Death and Dying

by Sudhir Kakar

  Another extraordinary medium was Gladys Osborne Leonard, who participated in many studies during the early decades of the 20th century. She was particularly good in what are known as ‘proxy’ sittings, that is, sittings in which someone who did not know the deceased person goes to the sitting instead of someone who did (for a review, see Kelly, 2010). Proxy sittings are especially important at minimizing the chance that a grieving family member as sitter might inadvertently give information or hints to the medium. Here are some examples involving Mrs Leonard.

  In what is known as the ‘Aitken’ case (Thomas, 1939), the investigator held some proxy sittings for a man whose son had been killed in an accident. Among many other things, the medium said:

  There was somebody else he [the deceased son] was interested in, that perhaps you [his father] don’t know … a name that starts with B, and I think there is an R in it … It’s not a long name—very much linked with him … It might be a Mr BRICK … I feel this is something you could use for building … [There is] a name starting with BR—rather an important name with him … somebody he was linked up with shortly before his passing … I also want to know if there is anything to do with him like a little ship … or a little model of a ship … He is showing me something like a toy ship—a fancy ship, not a plain one—’laborate, rather ‘laborate—with a good deal of detail shown in it—it seemed to be connected with his earth life—but some time before he passed over, rather early in his earth life.

  The father did not know what all this referred to, but learned that a friend of his son’s had died about a year after his son did. The friend’s name was Bridgen, and before joining the Air Force he had worked at a firm that made scale models of ships, photographs of which he had shown to the deceased son.

  The following details come from another series of proxy sittings with Mrs Leonard, held for the family of a Mr Macaulay (Thomas, 1938—39). On one occasion, the medium said:

  There is also a John and a Harry, both with him. And Race … Rice … Riss … it might be Reece, but sounds like Riss.

  Mr Macaulay’s daughter later explained:

  The most interesting passage is ‘It might be Reece, but it sounds like Riss.’ This carries me back to a family joke of these pre-war days. My elder brother was at school at Shrewsbury and there conceived a kind of hero-worship for one of the ‘Tweaks’ (sixth-form boys) whose name was Rees. He wrote home about him several times and always drew attention to the fact that the name was spelt ‘Rees’ and not ‘Reece’. In the holidays my sister and I used to tease him by singing ‘Not Reece but Riss’ until my father stopped us, explaining how sensitive a matter a young boy’s hero-worship was. I think Rees was killed in the Great War.

  At another sitting Mrs Leonard said:

  I get a funny word now … would he be interested in … baths of some kind? Ah, he says I have got the right word, baths. He spells it B A T H S. His daughter will understand, he says. It is not something quite ordinary, but feels something special.

  The daughter replied:

  This is, to me, the most interesting thing that has yet emerged. Baths were always a matter of joke in our family—my father [who was a water engineer] being very emphatic that water must not be wasted by our having too big baths or by leaving the taps dripping. It is difficult to explain how intimate a detail this seems. A year or two before his death my father broadcast in the Midland Children’s Hour on ‘Water Supply’, and his five children were delighted to hear on the air the familiar admonitions about big, wasteful baths and dripping taps.

  A little later in the same sitting Mrs Leonard said:

  What is that? … Peggy … Peggy … Puggy … He is giving me a little name like Puggy or Peggy. Sounds like a special name, a little special nickname, and I think it is something his daughter would know. Poggy, Puggy or Peggy. I think there is a ‘y’ on it.

  The daughter replied: ‘My father sometimes called me “pug-nose” or “Puggy”.’

  Items like these three are especially important because they are both highly unusual and so personal that they are unlikely to be known by anyone outside a few close family members.

  Nearly everyone who has studied the cases of mediums like Mrs Piper or Mrs Leonard has agreed that they did not get their information in any normal way. But they have disagreed on just how they iii get it. Some people thought that telepathy between the medium and living people could account for the source of the material. Other people thought it was what it seemed to be—communications from deceased people. Again, as with the crisis cases, we have the familiar survival/superpsi debate. Unfortunately, in the face of this impasse over how to interpret these cases, after about the mid-20th century, mediumship research gradually declined.

  Nevertheless, a few especially interesting cases have been reported in the last fifty years, many of them of the kind called ‘drop-in’ cases (see, e.g., Haraldsson & Stevenson, 1975a, b). These are instances in which a deceased person completely unknown to anyone at the sitting simply ‘drops in’. One important series of such cases was reported in the 1970s (Gauld, 1971). A small group of friends had been holding sittings, not with a designated medium but using a ouija board, intermittently from 1937 until 1964. Alan Gauld, the psychologist who reported the case, sat with them during 1959 and 1963—64. The sittings were held at the house of a Mr G, and he kept detailed records of what was spelled out on the ouija board. Many of the deceased people who seemed to be communicating were drop-ins. Although many names and other details were given about them, no one had tried to identify these people until Dr Gauld came along, and in the 1960s he was able to identify nine of them and verify many of the details that had been given. Clearly, drop-in cases are by far the easiest kind of mediumship case to fake: No one present is expecting them, and the medium might in principle simply find out details about a stranger and present them. A few drop-in cases have been exposed as fakes, but in Gauld’s cases, and others that have been reported, much of the information was unavailable to the medium, usually because it was private information known only to surviving loved ones or because it was available only in obscure sources, and often with the information being scattered among more than one of those obscure sources.

  Since so little controlled research with mediums has been done in recent decades, Emily decided a few years ago to do some. She particularly wanted to do a proxy study, because this is by far the best method for ruling out the two main normal explanations: If, instead of a family member, a proxy who does not know the deceased person sits with the medium, the medium can get no feedback and use that to elaborate on what may have been initially vague or general statements (‘cold reading’). And if the real sitters do not hear the reading, they can later be asked to blindly pick their own reading from a group, which provides the necessary basis for statistically evaluating the results.

  This study involved nine mediums and forty sitters, and a colleague and Emily served as the proxies (Kelly & Arcangel, 2011). The mediums were sent copies of photographs of deceased people, but given no other information. Later, family members were sent six transcripts—the (unidentified) real one, and five for other people of the same gender and approximate age. Of the forty sitters, thirty-eight returned their evaluations, and of these, fourteen were able to pick the correct reading out of the six, a highly significant result. We will now give just a few examples of the kinds of things the mediums said that led the sitters to pick the correct reading.

  In one reading, the medium said, among many other things:

  I feel like the hair I see here [in the photo that the medium was looking at] is gone, so I have to go with cancer or something that would take the hair away … Her hair—at some point she’s kind of teasing [it], she tried many colours. I think she experimented with colour a lot before her passing … I feel I’m up in Northampton, Massachusetts … Northampton does have that kind of college-town, beatnik kind of feel to it.

  The deceased girl’s mother confirmed th
at she had died of cancer, had dyed her hair ‘hot pink’ before her surgery, and had later shaved her head when her hair began falling out. (Her hair, by the way, looked normal in the photo.) Also, although the girl lived and died in Texas, her mother said that Northampton ‘is where she told a friend she wanted to go to college’. In another reading, the medium referred to …

  a lady that is very much, was influential in his [the deceased person’s] formative years. So, whether that is mother or whether that is grandmother … She can strangle a chicken.

  The sitter commented that her grandmother (who was the deceased person’s mother) …

  killed chickens. It freaked me out the first time I saw her do this. I cried so hard that my parents had to take me home. So the chicken strangling is a big deal … In fact I often referred to my sweet grandmother as the chicken killer.

  In this study there was one medium who did particularly well. This person did six readings, and every single one was picked out correctly by the sitters. If we can identify more mediums like this, who can do well under the admittedly artificial conditions of our experiments, renewed research with such people might take us a long way in understanding more about mediumship and its relevance to survival.

  Cases of the Reincarnation Type

  The last area of research we will talk about is also the most recent to develop. This involves what we call ‘cases of the reincarnation type’. In a typical case of this kind, a young child, usually two to five years old, will begin saying things like ‘When I was big, my name was such-and-such,’ or ‘I want to go home to my children’. They often give information such as names of people or places, or talk about how they died, and with this information, the parents, or sometimes an investigator, can trace a deceased person whose life corresponded to what the child was saying. The children frequently show unusual behaviour appropriate for that person, such as a strong phobia of water if the person drowned. And in many cases the child has an unusual birthmark or birth defect corresponding to fatal injuries of the deceased person. This phenomenon was virtually discovered in the early 1960s by Dr Ian Stevenson, the founder and long-time director of DOPS, and to date we have some 2700 cases in our files, nearly all of them personally investigated by Dr Stevenson and his colleagues. The phenomenon seems to be universal, with cases found in all parts of the world, from Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. By far the largest numbers have come from places where the belief in reincarnation is strong, such as India or Burma; but in recent years Dr Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist who has taken over this line of research since Dr Stevenson’s death, has concentrated on investigating cases in America, and he has learned of some extremely interesting ones (Tucker, 2005).

  For example, in one American case the child was about three when his mother threatened to spank him. His response: ‘When you were a little girl and I was your daddy, you were bad lots of times, and I never hit you!’ The boy made other remarks about the life of his grandfather, including the nickname that his grandfather had given a cat the family had, but certainly the most interesting aspect of the case was that the grandfather had been a retired policeman who was shot and killed when he tried to stop a robbery at a store. He was hit six times, and one bullet had severed his pulmonary artery. The boy was born five years later with several birth defects corresponding to these wounds, including a severe defect of the pulmonary artery that required multiple surgeries.

  This is an example of what we call ‘same-family’ cases, and the weakness in most of these cases is that one cannot really rule out that the child learned normally the information he gave, although of course in cases such as the above with physical correspondences this is a secondary issue. In many cases, however, the families were complete strangers to each other. For example, in a case in Sri Lanka (Stevenson & Samaratne, 1988), the child, a girl named Thusitha, was also about three when she heard someone mention Kataragama, a city about 220 km away from her town. She said that she had lived there, and that her father had been a farmer and had a flower stall in the Kiri Vehera, a Buddhist monument, near the main Hindu temple. She made many other statements, particularly saying that she had lived near the river and that a dumb (meaning mute) boy had pushed her into the river, implying that she had drowned. Her family knew no one like this, and never tried to verify her statements, but two of Dr Stevenson’s associates in Sri Lanka made a list of her statements and were able to identify, in the area she had described, a family with a flower stall, who had a son unable to speak and who also had a daughter who had drowned in the river at the age of two when she was playing there with her siblings.

  Dr Stevenson placed increasing emphasis on cases involving birthmarks and birth defects, and in 1997 published a two-volume work reporting over 200 cases of this kind (Stevenson, 1997). Nearly all the cases involved highly unusual birthmarks, not just the ordinary moles that most of us have. For example, in the case of Jacinto Agbo (Stevenson, 1997, pp. 522—26), a child in Nigeria, whose uncle had died after being struck on the head with a club. He was taken to a hospital and underwent surgery, but died and was buried with a bandage still wrapped around his head. Over ten years later Jacinto was born with what no one could doubt was a very unusual birthmark.

  Fig. Photograph of Jacinto Agbo

  Many of the cases involved two or more birthmarks, which reduces the possibility that the birthmarks and wounds corresponded by chance. For example, in the case of Hanumant Saxena (Stevenson, 1997, pp. 455—67), a boy in India, a man had been shot in his parents’ village just a few weeks before Hanumant’s birth. He was shot at close range in the chest with a shotgun. When Hanumant was born, he was found to have a cluster of hypopigmented birthmarks in the centre of his chest. Dr Stevenson was able to get an autopsy report, and showed it to a physician who was unfamiliar with Hanumant’s case. He asked the physician to draw the location of the wounds, based on the autopsy report:

  Fig. Hanumant Saxena (1955)

  Fig. Autopsy Report Drawing

  In eighteen cases, there were two birthmarks corresponding to entry and exit bullet wounds, one being small and round as an entry wound would be, the other larger and more ragged. One example was the case of Cemil Fahrici (Stevenson, 1997, pp. 728–45), a man in Turkey, who as a child had remembered the life of a notorious bandit who killed himself with a shot under the chin when he was finally trapped by police. The man had a birthmark under his chin which had bled when he was born. Three years later, Dr Stevenson met and talked with the deceased man’s sister, who said that the bullet had exited at the top of the skull and, in so doing, taken part of the skull with it. Dr Stevenson then wondered whether Cemil might have a birthmark corresponding to this exit wound. He went back and found one, a birthmark that no one had mentioned or, apparently, even noticed before:

  Fig. Cemil Fahrici’s first birthmark

  Fig. Cemil Fahrici’s second birthmark

  Another case also involved two birthmarks, but one of these was particularly interesting because it was what we call an ‘experimental birthmark’. In some Asian countries, particularly Thailand, people will sometimes mark the body of a dying or recently deceased person in the hope that when he or she is reborn they will recognize the person because of a corresponding birthmark. In the following case (Stevenson, 1997, pp. 839-52), a young woman in Thailand was born with a severe congenital heart defect, which was operated on when she was twenty years old. Unfortunately, she died on the operating table. Her niece, Ma Choe Hnin Htet, was born about a year later, and she had two birthmarks. One, a long linear one down the middle of her chest, corresponded (according to the surgeon in the case) to the incision made during her aunt’s heart surgery. The second birthmark was a red mark on the back on her neck, which corresponded to a mark some friends had made with lipstick on the back of the deceased woman’s neck.

  Fig. Ma Choe Hnin Htet’s first birthmark

>   Fig. Ma Choe Hnin Htet’s second birthmark

  Interestingly, the mother in this case did not know about the mark made on the back of her sister’s neck until Ma Choe Hnin Htet was about four years old, and the friends told her about it.

  What are we to make of these cases? As a rule, the care with which most of them have been investigated rules out fraud, although Dr Stevenson and his associates have uncovered a few fraudulent ones. The possibility that the parents misremember what the child said and give him credit for accurate statements he did not actually make is decisively ruled out in those nearly three dozen cases, like Thusitha’s, in which someone made a written record before the deceased person was identified. A common suggestion for the birthmark cases is that the child is born with a birthmark and the parents then seek out a person who had a wound corresponding to it. This explanation is completely untenable in most cases. For example, in Hanumant’s case, the highly unusual mode of death and the highly unusual cluster of birthmarks occurred within weeks of each other in the same small village. The parents certainly did not search far and wide in this instance; and what is the likelihood of these two events happening by chance? A more plausible alternative interpretation is that this was a case of ‘maternal impression’, in which a pregnant woman sees a disturbing wound or birthmark and her child is then born with a similar mark (Stevenson, 1992). This was a frequently reported phenomenon in the medical literature before the 20th century, when the scepticism of physicians as well as journal editors discouraged further reports. But in some of these cases, even that interpretation seems unlikely, since the mother did not see or even know about the wound in question. Ma Choe Hnin Htet’s birthmark corresponding to the lipstick mark is an example.