Read Online The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein - Free Book Online

one that predicted events which as yet had no existence. In this case the dream concerned a letter—one which had not even then been written. But these isolated cases by themselves would never have led me to a personal investigation. The incidents, however, kept right on piling up.
    Next in the plot came Hazel’s mother, Mrs. Higgins. She stopped at our house one Sunday morning just long enough to ask Hazel to join her. She was on her way to the ranch, she explained, to get a calf which had been missing for almost a week. “While I was working in the garden this morning,” she went on, “your grandfather suddenly appeared to me in a sort of dream, even though I was wide awake. He told me that the calf would be found in a hole that had been washed out by floods at the edge of the big arroyo running through the ranch.” Hazel’s grandfather had been dead for more than two years.
    Mrs. Higgins announced all of this in a matter-of-fact way, as though she actually expected to find the calf as the result of this incident. Hazel put on her jacket and left with her mother, but not before I scoffed at their willingness to waste their time.
    When they returned within a few hours, the calf had been found in the exact spot that had been indicated. It had apparently been dead for several days. I muttered something to Hazel about her mother’s probable use of deduction to decide where the animal was likely to be—and then attributing it to a “vision.” Hazel didn’t bother to answer.
    Then even Hazel’s cat got into the act. It’s a Siamese cat named Tai. Somewhere along the line the cat had a litter of kittens; and through an indiscretion on Tai’s part, the kittens were not exactly thoroughbreds. So Hazel’s mother encountered no argument when she asked permission to take the kittens to her ranch about sixteen miles south of Pueblo.
    The second day after Mrs. Higgins had left with the kittens, Hazel told me that Tai was missing; we couldn’t find her anywhere. But the next afternoon the mystery was solved. Mrs. Higgins came to the house and told us that when she had gone out that morning to give the kittens their milk, who should be there on the doorstep, also awaiting breakfast, but the old gal, Tai herself.
    Now Tai had never at any time been to the ranch. And if it makes any difference, she had never been in Mrs. Higgins’ car, nor had she possibly been able to see even the direction in which Mrs. Higgins drove off that day with the kittens; Tai had been locked in the basement. Nevertheless, she had promptly found the way to her kittens, sixteen miles distant. No dope, this cat!
    I learned never to relate these incidents to others, because they would inevitably respond with episodes which made my own look pretty slim. Very few people have had any experience with hypnotism, but it seems that almost everyone has encountered some form of extrasensory perception, whether it concerned animal stories or the death of a relative, which cannot be explained by ordinary principles. The complacent manner in which others accepted these things never failed to amaze me—it still does to this very day.
    Meanwhile odd phenomena began to enjoy a current boom in newspapers, magazines, and books.
Readers Digest
, for instance, printed an article entitled “Tales of the Supernatural,” and later followed it up with “The Man Who Dreamed the Winners.”Newspapers were telling the story of Lady, the Wonder Horse, an old mare who was demonstrating telepathic ability, finding missing people, and generally performing in a manner most unusual for both horses and people.
    But the last straw, the final push that started me digging into the problem of extrasensory perception, came about accidentally and as a result of a hypnotic session. With a deep trance subject Bill Moery and I were conducting an experiment in age regression. When we were almost through, but before the subject had been awakened, I unconsciously toyed with a book on the