I remember Bridey Murphy well! When I was a kid, my best friend and I were fascinated by the paranormal, reincarnation, monster movies, anything and everything in short that was weird or fantastic.
The Book, "Searching for Bridey Murphy" was in our neighborhood library and we both devoured it.
Unfortunately, much later it was discovered that as a small child VIrginia Tighe lived across the street from an Irish immigrant woman named Bridey Murphy Corkell who used to tell her stories about her childhood and about Ireland.
Today, most psychologists are satisfied that Virginia was recovering memories from her early childhood, not from a past life. This in itself is interesting, since in other contexts some psychologists claim recovered childhood memories are false. So which is it, you know?
I think that hypnosis CAN recover memories but they can be imprecise and sometimes punctuated by fantasies or fears. I always thought Budd Hopkins pretty much contaminated all his data from the gitgo by making sure all his subjects understood what he expected to hear. But that doesn't mean other hypnotists don't discover credible facts. They just have to be checked.
However, what IS really fascinating is that researchers have also found that people who undergo past live regression in order to address a present day phobia or problem often recover whether or not the past life memory can be proven to be true. I find that absolutely amazing.
My son, who is the youngest in our family (and who is now an adult) used to 'remember' another life when he was very small. When he was an adolescent he twice fell into what looked like a trance and started speaking a foreign language in front of his friends.
Both times he had no recollection of doing this and his friends did not recognize the language, so I guess he could have been 1) speaking nonsense syllables, or 2) making this up, or 3) his friends were pulling his leg. I tend to believe it happened though, gauging from the rest of his childhood. Today he's a totally normal 25 year old. He cooks for a living in a popular local restaurant.
I think it's all really interesting. I have no idea what happens after we die, but I find it hard to believe that we just end, period. It surprises me when people act as though they know for certain that death is just the end, period, when really none of us knows. I suppose it's because so many other people obnoxiously act like they know every detail about what happens, so these two groups react to each other. As for me, I'm thinking death is just the beginning of something else.
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