by Joe Nickell
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES
Another type of experience also seems to provide a glimpse of the Other Side. Some years ago I came across an antique lithographed poster advertising a newspaper feature about people who “came back from the dead” (figure 4.2). With the assistance of CFI librarian Timothy Binga, I was able to track down a copy of the paper, the October 14, 1906, Boston American (Nickell 2007, 259–63).
The main story concerned a Mrs. James A. Haskins, who had “apparently died during a recent attack of pleuro-pneumonia,” during which time she had recovered after having appeared neither to breathe nor to have a heartbeat for some twenty-three minutes. (Of course, if this had actually occurred, she would have suffered irreversible brain damage.) Afterward, Mrs. Haskins would state that she heard a nurse say, “Well, she's gone,” whereupon she felt the nurse close her eyes and heard her mother sobbing. “Then,” she said, “my little dead baby, Doris, came to me. I held out my arms to her and held her close to my breast. Oh, I was so happy.” She added: “Her coming back to me was not a shock. It seemed perfectly natural that she should come in that way. So I gathered her up in my arms and together we floated away in perfect happiness.” However, in time, Mrs. Haskins became conscious of gasping for breath, feeling the pain of her illness, and finding herself in her own mother's arms. “Returning to life was the hard part,” she insisted. “Dying was peace and happiness.”
Her encounter has much in common with today's typical near-death experience (NDE)—a term coined by physician Raymond Moody in the 1970s to describe the mystical experiences some report after apparently returning from death's door. Although each person's experience is unique, Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal Experience states:
In an NDE people generally experience one or more of the following phenomena in this sequence: a sense of being dead, or an out-of-body experience in which they feel themselves floating above their bodies, looking down; cessation of pain and a feeling of bliss or peacefulness; traveling down a dark tunnel toward a light at the end; meeting nonphysical beings who glow, many of whom are dead friends and relatives; coming in contact with a guide or Supreme Being who takes them on a life review, during which their entire lives are put into perspective without rendering any negative judgments about past acts; and finally, a reluctant return to life. (Guiley 1991, 399)
Mrs. Haskins reported many of these experiences. Although she did not mention the dark tunnel, she did refer to “brightness.”
From a scientific standpoint, out-of-body experiences are actually hallucinations such as can occur when one is nowhere near death: under anesthesia, when one is falling asleep or even merely relaxing or meditating, or during attacks of migraine or epilepsy. Also hallucinatory is the tunnel-travel experience, attributable to the particular structure of the visual cortex (the part of the brain that processes visual information (Blackmore 1991) or to pupil widening due to oxygen deprivation (Woerlee 2004). The life review results from the dying, oxygen-starved brain stimulating cells in the temporal lobe and thus arousing memories. And it is not surprising that people's longing for dead loved ones should manifest in dreamlike imagery.
As Mrs. Haskins's poignant story demonstrates, examples of people recovering from “death” and telling of their supposedly near-death experiences can be profound—even life transforming. Blackmore (1991) observes that the NDE has aspects “that are ineffable—they cannot be put into words.” Such an event can seem so real, so powerful in its import, that—even though it is “essentially physiological”—it can profoundly change the lives of those who experience it.
PAST-LIFE MEMORIES
In her book, Across Time and Death, Jenny Cockell (1993), a British wife and mother who also works as a registered podiatrist, tells an unusual story. As a self-described “withdrawn and nervous child,” she says she often woke sobbing with memories of her earlier death as an Irish woman named “Mary.” She also recalled “constantly tidying and clearing out my room and toys,” as well as “sweeping with a broom, and acting out other chores” (1, 5, 14). Jenny also frequently sketched maps of Mary's Irish village, although there were, admittedly, variations in the supposed landmarks.
In 1988, Cockell underwent hypnosis, whereupon she seemingly became Mary. Although while hypnotized she felt she existed partly in the past and partly in the present, she emphasized: “Yet I was Mary, and the past had become very real. I could smell the grass on the slopes outside a large farmhouse, and I breathed in the fresh spring air.” Under hypnosis she also explored what she believed were her “psychic abilities.” In addition, as “Mary,” whose death she supposedly relived, she seemingly drifted outside herself on occasion to view the environs of her “now vacant body” (1993, 40, 55).
Jenny then engaged in research—making queries, acquiring maps, and so on—eventually turning up a village named Malahide and a woman named Mary Sutton who roughly fit her “memories.” The story—also told on the television program Unsolved Mysteries—ended with Mrs. Cockell making contact with some of Mary's surviving children who—ironically and bizarrely—were old enough to be her parents. Nevertheless, she was satisfied with her “reunion” and began to look into her “next life” as a twenty-first-century Nepalese girl (1993, 117–53).
I carefully examined Mrs. Cockell's intriguing and no doubt sincere saga, but it did not withstand critical analysis. In addition to the overwhelming lack of factual information provided by her dreams and hypnosis (she had not even known Mary's surname or the name of her village), she made numerous errors (such as giving the husband's name as Bryan rather than John) and she rationalized her mistakes and omissions throughout her book. But if Jenny Cockell's story is untrue, where did it come from?
An analysis of her autobiographical statements (Nickell 2001, 137–41) reveals her to possess many of the traits that indicate a propensity to fantasize. For example, she is an excellent hypnotic subject; she spent much time fantasizing as a child and had imaginary playmates as well as a fantasy identity; she not only recalls but relives past experiences, has out-of-body experiences, and believes she has psychic powers; and so on. Taken together, these traits are strong evidence of what is termed a fantasy-prone personality (see Wilson and Barber 1983).
Being an excellent hypnotic subject is particularly relevant because, as the late psychologist Robert A. Baker observed (Baker and Nickell 1992, 152):
For a long while it was believed that hypnosis provided the person hypnotized with abnormal or unusual abilities of recall. The ease with which hypnotized subjects would retrieve forgotten memories and relive early childhood experiences was astonishing….
However, when the veridicality of such memories was examined, it was found that many of the memories were not only false, but they were even outright fabrications. Confabulations, i.e., making up stories to fill in memory gaps, seemed to be the norm rather than the exception. It seems, literally, that using “hypnosis” to revive or awaken a person's past history somehow or other not only stimulates the person's desire to recall and his memory processes, but it also opens the flood gates of his or her imagination.
As Cockell herself acknowledges, she was forever dreaming: “Sometimes it was about the future, sometimes about the past, but hardly ever about the present.” She adds, “My escape into the past grew as I grew, and it was like a little death in my own life, a death of part of me that replaced part of my life (1993, 16). As with other classic fantasizers, her need to retreat from an unpleasant reality led her to create a reality that took on—so to speak—a life of its own.
Experiences such as these—waking dreams, near-death experiences, and past-life memories—must extend far back in time. Indeed, one suspects they are as old as humankind. No doubt they have persuaded countless people to believe—profoundly, if wrongly—that they have actually had an otherworldly experience.
It is a horrifying concept: being buried—or walled-up—alive. Fears of such possibilities were once rife.
In earlier times eve
n physicians could not always determine infallibly whether an individual was dead or instead in a comatose or cataleptic state. Actual cases of people seemingly returning to life may have inspired ancient folktales about persons being raised from the dead.
Moreover, in Europe, untimely inhumation helped spread fears of vampires—those who returned from the dead to prey on the living (Bunson 1993, 211). Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) expressed, with his usual genius, the grotesque horror of living interment with his tale “The Premature Burial.”
Then there were incidents—real or imagined—in which for some motive such as punishment or revenge a person was deliberately entombed alive, the theme of another Poe story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”
One such alleged occurrence was in St. Augustine, Florida, at the Spanish-built fortress Castillo de San Marcos. Purportedly, an eighteenth-century colonel discovered his wife was having an affair and chained her and her lover to a wall in the dungeon; he “mortared a new wall of coquina stone in front of them” (Hauck 1996, 125). In fact, however, investigation shows that the event is historically unrecorded, and the tale is traceable only to the rumors and outright concoctions of tour guides in the early twentieth century (Nickell 2005, 26). (This case is explored more fully in chapter 17.)
In my travels, I have encountered other living-burial stories. Here are three that I have investigated, two being of the deliberate-entombment type, namely a walled-up nun in the Netherlands and a castle's mystery room in Switzerland, and the third belonging to the premature-burial genre, featuring a vault with a view in a Vermont graveyard.
WALLED-UP NUN
During a lecture and investigation trip to the Netherlands and Belgium in 2006 (Nickell 2007), I was escorted by Dutch skeptic Jan Willem Nienhuys to Singraven, an estate near the small town of Denekamp in northeastern Netherlands. Built on old foundations in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, the estate's manor house or “castle” is said to be haunted.
Its secluded location helped give it an air of mystery and, as is the case with many historic sites, the ambience helped spawn ghostlore. After one lord of the manor began a cemetery on the grounds, superstitious folk began to say he invited bad luck. When his beard caught fire from an oil lamp, burning him severely, and when his wife died in childbirth, people would say, “The ghost of Singraven has struck again” (Wynia et al. 2006).
A young Dutch “psychic,” Robbert van den Broeke, visited Singraven and claimed to perceive numerous ghostly presences. Robbert—who busies himself giving dubious readings, producing questionable otherworldly photos, conveniently discovering crop circles near his and his parents’ home, and so on (Broeke 2005)—did not, however, perform at his psychic best. He incorrectly identified an oil portrait as that of the noble with the burned beard (probably because he had seen a television show that made the same misidentification). He also placed the incident in the wrong room (Wynia et al. 2006).
In the mansion's drawing room, Robbert “saw” various ghosts sitting in chairs or moving about. However, tour guides at Singraven pointed out that there had never been reports of ghosts in that particular chamber, which, in fact, had been added relatively recently (Wynia et al. 2006). At Singraven and elsewhere, Robbert has produced “ghost” photos, but these seem on a par with his “alien” ones (see Nanninga 2005, 28), which are indistinguishable from ridiculous fakes.
The main target of Robbert's psychic and photographic efforts at Singraven is the colorful, spooky legend of a walled-up nun. A cloister occupied the estate from 1505 to 1515. According to a popular tale, one night a young nun slipped away for a clandestine liaison with her lover. Returning late, she attempted to sneak up the stairs, but they creaked and awakened the mother superior, who decided to make an example of her. The unfortunate nun was sealed up in the wall near the foot of the stairway. As she slowly starved to death, her shouts of despair served as a warning to the other sisters (Wynia et al. 2006).
Now, this tale is implausible on the face of it—not only be cause it has an ostensibly devout prioress capriciously violating one of the Ten Commandments, but also because the cloister at Singraven was not for nuns at all. Rather, it housed Beguines (lay sisters). It is, in fact, a proliferating and often-debunked folktale. It has found its way into literature, for example in the epic poem Marmion by Sir Walter Scott (1808). Catholic scholar Herbert Thurston said of the legend:
To anyone who honestly looks into the matter, it will be clear that no statutes of any religious order have yet been brought forward which prescribe such punishment; that no contemporary records speak of its infliction; that no attempt is made to give details of persons or time; that the few traditions that speak of discovery of walled-up remains crumble away the moment they are examined; that the growth of the tradition itself can be abundantly accounted for; that the few historians or antiquaries of repute, whether Catholic or Protestant, either avowedly disbelieve the calumny, or studiously refrain from repeating it. (quoted in Catholic 2006)
Thurston's skepticism is fully justified by the facts of our investigation at Singraven. The wall in which the nun was allegedly sealed—now graced with a mirror (see figure 5.1)—was actually opened up in the early 1990s. This was done by workmen who were replacing the manor's electric wiring. The workers discovered no bones inside the wall, thus discrediting the local legend and with it the ghost sightings of the nun at the alleged site of her horrible death (Wynia et al. 2006).
Such legends of nuns being walled-up for punishment may be derived from the fact that ascetics were sometimes voluntarily enclosed, hermitlike, for solitary meditation. We learned of a church in Utrecht with just such a history. Visiting there the day following our investigation at Singraven, Jan Willem Nienhuys and I found an incised stone tablet in the walkway at the side of the edifice. It reads (in translation): “Sister Bertken Lived Here as Hermit Walled in a Niche in the Wall in the Choir of the Buurkerk 1457–1514.”
Called “anchoresses,” the walled-up penitents were not nuns (they did not take vows, for example), and while they led very austere lives, their “cells” could be quite roomy and often had a door that led into the church. Such hermits even kept in touch with both common folk and nobles, dispensing spiritual counsel and practical advice. When, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) the Roman Catholic Church became increasingly male- dominated, the urban anchoresses disappeared (see Mulder-Bakker 2005).
MYSTERIOUS CASTLE ROOM
Another entombed-alive legend is attributed to a curious little structure high atop a medieval castle in Switzerland. Overlooking the village of Oensingen, near Solothurn, Bechburg Castle could have been built as early as the mid-thirteenth century, although the earliest document relating to it dates from 1313 (Schloss 2007).
The enigmatic structure is at the highest part of the castle, except for an adjacent tower that continues upward (see figure 5.2). Roofed but doorless and windowless, the structure is the subject of a legend of uncertain vintage. Reportedly entombed there was a certain Kuoni, a despicable robber-knight who terrorized the populace and shed much innocent blood. Finally, though, he received a kind of justice when he became afflicted with leprosy or some other contagious disease. According to the tale, he was walled inside the chamber, and servants fed him food and water through a small opening. When he died, this was closed with a stone. Supposedly, however, the chamber could not contain the restless soul of the evil man, which still haunts the castle on certain nights (Roth and Maurer 2006).
The fanciful tale of a leprous knight being walled-in sounds less like historical fact (especially since the spot seems an unlikely place for such confinement) than folkloric fiction inspired by accounts of walled-up ascetics. Nevertheless, the name Kuoni—a diminutive of Konrad—has been common among the barons of the Bechburg, and there is an old document that could seem to support the legend. Dated 1408 and penned by Count Egon von Kyburg, it reports repair work occurred on the “alcove” (or “little chamber”) in which “Kuoni reposes” (Roth and Maurer
2006). Ghost proponents assume that this refers to the mysterious structure and so confirms that someone named Kuoni is entombed there. But might it not also refer to another place on the premises where, say, a child—little Konrad—slept?
In any case, there is no apparent evidence that the small roofed structure ever had a door or windows. Moreover, when I visited the castle with German skeptic Martin Mahner on May 25, 2007, we discovered something that none of our sources mentioned: its shape is peculiar. While one side meets the front at right angles, the other curves smoothly into it (again, see figure 5.2). This suggests that, architecturally, its purpose may have been partially or even totally stylistic.
As we learned from files at the city hall in Oensingen (Schloss 2007), a further possibility was suggested by a provincial historical-building supervisor. He had a worker use a jackhammer to drill into the mysterious structure from the top. While this was in progress, a severe lightning and hail storm arose and ended the exploration, but not before a depth of one meter had been reached. This led the supervisor to conclude that the little prominence has incredibly thick walls, indeed that it is probably not hollow at all but instead just a defensive bulwark.
Of course, even if the entire Kuoni folktale is untrue, that does not disprove the claims that the place is haunted. But what is the evidence that it is? Well, a tour guide who “usually” leaves the tower door open sometimes returns to find it closed again. Since it is latched from the inside, this cannot happen accidentally, and he dismisses suggestions that it could be a prank by visitors. He continually feels that he is not alone, and he sometimes hears voices along an empty hallway, but he is unsure whether they belong to ghosts or whether it is simply the wind carrying the voices of people who are walking nearby. Once, years ago, a volunteer worker during spring cleaning heard footsteps behind him as he descended the tower stairs. When he looked there was no one behind him, yet as he continued on so did the sounds. He insisted they were not the echoes of his own footsteps (Roth and Maurer 2006, 105–108).
