by Mary Roach
You would think that the SPR would need no more convincing. You would think that a letter like this, following a courtroom victory, would be trumpeted in the pages of the SPR’s journal as proof positive of the soul’s survival after death. But you would be wrong. In response to his report, Johnson received a contrary ten-page letter from SPR honorary officer W. H. Salter, which remains to this day in the Chaffin Will file in the SPR archives. Salter felt—and you’d have to agree with him—that the case presented puzzling irregularities. If the old farmer had changed his mind and now wanted his land divided among all four sons, why would he hide the new will so carefully and not tell any of his sons—indeed anyone at all—about it? Wrote Salter: “There is, I admit, no limit to the folly of testators or the secretiveness of farmers, but the present testator seems to have pushed both these characteristics to the limit. But for the apparition, his testamentary wishes would never have been carried out, and one can hardly suppose that during his life he counted on being able to appear as a ghost.”
The SPR party line on apparitions is outlined in SPR cofounder Frederick Myers’s seven-hundred-page opus Phantasms of the Living (which includes a chapter on phantasms of the dead). Myers felt that most are the products of the viewer’s own mind. Especially suspect is “an apparition which seems to impart any verbal message,” as did the ghost of James L. Chaffin; these are described as “very rare.”
Attorney Johnson replied to Salter’s letter with a possible explanation. Johnson had been told by a neighbor that the old farmer lived “in mortal terror” of his daughter-in-law Susie, who had in her possession the 1905 will. Changing his will would have meant confronting her, a task James L. was no doubt loath to undertake. So perhaps he hid the new will and planned to tell his three sons about it in his dying moments, so that in death he might escape the wrath of Susie. And then, I suppose, he misjudged his timing, and died before he could tell them. “This man J. P. Chaffin is an honest man and he thoroughly believes his father’s spirit appeared to him and gave him the clue to the 1919 will,” concludes Johnson’s letter. “And his manner appeared to me to be entitled to such respect that to doubt him would be to sin against light.”
Salter didn’t buy it. He came up with his own scenario, which held the will to be a fake, yet salvaged the innocence of James Pinkney Chaffin. He imagined that the eldest son, John Chaffin, perhaps with the help of his brother Abner, faked the will and the slip of paper in the overcoat pocket. James Pinkney Chaffin was made the unwitting pawn in the plot, for it was he who would be moved to discover the will. This would be accomplished by making Pink believe he’d seen his father’s ghost, when what he’d really seen was his brother John dressed up in his father’s overcoat.
And there the mystery lay. Until April 2004, when yours truly decided to take a trip to Mocksville. I would talk to the descendants of the Chaffin brothers and unearth the two wills. I would hire a forensic document examiner, the best in the business. I would let science decide, once and for all, if the second will was a forgery and our overcoat-wearing ghost a fabrication.
THE DIRT ROAD along which James Pinkney Chaffin walked with his molasses and his axe handles is now four lanes wide. Yadkinville Road grew up to be the shopping mall strip, the predictable, just-outside-town plop-down of Burger Kings and BoJangles. My room in the Mocksville Comfort Inn looks out onto this road, and I try to picture old Pink shambling along with his load, vest fronts flapping in the after-blast of passing four-ton Chevys.
There are fewer farms in Mocksville today, and no farmers at all in this branch of the Chaffin clan. Pink’s grandson Lester Blackwelder is a retired Ralston-Purina salesman. He has a salesman’s smile, accessorized with a wink and a toothpick. His sincere, clap-you-on-the-shoulder congeniality served him well in his career; he and his wife Ruby Jean live comfortably in a roomy house on an upscale street. Pink’s grandson Lloyd is an engineer with Ingersoll-Rand. Neither man so much as grows lemons in the backyard. This all came as a surprise to me, having spoken to Lester and Ruby Jean by phone and having placed them—mostly because of their accents and the “might-coulds” in their speech—in homey farm kitchens with gingham curtains and eggs in wire baskets on the counter.
This afternoon, Lester and Ruby Jean and I have gone visiting. We’re sitting in Lloyd Blackwelder’s living room, and the two men are reminiscing. (Lester and Lloyd are James L. Chaffin’s oldest living descendants; Marshall and Abner have no living descendants, and John’s living descendants are the next generation down—too young to recall any details.) Lester was a teenager when Grandpa Pink used to tell him the story of the dream and the will. His mother Estelle rode in the Model T with her daddy Pink the twenty miles to John’s house, to look for the overcoat. “Dirt roads the whole way,” Lester is saying. “No windows on the car. Mama said she remembered what the coat looked like. The pocket was hand-sewed and there was dirt dobber nestin’ all over it.”
I don’t know what this means and apparently they can tell, because Ruby Jean sets down her iced tea and says, “Wasps’ nests, Mary.” Sometimes it’s just the accent that loses me. “Pie safe” required four repetitions and a trip to the kitchen.
I ask them what James Pinkney Chaffin looked like. “He was real thin,” says Lester. “Six foot. Rugged. Mustache. Not a good-looking man.”
Ruby Jean twirls the ice in her glass. “He didn’t have no mustache, hon.”
Lester considers this. He juts his lower lip. “I thought he had a mustache.”
Later, Ruby Jean finds a photograph for me: Pink Chaffin and his wife and baby daughter posing in their Sunday clothes. Pink’s striped shirt looks new and his hair is combed and pomaded, but you can see the dirt worn into the rims of his fingernails. He confronts the camera with a calm, somber, baldly direct gaze, probably the same one that so impressed attorney Johnson. He doesn’t have a mustache.
Lloyd is the younger of the two grandsons. He is dressed in Levi’s and a corn-colored polo shirt. His memories of Pink are a child’s memories; he recalls the time he sat in his grandfather’s lap, the rocker rocking so hard it flipped over backward, and the toy horses Pink made out of pieces of dried cornstalks, with tufts of cotton for the manes. Lloyd crosses the room to a glass-fronted curio cabinet and takes down a glass walking stick, twisted at the neck and bobbed into a rounded handle. “Here’s his Sunday cane,” he says. The glass is ribboned with red and blue, like stick candy. Having seen only posed sepia photographs of these people, I find it hard to add this colorful, foppish item to the grimy, monocolor tableaus of James Pinkney Chaffin that I’ve built in my mind. They might as well have shown me the man’s floral nosegay and spats.
Neither Lester nor Lloyd remembers his great-uncle Marshall, the original recipient of James L. Chaffin’s entire estate. Lloyd recalls a vague aura of ill will surrounding Marshall’s wife Susie. Susie, to refresh your memory, is said to have been the one in possession of the earlier will, the one that left everything to Marshall. Interestingly, the first will was written the year after Marshall married Susie. Perhaps Susie pressured her father-in-law into drafting the will. Lester says Grandpa Pink loved to tell the story of the apparition and the secret will, but he can’t recall hearing him say anything at all about Marshall and his wife, or the circumstances of the first will. The one thing he recalls is that James L. Chaffin lived with his son Marshall after his own house burned down, so perhaps the father felt beholden to his son. Indeed, Marshall is listed on the “informant” line of James L. Chaffin’s death certificate, which suggests a closeness between the two.
Lloyd and Lester are not open to considering that Grandpa Pink might have made up the dream and been part of a plot with his brothers to forge a new will and take back the land. That the ghost and the overcoat and the Bible were all just elements of an imaginative scam dreamed up by the three spurned brothers.
“Pink would just never have thought of that,” says Lester.
“Nope,” says Lloyd. “He would have considered that crooked.�
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The old farmhouse where Pink lived when he had the visions of his father still stands, and Lloyd and Lester offer to take me there. Lester and Ruby Jean squeeze into my rented Hyundai, and Lloyd and his son Brad follow in Lloyd’s truck. Lester is driving the Hyundai, so that I can take notes while we talk. At one point he puts the left turn signal on, though there’s no road or driveway in view on our left, just an open field of tall grasses. The house sits on the far perimeter of the field, and that is where Lester is headed. “Used to be some tracks here, but not no more.” The weeds brush the underside of the Hyundai, making worrisome car-wash sounds inside the car. Lester and Ruby Jean seem accustomed to driving in fields. “Lester, there’s the old persimmon tree,” trills Ruby Jean.
“Uh-huh,” says Lester. He drives in overgrown fields at more or less the same speed as he drives on asphalt. “Grandma made the best persimmon pie, didn’t she?”
One side of Pink’s house is obscured by a thick climb of honeysuckle. Parts of the house are down to framing now, partly because it’s been abandoned so long, and partly because Lloyd pulled some boards away to make a pie safe. The men take me on a tour, pointing out the kitchen, their mama’s courting room, the bedroom, the outhouse, the earthen wells to keep the milk cool. There’s a doorway out the back wall of the bedroom. If John A. Chaffin came out here to play ghost in his father’s overcoat, that’s probably how he’d have come in. I tell Lloyd and Lester about the SPR officer’s theory. “Har,” says Lester. “I doubt that. John was just like Pink. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t go for foolishness.”
IS IT POSSIBLE to dress up like a ghost and fool people into thinking they’ve seen the real deal? Happily, there is published research to answer this question, research carried out at no lesser institution than Cambridge University. For six nights in the summer of 1959, members of the Cambridge University Society for Research in Parapsychology took turns dressing up in a white muslin sheet and walking around in a well-traversed field behind the King’s College campus. Occasionally they would raise their arms, as ghosts will do. Other members of the team hid in bushes to observe the reactions of passersby. Although some eighty people were judged to have been in a position to see the figure, not one reacted or even gave it a second glance. The researchers found this surprising, especially given that the small herd of cows that grazed the field did, unlike the pedestrians, show considerable interest,* such that two or three at a time would follow along behind the “ghost.” To my acute disappointment, “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings,” published in the September 1959 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, includes no photographs.
Several months later, the researchers revised their experiment, changing the venue and adding “low moans” and, on one occasion, phosphorescent paint. One trial was set in a graveyard right off a main road and clearly in the sight line of drivers in both directions. Here observers hid in the bushes not only to record reactions, but to “avert traffic accidents” and “reassure anyone who became hysterical.” But again, not a single person of the hundred-plus who saw the figure thought it was a ghost, including two students from India. “Although we are superstitious in our country,” the men told one of the researchers, “we could see his legs and feet and knew it was a man dressed up in some white garment.”
In their final effort, the research team abandoned traditional ghost-appropriate settings and moved the experiment into a movie theater that was screening an X-rated film. The author of the paper, A. D. Cornell, explained that the X rating was chosen to ensure no children were traumatized by the ghost, as though that somehow explained the choice of a porn theater as a setting for a ghost experiment. This time the “ghost” walked slowly across the screen during a trailer. The phosphorescence was not used this time, and presumably low moans were deemed redundant. No mention is made of the specific images showing on the screen behind the ghost, but clearly they were a good deal more interesting: The audience was polled after the film, and forty-six percent of them didn’t notice the man in the sheet. Among those who did, not one thought he’d seen a ghost. (One man said he’d seen a polar bear.)
And so we can safely conclude that if John Chaffin had attempted something as uncharacteristic as dressing up as his father’s ghost and moaning in his brother’s bedroom doorway, James Pinkney Chaffin would not have been convinced. Though his cows, were they in a position to observe, would have been fascinated.
I HAVEN’T SPENT much time in the South, and I didn’t realize how helpful people are there. They help you even if you don’t ask for help. I went to Food Lion yesterday, and the checkout clerk told me my yogurt was on special if I had an MVP card. “Trudy,” he said to the bagger when he found out I didn’t. “Give me your MVP card.” It’s the kind of place where you call a total stranger on the phone, and his wife will say, “Hang on, I’ll go run and see if I can catch him before he goes off on his tractor!” The closest thing to impoliteness that I’ve come across so far has been a license plate holder ordering me to EAT BEEF. Eat beef, please, I chide.
Thanks to southern hospitality and the kindness of strangers, finding the Chaffin wills turned out to be as simple as telephoning the records office. The woman who answered put me through to the clerk of the court, who regularly picks up his phone. The clerk, Ken Boger, said the old records were in the courthouse basement and I could come down any day of the week and he’d help me find them.
Today is that day. I’m meeting a Tennessee-based questioned document examiner and forensic handwriting expert named Grant Sperry. I found Sperry through the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, of which he’s president. Sperry has been an expert witness in some three hundred federal and state cases, including the Waco mess, where his testimony resulted in the conviction of an assistant U.S. attorney who had denied any knowledge of the pyrotechnic devices used on the compound. Sperry found imprints of his notes about the devices on the page below the page where he’d written them. (Note to the careless: These guys can read the imprints of your writing on a pad as much as ten pages down from the page you wrote on.) Sperry was coming to North Carolina to visit his parents and the Chaffin case intrigued him, so he agreed to help me out for about, oh, 1/100th of what he charges the trial lawyers.
We’re waiting at the metal detector in the front vestibule, along with a pile of Sperry’s equipment. We’ve been here several minutes. After a while, a man in a security uniform spots us. “Ain’t been nobody manning that for two months.” He waves us in.
It’s a busy Monday morning, but Boger gets right up from his desk to take us to the basement. Within five minutes, we’ve got both wills. Sperry sets up a makeshift desk on a stack of boxes full of old case files. Most are boxes designed to hold files, but one says: ORRELLS WHOLE HOG SAUSAGE. Sperry puts on bright blue latex gloves, picks up the wills one at a time, and lays them on a scanner. Now he’ll be able to look at them side by side on his computer screen and line up any two elements he chooses. Since both wills are handwritten, we’d thought that we had two lengthy handwriting samples to compare, but Sperry quickly determines that the body of the first will has been written out by someone other than the signer—presumably a lawyer, for the document is written in standard-issue legalese on legal-sized paper. The second will, he says, is all one handwriting. This one is a curious mixture of legalese and down-home sap, penned on a page from a ruled school tablet:
After reading the 27 Chapter of genesis I James L Chaffin do make my last will and testament and here it is i want after giving my body a desent burial my little property to be equally devided between my four children if they are living at my death both personal and real estate devided equal if not living give share to there children and if she is living you all must take care of your mamy now this is my last will and testament. Wit my hand and seal on other side
Jas L Chaffin
Sperry can tell right away that whoever wrote out the second will wasn’t attempting to copy someone else’s handwriting. The
writing is too fluid and relaxed, too swiftly and confidently written to be a forgery. Forged writing is more like drawing, he says. The person moves slowly and deliberately, stopping and starting and sometimes even touching up letters. I read about this in Questioned Documents, a classic in the field, written by the enormously learned and occasionally crabby Albert Osborn. “A genuine writing does not often suggest that the writer is thinking of what he is doing with his pen,” Osborne wrote, “while a dishonest writing, when examined with care, often shows quite conclusively that the writer was thinking of nothing else…. This is another subject beyond the understanding of the stupid observer.” It’s clear the second will was written with a relaxed hand. So either James L. Chaffin wrote the second will, or it was written by someone who wasn’t overly concerned with creating a convincing match for Chaffin’s hand.
Sperry moves on to a comparison of the James L. Chaffin signatures on the two wills. It’s likely that the first will was indeed signed by Chaffin, as there are two witnesses. Sperry’s job now is to see if the writer of the second will, which had no witnesses, is also James L. Chaffin. The task is complicated by the fourteen years that span the two documents. Handwriting—especially signatures—often changes over time.
Nonetheless, Sperry has reached a conclusion. “There’s an old axiom we have,” he says, peeling off his gloves. “You can’t write better than your best.” In other words, I could never do a convincing forgery of my mother’s signature. My mother had beautiful, gliding, even penmanship, and mine has always been rat scrabble. She could forge mine, but not vice versa. Once you reach your “age of graphic maturity”—usually sometime in your teens—you’ve hit the peak of your ability and are unlikely to get much better. If anything, your writing gets worse: Handwriting deteriorates with old age and its decrepitudes—bad vision, stiff fingers, hand tremors.
