debunking reports got it wrong and ignored all the strange knowledge Ty had about nineteenth century Ireland. He met with a lawyer and asked Ty if she'd give interviews, but she refused. She'd fallen out with her family, her home life was in shambles, and look, I don't think Tie was lying about Bridie Murphy or about being hypnotized. I think she was just semi conscious and stitching together a story at Bernstein's suggestion,

combining stray details from the past. But then again, things do have strange afterlives. What is your name? Please? My name is Virginia Tie. My name is Virginia Tie. My name is Virginia Tie. Final least three ladies all claimed to be Virginia Tie's got to cost examination with That's a TV game show popular in the sixties called to Tell the Truth Very Last Archive. In each episode, three people all claim to be the same person, but only

one of them really is. The panelists have to guess who none of three was the times that two went into it in it was on purpose to find out something like this or did it just happened? A first trance was accidental? Accidental? And number two, how did you happen to fall into this accidental first trance? I mean other than hypnosis? Yes, yes, well I was it a social contact the man that we knew personally? Ah, and it just happened. And the number one was at the

time then that you began. It's not much fun if you can't see them, so I'll just tell you that's the real Virginia Tie. Number two, how extraordinary? Number two? Did you remember anything when you came out of the drandella and nothing? Well, how do you know they weren't just putting you on when you woke up? Their shud go what you should? I'd like to think they did. This tape ten years after Bernstein's book came out. Is the only non hypnotized audio that I could find of Tie.

Well there, Virginia Tie, please stand You hardly ever get to hear Tie speak for herself in this story, just Bernstein speaking Bridie Murphy through her. So I had high hopes for the game show. But after the real Virginia Tie stood up, finally stood up in front of a mic her own self, the host just ended the segment. I guess that's how the game is played. A fascinating story. We thank you for bringing a dulas and hope you

enjoyed it too. Good night, and God left you. Tie and her husband got divorced not long after that game show aired. She moved on to a new life, but she never lived the past one down. She died from cancer in nineteen ninety five. I don't know what happened to her after death. Maury Bernstein became a millionaire trading stocks, but he became more and more withdrawn, angrier, and more controlling. His wife divorced him. He moved into a small apartment

and never really left it. He stopped cutting his hair, left stains on his shirt. People called him the Howard Hughes of Pueblo. He liked to say that people didn't die. They just went to Brideyville. But he did die in

nineteen ninety nine. His brother said it was malnutrition. But so, the thing that I'm still struggling with trying to understand this story and the whole of the twentieth cent true which I am still babbled by, is what happened to a tolerance for just uncertainty, Like, what about the kind

of mystical unknowability of why we do things? Jill and I batted the meaning of this story around for a long time out in that cabin, like in one of those late night conversations in the hallway of your dorm room, except in the middle of a global pandemic waiting for the world to end. I'm not sure that the search for Bridey Murphy produces a lot of doubt. Yeah. I mean, it's like it's an artifact of our growing intolerance for uncertainty. Yeah,

and I'm going to nail this one down. Yeah, because you don't want to be uncertain about what happens to you after you die? Yeah, who you really are? I don't think Bridie Murphy proved anything about who we really are or about what happens to us after we Die. Americans in the nineteen fifties never did settle those questions, because those questions can't ever be settled all the way. They're like a window you can't quite shut and the

draft keeps getting in. But I guess the thing about all of these stories, Bridie Murphy, brainwashing, body snatchers, even Freudiani is um just looking hit to the nineteen sixties. It doesn't fare for to get to conspiracy theories from here. We'll find out more on the next thrilling episode of The Last Dark Eve from the Kevin in the Woods, My Heart All the Time. This episode was written by Ben Natt of Halfrey. It's produced by Sophie Crane mckibbon

and Ben Natt of Halfrey. Our editor is Julia Bartner and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Martin Gonzalez is our engineer. Back checking by Amy Gaines's original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphinett. Our research assistants are Olivia Oldham and Oliver Riskin. Cuts are full Proof players are Yoshia Mao, Raymond Blankenhorne, Matthias Bosse, Dan Epstein, Ethan Herschenfeld, Becka A. Lewis, Andrew Perella, Robert Ricotta, and

Nick Saxton. The Last Archive is a production of Pushkin Industries. Head Pushkin thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Schnarz, Harley Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Emily Rost, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig and Daniella Lacan Special thanks to Simon Leak, Vicky Merrick and the Pueblo Historical Society. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janet Junior and the Star Jenett Foundation. If you like the show, please remember to rate,

share and review. To find more Pushkin podcasts, Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Jillapoor Bride. Speak to me, Briday, Speak Boya. Eyes are full of the love for you, and this song in my heart must be heard. Speak Briday, Yes, my love, Bright Bright are you here? Yes, my love? What do you see? Briday? Will we be together soon and for always? Always?

My love? Away, eternity, forever and ever. Oh, I've got a feeling that I'm moving on from the soldier Thompson gone and She'll be there right by my side when I crossed the Great line. For the love of bright in my heart all the time you list in my heart a time