It’s a spoken word thing #5 (Bridey Murphy)

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• Wednesday 11th August 2010

In 1952, the US was in the throes of several different varieties of hysteria. The Korean War was pounding away; another confrontation between good (us) and evil (them). The US economy entered a stratospheric delirium, drunk with an unprecedented infusion of wealth that created the modern middle-class. Anti-Communist madness – led by the one, the only, the dipsomaniac Joseph McCarthy – led to thousands of people losing their jobs and homes because they refused to sign unconstitutional “loyalty” oaths.  Negroes were beginning to make some long-overdue noise about their status as third-class citizens, upsetting the idea of a stable society. Flying saucers were sighted practically everywhere. And a Nazi invention – magnetic particles affixed to thin plastic tape – made its way into the hands of US engineers, who promptly pushed aside  unwieldy, lo-fi wire recorders to usher in the modern-era tape recorder.

In Pueblo, Colorado, Morey Bernstein, seen above fondling the brand-new, old-school portable reel-to-reel job (with included speaker, please notice) put his new device to an interesting use. An amateur hypnotist, he placed a local woman named Virginia Tighe into a series of deep trances. He progressively moved her back in recollecting her earliest memories, and in the spirit of experimentation, asked her to “remember back before you were born.”

Zowie. Under hypnosis Ms. Tighe morphed into the Irish brogue-spouting spirit of a woman named Bridey Murphy, who she apparently was in a previous life. She recollected in some detail the life that once she led in 19th-century Cork and Belfast, married to a lawyer. Bernstein wrote a book about the sessions, called The Search For Bridey Murphy, and hit a vein of hysteria running through the media, with apparent proof of reincarnation. People believed the Communists were taking over the US government, the schools,  and the motion picture industry, they saw UFO’s with great regularity. Reincarnation is real? Why not?

The book was a best-seller. Growing up in the 50′s I remember seeing copies of the book at people’s houses everywhere. It was one of those fads that seemed to happen then, like Davy Crockett, or Elvis.

Over time, I heard that the whole deal was suspicious, and it eventually turned out to be bogus, but in an innocent way. Nobody stroking their mustache, gloating while they counted the money, or anything.

These were the dim memories stirred the first time I saw the sleeve for the Bridey Murphy sessions LP at Colony Records (on the ground floor of the Brill Building) in 1983. Well, waddya know. I’d picked through enough spoken word bins by then to realize this might actually be worth the $25 the Colony was attempting to clout from the populace. But nothing is easy; the sleeve was all they had. The actual record had been lost/misplaced/stolen long before I made the scene, and it was years until I found a copy. But find it I did.

Recorded on the home tape machine Mr. Bernstein poses with above, the audio has the predictable fuzziness of the time, and the mumbling of the hypnotized subject is barely understandable. Nontheless, it has a certain otherworldly vibe, and the mix of Korea, commies, and UFO’s is  helped along by an actual  tape recording of some Colorado woman’s past life.

An excerpt from the above LP, in all its black and white, 1950′s glory. 5.6 meg download.

If you’re the rights holder, or you were the rights holder in a past life, and you have a problem, let me know.

The hypnotic regression thing caught on. Cheap, easy, and anyone can play:

In an interesting side note, Bridey Murphy has herself been reincarnated. As a kickboxer.