The woman who is creating the biggest stir in the U.S. this week is an attractive, 33-year-old Pueblo, Colo, housewife named Virginia Tighe. Millions of Americans know her in another personality as Bridey Murphy, the necromantic heroine of The Search for Bridey Murphy who has made reincarnation a fad more entrancing than canasta or flying saucers.
Bridey Murphy—born A.D. 1798, died 1864—first appeared in print in the fall °f J954, soon after a chance remark by Robert Cast, an attorney of Pueblo (pop. 80,800). Said Cast to his brother-in-law, William J. ("Bark") Barker of the Denver Post's Sunday supplement Empire: "Do you think there might be a story in a guy who has discovered that a woman in Pueblo lived an earlier life in Ireland in the 1800s?" Replied Newsman Barker: "Hell, yes." He wrote the story. Empire ran it in three installments as "The Strange Search for Bridey Murphy," and letters from 10,000 readers gave a glimpse of the national furor to come.
Last January, with some manuscript advice from Newsman Barker, Morey Bernstein, 36, a Pueblo businessman who sells farm and mining equipment, told the story again in his book (TIME, Feb. 20). Bernstein, an amateur hypnotist, had put Housewife Tighe, who uses the name Ruth Simmons to avoid publicity, into a trance in which she conjured up an earlier incarnation as Bridey, a redheaded lass born in Cork. What made the story chillingly persuasive was the mass of circumstantial detail about people, places and customs that Mrs. Tighe recounted in a brogue and in words that seemed utterly foreign to her. $25 an Existence. In two months Bernstein's book shot through eight printings and 170,500 copies into No. 1 spot on U.S. nonfiction bestseller lists overlapping Anne Lindbergh's Gift From the Sea. It has also sold some 30,000 longplaying records ($5.95 each) enabling purchasers to hear Bridey herself as Bernstein recorded her on tape in the first of his six sessions with Housewife Tighe. The book has been bought by the movies (for a reported $50,000), syndicated in 42 U.S. newspapers, and echoed in popular songs (The Love of Bridey Murphy).
More than that, it has created a boom in the occult. A West Coast hypnotist advertised an offer to "establish the prior existence" of all comers (at $25 an existence). Around the country, while hostesses gave "come as you were" parties and restaurants offered "reincarnation cocktails," ordinary Americans began turning up (often on TV screens) in earlier lifetimes as German leather merchants, French peasants, English princesses, and; in one case, a horse. In Shawnee, Okla., Bridey intrigued a 19-year-old newsboy so mightily that he killed himself after leaving a note that he was going to "investigate the theory in person."