The problem was that neither of them spoke German. Intrigued, Reverend Jay re-hypnotized his wife three days later and tried to expand upon what had happened. Encouraged to speak German, in trance, she did. The minister asked the questions in English; Dolores replied largely in German, and in the voice of a young child. Since he could not understand her, Carroll found some friends who could speak German and had them listen to the sessions, which he had taped.
Gretchen
Dolores spoke German, under hypnosis, responsively, meaning she answered in German whether the query was posed in English or in German (some sessions were attended by Germanspeakers). Only she wasn't Dolores; she was Gretchen. And the time in which she lived, placed by events of which she spoke, would have been the late nineteenth century.
The phenomenon of age regression under hypnosis was discussed in the previous chapter. Apparently, some subjects can be regressed further-beyond their own lifetimes, into what seems to be a previous life. This is a not-uncommon happenstance with hypnosis, and some clinical hypnosis books even mention it. For example, in Hypno i:: Questions and Aneu'er., (1986), a chapter is devoted to past-life regression. The author does not object to anyone believing in reincarnation (implied by remembrance of a prior life), but does remark that science has yet to validate such a claim.
"Past lives" evoked under hypnosis have often attracted much public attention and have been the subject of best-sellers. They are less useful for scientific study, as it is known that hypnotized individuals are highly suggestible and try to please their inquisitor, and because details of the times and places of ordinary folk living hundreds of years ago are sparse and not useful for "confirmation." That is why "past lives" emerging during hypnotic states will not be dealt with in this book. And this chapter only examines the speaking of a seemingly never-learned but real language, which cannot be concocted on the spot. While this might imply reincarnation, and has been investigated as such, the linguistic phenomena are more amenable to study.
Suffice it to say that Gretchen's accounts were more or less consistent, including her last name (Gottlieb), the town in which she lived (Eberswalde), and her death-a murder-at about the age of sixteen. Not to mention the fact that she could speak German, and even used some archaic and obscure words.
The Investigation
Ian Stevenson, M.D., now well into his eighties, is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He holds an endowed chair and has served as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University's medical school. He has an interest in studying accounts suggestive of reincarnation. After a letter from Reverend Jay, about his wife, appeared in a psychic magazine, Stevenson contacted the Jays. His report of "The Case of Gretchen" was published in The Journal of the American Society / or Riychu•al Re.iearch in 1976. While the Journal is not indexed in MEDLINE, Stevenson's credentials and the meticulousness of his work merit its review.
Stevenson referred to the phenomenon of someone speaking a language they presumably never learned as "xenoglossy." (Some use the term "glossolalia" for this, although glossolalia is used more often for "speaking in tongues"-technically, a babble that sounds like language but isn't.) In the case of D. J., as she is referred to in the paper, her answers in German constituted "responsive xenoglossy."
Stevenson speaks German, and first ascertained that D. J. was, in fact, responding in coherent German in her "Gretchen" mode. He then obtained assurances from the couple that neither had ever had any prior knowledge of the language; they even signed affidavits to this effect. Mrs. Jay would eventually take a lie-detector test in New York City, which showed that she believed she was telling the truth about never having learned German.
The focus of the paper is an investigation into whether Dolores Jay could have learned to speak German at some juncture in her past, and perhaps had forgotten about it. She was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and at the age of two moved to a neighboring town. Her only German ancestry consisted of two great-great-grandparents on her mother's side, who had died many years before her birth. Stevenson interviewed D. J.'s mother, who told him that she had never heard any family member speak German.
Carroll Jay (C. J.) was from the same area of West Virginia. He and Dolores were high-school sweethearts and married soon after graduation. Stevenson went back to the Clarksburg area where both Jays had grown up and interviewed nineteen relatives and neighbors of Dolores Jay, including her parents and a younger sister. All denied having any family or acquaintances who spoke German. No German books had ever been in the house. Young Dolores could not have toddled off and learned a foreign language unbeknownst to her parents, who kept a close eye on her (the parents also signed affidavits as to the truth of their reports).
Stevenson even found statistics as to the number of Germanspeaking persons in Harrison County, West Virginia, where the Jays' hometowns were located, but could find no one conversant in this language anywhere near the wandering range of a young, supervised child. Even the schools of Harrison County did not teach German at the time the Jays were enrolled there.
So what are we left with? Stevenson is certain that this Gretchen character can speak German. He does not believe the Jays are trying to commit some type of elaborate fraud, and he visited the area where Dolores grew up, satisfying himself that there was no way she could have picked up German. In conclusion, he sees "no reason to be rushed toward final judgments in this matter," but believes "that responsive xenoglossy derives from,oo ne paranormal process."
As for the reverend, although he had dabbled in hypnotic regression previously, he had made no attempt to accomplish this with his wife. In fact, C. J. found the idea of reincarnation somewhat incompatible with the teachings of Christianity, nor did he care for the concept of possession, which bespeaks of the devil. The couple also had no involvement with parapsychology or cults. But despite their own bewilderment, the Jays felt that something had transpired that was worthy of scientific study. Their case attracted some notoriety, and an article about it appeared in the W'a.,hiirgton Po,ot in 1975.
Sharada
Stevenson has reported other cases. In 1979 in the American Journal of P.~Vlhiatry (which is ME)LINi indexed), he published "A Case of Secondary Personality with Xenoglossy." This time, hypnosis was not involved. The case was that of a thirty-twoyear-old single woman, living in the state of Maharashtra in India, who would periodically undergo some sort of change in her personality.
Ms. A., as she was called, spoke Marathi, her native language until her personality changed. This came on gradually, over several hours. Then she became "Sharada" and spoke fluent Bengali. Dr. Stevenson and research associate Satwant Pas- richa, Ph.D., studied Ms. A. and interviewed her during her normal states. She taught at a university, and at times helped her mother with housework. She and her family denied any knowledge of the Bengali language, had always lived in Maharashtra, and had never visited the Bengali region of India.
Like patients with multiple personality disorder, Ms. A. and Sharada seemed to have no knowledge of the other's personality or its pertinent events. A few Bengali speakers were enlisted by the family to translate during the Sharada episodes, which could last anywhere from one day to seven weeks. Sharada described places and events consistent with early-nineteenth-century Bengal. Her Bengali was appropriate to that era, and not to the modern language. As Sharada, she dressed and acted like a married Bengali woman, was familiar with Bengali foods and cooking, had some familiarity with the area's geography, and related that she had died from a snake bite.
From his meetings with Mrs. A. and her family, Stevenson is convinced that "she had no normal knowledge of spoken Bengali." While one could postulate that Ms. A., as a child, could have seen a book about Bengali history and culture and didn't remember it, fluency in a language, Stevenson is quick to point out, is a skill. One doesn't acquire such a skill in a forgotten afternoon; the professor believes Ms. A.'s Bengali to have been paranormally acquired.
Ste
venson had published an earlier report (1974) in The ,Jour,zal of the American Society for Psychical Research regarding an American woman who could speak an unlearned languageSwedish. Similarly to the Jays, this occurred under hypnosis performed by the husband. Unlike the Jays, who went public out of a belief that their experiences might have some scientific value, this couple wished to avoid any limelight, and the report identifies them only by their initials.
Jensen Jacoby
T. E. was a thirty-seven-year-old Jewish housewife in Philadelphia in 1955. Her husband, K. E., was a physician in general practice who occasionally employed medical hypnosis with his patients. During an attempt at age regression, T. E. visualized a scene where old people were being forced into a body of water, ostensibly to drown them. In trance, she felt her head being pushed into the water, and suddenly let out a scream and clutched her head, as if she had been clobbered. She awoke with a headache that persisted for two days, and a sense of a lump on her head.
A week later, K. E. hypnotized and regressed his wife again, with the same result. A similar session a week after that also culminated in the same headache. A month later, a different hypnotist was brought in who regressed the wife to the brink of the "incident" and then suggested to her that she go back in time to ten years before the incident. Then the fun began.
Speaking in a deep, masculine voice, the hypnotized T. E. announced: "I am a man." "His" name was Jensen Jacoby, and he was a Swedish peasant farmer. Jensen spoke in broken English and used some foreign-language phrases that sounded Scandinavian. At subsequent sessions, with K. E. back as hypnotist, the same type of linguistics ensued; but following these sessions, some speakers of Swedish and other Scandinavian languages were present. Then, Jensen spoke almost exclusively in Swedish, although he could reply in a halting English if a question were posed in English. The Swedish speakers thought his Swedish accent was "excellent" and commented on several specific Swedish words that non-native speakers generally mispronounce but which Jensen handled fluently.
Jensen Jacoby described the life of a peasant farmer, raising livestock, before the industrial revolution. He had no familiarity with modern tools but was acquainted with crops, foods, and types of ships that would have been known in seventeenthcentury Sweden. His dialect was also consistent with that era.
Jensen was apparently Christian, but the surname Jacoby was frequent among Jews living in Sweden. Sporadic Jewish immigration to Sweden began during the seventeenth century, but conversion to Lutheranism was a requisite. Jensen was vague about his father's origins; he said his mother came from Norway, and he identified his own wife as "Latvia," which was not a Swedish name.
In one of the sessions, T. E. was regressed once more to the headache that started it all. Jensen was sixty-two now, and was engaged in some sort of battle with enemies who pushed him into water while delivering a severely painful blow to the head, which seems to have killed him.
Stevenson spent about fifty hours with K. E. and T. E., investigating this case. As with the Jays, he focused his attention on any possibility that T. E. could have learned Swedish "normally." He interviewed the housewife's eldest daughter and three members of her childhood family (her mother and two older siblings). T. E.'s parents were immigrants from Odessa, Russia, and had never been to Scandinavia, nor did they know anyone who spoke Swedish. English was the language of the Philadelphia neighborhood in which they settled; the parents occasionally spoke Yiddish, Polish, or Russian in the house, but never any Scandinavian language. At the high school she attended, French, Spanish, and Latin were the foreign languages offered (T. E. took some French).
The Swedish speakers who conversed with "Jensen" confirmed that the language was Swedish, with a fluency beyond mimicry or a few phrases. His vocabulary was well over a hundred words, some of'which he introduced before hearing them from the interpreters. His accent was authentic; he did not speak Swedish as an American would.
Stevenson administered language aptitude and psychological tests. T. E. did not show much facility for learning a language; she tested psychologically normal. What's more, if she was hypnotized but not regressed, she demonstrated no knowledge of' the Swedish language.
Stevenson could find nothing to suggest that fraud could have been involved. Aside from signed affidavits from T. E. and her mother as to the truthfulness of their statements, and a polygraph test which T. E. passed, there seemed to be no motive, psychological or otherwise, for such an elaborate scheme to be perpetrated. The interviews with the family ruled out what Stevenson calls cryptamnesia-forgetting that one has learned something. Again, conversing in a language is a skill; it takes practice.
This Isn't Normal
So that brings us to non-normal explanations, needed for all three cases. Telepathy? Stevenson considers the possibility that a language could have been learned telepathically, from someone else who spoke it. But he comments in his 1984 book Unlearned Leutquage, which discusses the Gretchen and Sharada cases in detail (and makes comparisons to Jensen), that "To speak a language intelligibly, it is not enough just to have a limited vocabulary of words in it; one must be able to understand what someone else says in the language and be able to deploy an appropriate reply in the same language." All three could do this, so telepathy, assuming it even exists, wouldn't account for responsive xenoglossy.
Possession? In an earlier chapter, 1 described the report of a young Londoner who could see the "ghost" of an old woman coming and then uncontrollably possessing his body. Gretchen and Jensen had to be invoked by hypnotic trance. Sharada was simply a benign personality, not a Mr. Hyde to Ms. A.'s Dr. Jekyll. Gretchen slipped in and out of each personality without remembrance of the other, and without any sense of being "controlled."
Stevenson even considers the possibility of "genetic memory." In animals, this would be called "instinct." A bird "knows" how to build a nest without having to be taught. Do we "know" things like foreign languages via our genes? Not if our current understanding of genetics is correct: What our ancestors learned in life isn't supposed to be encoded into our DNA and passed on.
Comparing the three cases, two were evinced under hypnosis, one was spontaneous. Jensen differed in gender; the other two did not. Sharada was quite fluent in Bengali, while Gretchen and Jensen spoke in a more fragmentary fashion. All three alter personalities died unnaturally: Gretchen and Jensen by murder, Sharada by snakebite.
The uniqueness of Stevenson's work is its thoroughness. He used native speakers to verify that the subjects could converse in a foreign tongue, and published transcriptions of the recorded conversations. He thoroughly picked apart every aspect of their pasts, going back to childhood and schooling, and speaking to friends, family, and neighbors. He has done his best to rule out fraud and forgetfulness, and fully believes in the integrity of the subjects.
Stevenson was unable to historically confirm the places and events in the lives of' Gretchen and Jensen. However, in Sharada's case, a family was identified, with the same surname Sharada claimed to have had, that lived in Bengal at about the time of the Indian woman's apparent tenure there. As Sharada, Ms. A. had a detailed knowledge of life in nineteenth-century Bengal, including customs, geography, and foodstuffs, and Stevenson finds it implausible that these facts could all have been gleaned from books.
There have been many other reports of spoutings of "unlearned" languages. Stevenson reviews these in his 1974 introduction to the Sharada case. Some were examples of phrases heard in childhood and long forgotten; these people could not carry on conversations in the language. Of those who could, some cases dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, but Stevenson does not consider these accounts to be sufi- ciently researched and detailed. In fact, after his first publication on this topic in 1974, he received many letters regarding similar happenings, but the lack of documentation and/or tape recordings of sessions render these only "a catalogue of missed opportunities."
Ian Stevenson believes that these cases provide evidence for some sort of survival of
personality after death. I can't claim to understand these phenomena myself', but I am convinced that Stevenson's reportage is accurate, that fraud was not involved, and that there is currently no good explanation of why these events occurred. But we should eventually understand them.
Fifteen
Deja Vu All Over Again: Children Who
Remember Past Lives
In researching the paranormal in medicine, perhaps the strangest and most troubling things one finds are the accounts of young children who remember, with confirmable accuracy, someone else's previous life. The collection of these cases has been largely the life work of psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson (who studied xenoglossy, described in the previous chapter), although other researchers are involved. While some of' Stevenson's work has reached ME►)L►NE publications, much of' it has appeared in the non-indexed Proeee)ia,ts o% the zlmerit•air Society /i,r P.oychieal Research and the Journal o/ Seienti%ie Frplo- ratioa, and details of the cases, along with commentary, can be found in Stevenson's books, the most recent of' which is a revised edition (2001) of Children Who Remember Previous Lives.
Such a Child
All the stories have basic similarities. Here's an example.9 In India, in 1950, a ten-year-old boy named Nirmal died at home of smallpox in the town of Kosi Kalan (I'll abbreviate it henceforth as K.K.). Sixteen months later, a male infant named Prakash was born six miles away in the village of Chhatta. When Prakash was about four, he began awakening during the night and running outside, claiming that his name was Nirmal and he wanted to go home. "Home" was K.K. He persisted in asking his family to take him to K.K., until finally, when he was five, they decided to humor him. His uncle first took him on a bus that was actually going away from K.K., but the boy seemed to know the misdirection and insisted that they travel the other way, which they then did. At the child's behest, they went to the shop owned by the Jain family (Nirmal's parents). But the shop was closed, and they gave up and returned to Chhatta. Eventually, the Jain family got wind of this visit.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 14
