Bridey Murphy and the Popular Past-Life Regression Boom

Hypnotic age regression, guiding a hypnotised subject to recall earlier periods of ordinary childhood, was an established clinical technique by the early twentieth century, used by some therapists on the theory that forgotten early memories could be retrieved this way to treat present-day psychological difficulty. The specifically past-life variant became a public sensation through the case of Virginia Tighe, a Colorado housewife hypnotised across several sessions beginning in 1952 by amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein, during which she spoke in an apparent Irish accent as "Bridey Murphy," a nineteenth-century Irishwoman, describing period details of her supposed former life.

Bernstein's 1956 book The Search for Bridey Murphy became a bestseller and briefly made past-life regression a mainstream American curiosity, complete with Bridey Murphy-themed parties and merchandise, before journalists tracing Tighe's biography found she had grown up near an Irish-born woman, Bridie Murphy Corkell, who plausibly supplied the names, accent, and background details Tighe later produced under hypnosis without consciously remembering their real source, a discovery that deflated the sensation almost as quickly as it had arisen.