Past-life regression entered American popular culture through a single well-documented case that also supplied its most durable scientific counterargument. In 1952, Colorado hypnotist Morey Bernstein regressed a Pueblo, Colorado housewife named Virginia Tighe across six sessions, during which she spoke in an Irish-accented voice as Bridey Murphy, a nineteenth-century Irish woman, supplying names, places and period details that Bernstein's 1956 book The Search for Bridey Murphy presented as evidence of survived memory from an actual past life, and the book became a bestseller that made past-life regression a household phrase almost overnight.
Newspaper investigation that followed the book's success traced a much more mundane source: Tighe had grown up in Chicago partly in the household of an Irish immigrant neighbour named Bridie Murphy Corkell, and researchers argued the regression had surfaced ordinary childhood memory, dramatised and elaborated under hypnosis, rather than any prior existence, a phenomenon psychologists later named cryptomnesia, the resurfacing of forgotten ordinary memory experienced by the person as new or externally sourced information. The case established the pattern nearly every subsequent regression case has followed: a session under hypnosis produces vivid, internally consistent and often historically detailed material, and subsequent research turns up an available, unremarkable source, a book once read, a film once seen, a person once known, that plausibly accounts for the content without requiring an actual past life, a pattern regression practitioners generally do not dispute has occurred in specific documented cases while maintaining that it does not account for every session they conduct.