Virginia Tighe told the truth as far as she knew it, but it really wasn’t far enough.

The Colorado housewife caused a sensation in the U.S. in 1950s when, under hypnosis, she described with a perfect brogue the details of her earlier life as “Bridey Murphy,” a 19th-century Irish woman. Tighe (who was only identified by the pseudonym “Ruth Simmons” at the time) had never visited Ireland and seemingly had no way to know the quotidian detail of life in Cork and Belfast in the previous century.

When her hypnotist Morey Bernstein subsequently released a book about her story, The Search for Bridey Murphy, it quickly became a bestseller and a reincarnation craze swept the nation. Pretty soon the name “Bridey Murphy” was as famous as Dwight Eisenhower or Mickey Mantle, even if she never existed, at least not as Tighe’s earlier self.

Official records were later checked and the story began to fall apart. It eventually came to light that when Tighe was a small girl, a neighbor lady named Bridey Murphy Corkell had told her stories about her childhood in Ireland. Over the years, these tales of another land had become repressed memories for Tighe. So she was relaying the past alright, just not her own. But for a while, it was mania.

In the March 19, 1956 issue, Life offered its take with “Bridey Murphy Puts the Nation in a Hypnotizzy.” An excerpt:

Last week a considerable part of the U.S. lay under an Irish spell and the spell was becoming deeper and wilder as fast as the written word, awed gossip and the televised image could spread it. The genie responsible was a red-haired Irishwoman named Bridey (short for Bridget) Murphy, who may or may not have lived in early 19th-century Belfast and Cork, and who made her presence known, in eerily factual detail, during a series of hypnotic sessions held some time ago in Pueblo, Colorado. Bridey spoke through the hypnotized person of an attractive young Pueblo matron whose pseudonym is “Ruth Simmons.” While deep in a trance she told how she had grown up in early 19th-century Ireland, married, died and then even watched her own funeral.

The hypnotist was Morey Bernstein, a 36-year-old Pueblo businessman of impeccable reputation and honesty, who had taken up hypnotism as a hobby. He summoned up Bridey by a familiar technique known as hypnotic regression, whereby the hypnotist leads his subject back to adolescence or early childhood. Going one step further, Bernstein attempted to take his subject back before birth, and the next thing he knew he was listening to Bridey Murphy’s rambling discourse.•