by John Pinkney
Jasbir announced that his real name was Sobha Ram. He was, he claimed, the son of a Brahmin family in the nearby village of Vehedi. Scornfully he refused meals, insisting that he be given food prepared by a Brahmin. At first the family surmised that Jasbir’s presumed death, or entry into a catatonic state, had affected his mind. But when he began describing his purported past life in detail - saying Sobha Ram had been poisoned by doctored sweets - they began to believe something extraordinary might have happened. But as often happens in such cases they did nothing about it.
A resolution occurred when Jasbir was six. He ran home and insisted that he had seen his aunt, a Brahmin woman, who happened to be visiting the village. He offered the visitor so many details of his ‘previous life’ that she obtained his parents’ permission to take him back to Vehedi to meet other relatives. Soon both families were convinced that the poisoned Sobha Ram had somehow taken over Jasbir’s body.
Scientific investigators established that the boys had died virtually at the same time. In his book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation Dr Ian Stevenson speculates that Sobha might have slipped into Jasbir’s physical frame before brain death occurred, then helped the body struggle back to life.
‘I Knew a Town I’d Never Seen’
The events - teasing and unexplained - lingered for years in Esther Doolan’s memory. In 1986 she wrote to me from Highgate, South Australia, to describe her experience:
It happened when I visited England for the first time. My travelling companion, a South African girl, wanted to go to Kent, which she’d heard described as ‘the garden of England’. We started out in one of the county towns, Tunbridge Wells. I’d never heard of the place - and that’s why I got such a shock when I stepped out onto the streets. Suddenly, what I can only describe as memories of the town started flooding into my mind.
…These recollections became extremely powerful after lunch when we decided to explore the old part of the town. We found ourselves in an arcade, open to the sky and flanked by ancient shops. I heard myself say, ‘Let’s look at the old tavern - it’s just beyond that corner, to the left.’ My friend stared then told me I must be mad as we’d never set foot in Tunbridge Wells before.
But I had no doubt we’d find that tavern, with its quaintly coloured windows - and when we rounded the corner it was there. Under the law at that time the tavern was closed in the afternoon, so we walked on… After a while we grew tired and I confidently told my friend that if we walked for five minutes more we’d find a beautiful place to rest: an old three-sided rustic seat. And we did.
I’d been quite cheerful up to then. But from the moment I sat down I was gripped by sadness. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I’d spent hours here before in a happy time that I could sense only faintly and fleetingly…I’m of Cornish descent, and as we travelled back to London in the evening I began to wonder whether I might have lived in England in an earlier time.
Many observers have described accurate memory flashes of the kind Esther experienced. Whether they are suggestive of reincarnation, of recollections genetically inherited from ancestors, or of psychic insight is, in numerous cases, unclear. The novelist J.B. Priestley described a recurring dream which troubled him over 10 years. He found himself in a foreign city unknown to him but (paradoxically) profoundly familiar. Then one day Priestley was invited to Prague and instantly recognised its streetscapes. This was the city he had seen so often in his sleep. He theorised publicly about the possible meaning of this. Had Prague been his home in a previous existence? Had he repeatedly foreglimpsed his future visit, while asleep? Had he tapped in to someone else’s memory of the city? Whatever the explanation, he did not dream of Prague again.
Death on a Submarine
Hypnotherapists, who regress patients to find the cause of traumas, sometimes stumble on data they didn’t expect to find. One such case is described in the American Journal of Regression Therapy (Vol. V, No. 1, 1991).
L, a patient born in 1953, was referred to therapist Rick Brown for treatment of claustrophobia and fear of water. During hypnotic regression L identified himself as ‘James’, a seaman aboard the submarine USS Shark, which had been stationed in Manila Bay in the early stages of the war with Japan. He named officers and friends and described the sub’s daily routine.
James revealed that on 11 February 1942 a Japanese destroyer dropped a depth-charge on the submarine, sending her to the bottom of the bay. The hypnotised patient described the nightmare aboard the stricken craft, as water gradually rose, finally drowning him and everyone else aboard. He described how his spirit had left his body. Therapist Brown was able to cure his patient’s symptoms. He then played him tapes of his past-life revelations during the sessions and asked permission to conduct further research.
L, who had had no conscious recollection of a former existence, happily consented.
Brown checked James’s birth and high school records, then confirmed through the navy that he had served and died aboard USS Shark. Next he visited the US Navy’s Historical Center and Operational Archive where he found that James had correctly identified his officers and shipmates and that most of his technical descriptions of the battle were accurate.
Hundreds of similar regressions, followed by factual checks, have been conducted since the 1950s. The results may or may not offer proof of reincarnation. But at the least they suggest that the hypnotherapist has been in touch with a discarnate entity - a mind fully acquainted with the facts of a dead person’s life.
The Dead Girl who ‘Lived Again’
Six-year-old Dinah Graham of Norfolk, Virginia, was, overall, a contented child. But she had the alarming, albeit occasional, habit of running away. In 1968 her worried parents discovered why. She was looking for something.
Just as they were about to ring the police - again - the Grahams received a phone call. It was a Mrs Marne, who lived eight kilometres away. ‘We have your daughter,’ she said. ‘She turned up an hour ago and she won’t leave.’ The woman sounded angry and distressed. Dinah’s parents noted her address and headed out.
When they arrived Mr and Mrs Marne were in tears. It was because Dinah was saying terrible things. She kept telling them she was Anne. Couldn’t they see? And she’d been trying to find her house, this house, for a long time. And she wasn’t going away - they couldn’t send her away - because this was where she lived.
Understandably the Marnes believed they were the victims of a sadistic joke. Their 13-year-old daughter Anne had drowned several years earlier. Who was this child who seemed to know so much? Had her parents told her about Anne’s death? But the Grahams were as bewildered as their hosts - and patently innocent. All four people realised they had something - although they had no idea what - to discuss.
The strange saga of Dinah Graham would continue through her childhood and teenage years. In subsequent meetings the Marnes discovered that she knew so much about their daughter Anne - her favourite toys, her schoolfriends, her teachers - that there was no possibility of trickery. There was, they realised, some inexplicable connection between the two girls. They came to believe, in common with Dinah’s parents, that the link was reincarnation. Seven years after Anne had drowned, her spirit had somehow been reborn with Dinah. They were sure of that - and glad of it. The two sets of parents reached a friendly, and necessary, agreement. Dinah would be allowed to spend every second week with her ‘original family’.
Dr Ian Stevenson described this case as ‘prima facie evidence for reincarnation’.
Puzzle of the Reborn Poet
During the 1920s the elegant volumes of Patience Worth’s poems and novels sold in millions. The books were bought less for their unarguably strong literary value than because of claims they had been written by a dead woman’s spirit.
The Worth drama began when a newspaper, the St Louis Globe-Democrat, began publishing meticulously crafted love sonnets on its book review pages. The poems aroused the interest of Dr Roland Usher, a literary scholar. In a letter t
o editor Caspar Yost - an old schoolfriend - he wrote: ‘Let me congratulate your contributor Patience Worth on her truly dazzling achievements. She contrives to write all of her verses in flawless Elizabethan English. The idiom is perfect.’
Shortly afterward Yost invited Usher to lunch. He revealed that the name Worth was a pseudonym used by Pearl Lenore Curran, wife of John Curran, the State Immigration Commissioner. The editor said, ‘The odd thing is she’ll never accept a cent of payment.’
Usher, now insatiably curious, called on Mrs Curran. He was unprepared for the story she told him. She could not accept money for Patience Worth’s poems, she said, because it did not rightly belong to her. ‘Patience died in 1677,’ she explained. ‘She dictates her poetry to me through a ouija board.’
Usher immediately decided that, although brilliant, Mrs Curran was deluded. She quickly became such a puzzle to him that he expressed his confusion in an article for a literary magazine:
I find it difficult to believe that this surpassingly beautiful body of work is the product of a ouija board. However, I am equally perplexed by the fact that Mrs Curran denies upon her family Bible that she plays any part whatever in the creation of the poems, and even offers in proof the facts that she was a deficient scholar, quitting in her first year of high school and that her verbal and particularly written expression have remained poor to the present day. Only when she has listened to what she calls dictation from beyond does she begin to write like the highest of the angels.
Within a week of the journal’s appearance, publishers were clamouring for the rights to publish Pearl Curran’s ‘verses from the grave’. But she favoured Caspar Yost, the editor who had supported her from the start - and in 1916 a book with a foreword by Yost appeared under the imprint of a Missouri firm. At a time when the cruel megadeaths of World War I had sparked new interest in spiritualism, this first volume made Pearl Curran internationally famous.
One journalist wrote:
When Mrs Curran transcribes these mysterious verses she works in broad daylight, and is completely conscious, with none of the malarkey of the séance table. It is suggested by those who give credit to such beliefs that Pearl Curran is Patience Worth herself, repersonified, and that the ouija is but a prop.
The world quickly came to know ‘Patience’ well. According to Mrs Curran she was born in Dorset in 1641, immigrated to Massachusetts and was killed by an Indian war party in 1677. Her poetry and prose were infused with elegiac memories of England: long foam-washed cliffs, a lichen-covered monastery in late-afternoon sunlight, a village whose only street was a thoroughfare for goats and hens. She wrote of customs so long abandoned that scholars took months to verify their existence.
Patience Worth’s longest work was Telka, an 80,000-word paean to old English peasant life. Of this poetic novel Professor Franklin Price of Boston wrote, ‘I saw it apparently dictated over a period of 35 hours, mingled with chatter, meals and sleep. I was left in no doubt that these glorious lines were composed in some other place.’ Dissected by academic linguists, Telka was judged to be a perfect representation of 17th century English grammar and vocabulary, composed in less than two days. The limitedly educated Mrs Curran calmly insisted that she had never studied the English of the era - and everyone found that easy to believe.
Pearl Curran would accept no payment for her verses - claiming she merely took dictation from an earlier poet, long-dead.
Pearl Curran was an enigma to all who met her. Journalists to whom she granted rare interviews were bemused by the fact that there were no books in her house (other than Patience Worth volumes presented by the publisher). Pearl matter-of-factly admitted that neither she nor her husband derived any pleasure from reading. Even more surprising, in a wealth-obsessed century, was her lack of interest in money. As many commentators pointed out, her royalties could have made her a millionairess - but she decreed, in all contracts, that every cent of her income must be paid to charity. She insisted, moreover, that her publishers write and pay these philanthropic cheques themselves - explaining that, because of her relationship with Patience, the proceeds of the ouija texts must not so much as pass through her hands.
If the Patience Worth volumes were an industry, so were the learned tomes and magazine articles that attempted to discredit them. But Pearl Curran was never troubled by attempts to paint her as a fraud. ‘Patience talks to me,’ she said. ‘And I write it all down. There’s no more to it than that.’
And she was always happy for scholars to watch her languidly at work - an openness that led, in 1922, to the embarrassing revelation that Pearl and her ghost-writer had quarrelled. From 1677 AD (or whenever else she might be quartered) Patience Worth had begun to make sarcastic comments about her host’s low intelligence. Pearl, as was her custom, obediently wrote everything down. Analysts who later dissected the diatribe received the impression that Patience had only belatedly realised that her obedient note-taker possessed a lesser literary mind than her own.
The ouija board sessions continued, but formerly enthusiastic critics were disappointed with the results. By 1925 Patience Worth, the 248-year-old bestselling author, was out of print and largely forgotten.
* * *
Jewels from Jupiter
Forest Search for a Space
Treasure
* * *
While surveying the trackless maze of Oregon’s back country, geologist Dr John Evans made a startling discovery. Protruding from the forested flank of a rugged mountain was a massive meteorite which, he estimated, must weigh at least 10,400 kilograms. The space-rock was richly studded with translucent crystals of a kind Dr Evans had not seen before. Curious, he chipped off an almond-sized sample and bagged it alongside his soil scoops and fossils. Then he walked away, completely unaware that he had stumbled upon the find of the century: a rare gem-studded megalith, which unborn scientists would identify, from his notes, as originating from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. The commercial value of this ‘mountain of jewels’ was incalculable - but Dr Evans failed even to map its precise location. His oversight would lead to countless treasure searches over the following one and a half centuries…
IN 1851 THE US DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR engaged John Evans, in company with other geologists and engineers, to seek a prospective railroad route through the Washington and Oregon territories. Evans sorely needed the money and performed his duties conscientiously. But he never concealed from his colleagues that he was profoundly bored by steam engines and the rails they clattered along.
What excited Evans about these remote landscapes was the knowledge that he would find fresh scientific material: fossils unknown and unclassified; unique soils; reputation-making rocks.
On the latter front he was more successful than he had dared to dream. On a side-trip through the deep Siskiyou National Forest he happened upon a mountain that commanded views of the ocean and Oregon coast. And it was here he found his treasure - although he did not recognise it as such. Jutting from the mountain’s western face was the edge of what he calculated to be an immense meteorite. As he scraped earth away he became increasingly intrigued by the thousands of glass-like fragments embedded in the rock surface: tiny yellow-green ornaments that flashed blindingly in the late afternoon sunlight. He chipped off a tiny fragment of the many-splendoured rock and consigned it to a sample bag.
Dr John Evans was unaware that he had discovered a vast treasure: a cargo of riches borne millions of miles through the cold deeps of space before it crashed onto our planet, in primal forest, long ago.
* * *
Life in mid-19th century America could be haphazard and slow: adjectives that might equally be applied to the Boston chemist Dr Charles Jackson. Having received his colleague Evans’s samples in late 1851, Jackson took eight years to get around to processing them.
But when at last he opened the bag and saw what was inside he sprang into action. After conducting an analysis which merely confirmed what he had known already, he wrote to Evans to say
his sample was from a rare pallasite meteorite, made up of translucent crystals of olivine (gemstones suspended in an iron-nickel matrix). Pallasite is so rare that it is found in only one per cent of meteorites that have landed on earth. At that time, the largest pallasite meteorite held in a museum was a modest 680 kilograms. Jackson told Evans that his discovery was immensely important to science - and hinted that it could, into the bargain, make him one of America’s wealthiest men.
The two men arranged to meet. Evans embarrassedly admitted that he hadn’t made a map. However, he had a clear memory of where the meteorite lay: on the western face of a mountain visible from the coast, about 65 kilometres from Port Orford. Could he lead a search party to the spot? Indeed yes, Evans replied - and in the meantime he would look at his journal of the trek, in which he might have entered further clues eight years before.
A month later, in April 1861, the Boston Society of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institute stood ready to mount an expedition. All they needed was a formal vote from Congress to fund the enterprise.
But then, within days of each other, three events occurred. Shooting broke out at Fort Sumter. The Civil War began. And Dr John Evans died of pneumonia.
Jupiter: alleged source of a vast meteor-treasure borne millions of miles through space.
With a long, expensive conflict stretching ahead, the government decided not to waste money seeking a big stone in a forest. Many prospectors tried their luck in the years ahead - but with the lack of a map, and the sketchiness of Evans’s recollections (quoted at secondhand in newspapers) no aspirant seriously expected to strike jewels.
