The main story, the one dramatized by the poster artist, told how Mrs. James A. Haskins of 82 Oak Street, Middleboro, Massachusetts, [1] had “apparently died during a recent attack of pleuro-pneumonia.” It was alleged that “For twenty-three minutes her heart ceased beating, no breath could be detected, and she made no sign of life when her eyes were closed by the nurse.” (Obviously at best this was only apparent; otherwise she would have suffered irreversible brain damage.)

The twenty-three-year-old Mrs. Haskins did relate a moving account, dictating it after her recovery. She stated she had suffered a fever of 104.5, had a fitful pulse, and experienced shortness of breath, whereupon she declared, “Mother, I’m going to die.” Soon she obtained relief: “I felt as if I had been lifted from my bed and was floating up and away on light fleecy clouds. At the same time I heard the nurse say: ‘Well, she’s gone.'” She felt the nurse close her eyes and heard her mother sobbing.

“Then,” Mrs. Haskins said, “my little dead baby, Doris, came to me. I held out my arms to her and held her close to my breast. Oh, I was so happy. Baby and I were together again. That was all I thought of or cared for.” Little Doris, her first of three children, had died when eight months old, a few years earlier. Now, Mrs. Haskins noted, “she looked happy and healthy,” although “she wore the short skirts and white stockings and shoes that she was buried in.”

She added: “Her coming back to me was not a shock. It seemed perfectly natural that she should come in that way. So I gathered her up in my arms and together we floated away in perfect happiness.” In time though, Mrs. Haskins felt herself gasping for breath, the pain of her illness returned, and she was caught up in her own mother’s arms. “Returning to life was the hard part,” she insisted. “Dying was peace and happiness.”

Mrs. Haskins’s encounter has much in common with today’s typical Near-Death Experience (NDE)-a term coined by physician Raymond Moody in the 1970s to describe the mystical experiences of some who return from death’s door. Although each individual’s experience is unique, Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience (Guiley 1991, 399) states:

In an NDE people generally experience one or more of the following phenomena in this sequence: a sense of being dead, or an out-of-body-experience in which they feel themselves floating above their bodies, looking down; cessation of pain and a feeling of bliss or peacefulness; traveling down a dark tunnel toward a light at the end; meeting nonphysical beings who glow, many of whom are dead friends and relatives; coming in contact with a guide or Supreme Being who takes them on a life review, during which their entire lives are put into perspective without rendering any negative judgments about past acts; and finally, a reluctant return to life.

This sequence generally describes Mrs. Haskins’s reported experience, except for a few elements. She did not mention the dark tunnel but did refer to the “brightness.” There was no life review by a guide or deity, but, perhaps significantly, Mrs. Haskins described herself as “not very religious,” adding, “I am not a spiritualist, either, and had never before seen the apparition of my dead baby, though I have thought and dreamed of her often.” Spiritualism, the supposed communication with the dead, was still a popular belief in 1906. (Interestingly, a one-paragraph account of the incident in the May 18, 1906 weekly, Middleboro Gazette referred to Mrs. Haskins’s experience as an example of “suspended animation,” and made no mention of the encounter with her deceased infant daughter.)

Viewed scientifically, the out-of-body experiences are actually hallucinations that can occur under anesthesia when one is nowhere near death, as well as when one is falling asleep, or even just relaxing or meditating, or that can be experienced in migraine and epilepsy. The tunnel-travel experience is again an hallucination, one attributed to the particular structure of the visual cortex, the visual-information-processing portion of the brain (Blackmore 1991), or to pupil widening due to oxygen deprivation (Woerlee 2004). And the life review results from the dying oxygen-starved brain stimulating cells in the temporal lobe and thus arousing memories.

It is not surprising that people’s longings for a dead loved one should be manifested in dreamlike imagery. During more than three decades of investigating the paranormal, I have encountered many such claims of direct contact with the dead, typically reported through dreams, waking dreams (hallucinations which occur in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep), apparitions (which tend to be perceived during daydreams or other altered states of consciousness), and deathbed visions (which are similar to NDEs). Having one of these experiences is probably physiological; the content of the experience is probably psychological and cultural (Nickell 2002).

Yet the NDE has aspects, says Blackmore, “that are ineffable-they cannot be put into words.” The experience can seem so real, so powerful in its import, that even thought it is “an essentially physiological event,” she says, it can profoundly change the lives of those to whom it happens.

Of the other three cases related in “Came Back from the Dead,” only one follows the essential NDE pattern. A Richard Howland of Brooklyn was on his deathbed when he apparently died and his sorrowful wife, Mollie, sent for the undertaker. When he arrived they found Howland sitting upright and calling, “Where’s Mollie?” He told how he had died, his body grew cold, and he felt his spirit transported into strange surroundings; at the end of the road he traveled down was “a great and glorious white light.” Then “some invisible intelligence” spoke, assuring him of “eternal happiness,” and concluding “You may return.” Howland found himself again in his body and spent many hours talking with his wife until “his spirit passed away finally.”

The next case involved a man named Edward McElroon of Yonkers who had suffered a skull fracture and underwent surgery. During the operation his heart stopped beating and he could not be revived. His body was taken to the morgue but was later seen to exhibit “a slight tremor of the chest muscles,” whereupon doctors were recalled and they resuscitated him. After two days he recovered consciousness, but the narrative ends without mentioning any NDE.

The fourth and final case is suspect in the extreme. One Henry Hutchinson of Croydon, England, supposedly gave a first-person account of dying and his spirit being lifted up “in a vortex of light.” He heard the physician pronounce him dead, was dressed on the following day for his funeral and “for three days I was exposed upon a bier” to friends and family. The undertakers roughly forced him into a too-narrow coffin, one placing his knee in Hutchinson’s chest to accomplish it. The lid was nailed shut, and Hutchinson recalled hearing a sermon preached over his grave before he heard the sod striking the coffin. He lay buried alive “for many hours,” when he became aware of his coffin being exhumed and was then transported a great distance.

“Soon after,” he said, “I heard the sound of many voices; hands touched me, and as it happened that some one raised the lid of my eyes"-so that, he says-"I saw myself in the amphitheater of a dissecting room in the midst of a great body of students!” Fortunately, he continues, they first decided to “galvanize” him, and the electrical jolt was applied: “At the second discharge every one of my nerves trembled like the strings of a harp, and my body rose to a sitting posture, with stiff muscles, open and staring eyes. They extended me again; the professor approached and made a light cut through the ligaments of my breast. At this moment an enormous change took place in my whole body, I succeeded in crying out; the bonds of death were separated, and I returned to life.” Believe it or not!

Hutchinson’s narrative reads like fiction. It is unlikely that an unembalmed body would be left unburied for four days, or that, if it was, the fact that it showed no obvious signs of decomposition would have failed to provoke astonishment. If he had family and friends, why could not a coffin have been found to fit him? The undertaker’s-knee-in-the-chest detail seems particularly literary. Then there are the fortuitous elements of grave robbers digging him up, someone raising one of his eyelids (enabling him to glimpse his presence in a medical amphitheater), and the application-such as was done to Frankenstein’s monster-of a reanimating electrical current.

As these stories demonstrate, examples of people recovering from “death"-sometimes with near-death experiences to relate-extend back a century; indeed they are probably as old as humankind.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to three libraries for their crucial assistance: The Boston Public Library; the Center for Inquiry Libraries (Tim Binga, Director); and the Middleboro, Massachusetts Public Library (Betty Brown, Reference Librarian). I also thank colleagues Tim Binga and Andrew Skolnick for helpful discussions and Betty Brown for her generous assistance in researching the Haskinses and Dr. Hodgson.

Note

1. The Resident and Business Directory of Middleboro, Mass., for the Years 1906-1907 lists not “James” but John A. Haskins at 82 Oak Street; he was a shoemaker. Mrs. Haskins’s doctor, mentioned in the article (with an erroneous middle initial, “H”), was also listed in this city directory; he was Thomas S. Hodgson, a physician, at 47 South Main Street.

References

• Blackmore, Susan. 1991. Near-death experiences: in or out of the body? Skeptical Inquirer 16:1 (Fall), 34-35.
• Came back from the dead! 1906. Boston American, October 14, 14.
• Nickell, Joe. 2002. Visitations: After-death contacts. Skeptical Briefs 12:3 (September), 7-10.
• Woerlee, G.M. 2004. Darkness, tunnels, and light. Skeptical Inquirer 28:3 (May/June), 28-32.

The content of reversals is nearly always related to the equivalent FS dialogue: RS often gives additional information to accentuate or strengthen the FS speech. RS also tends to reveal an individual’s unspoken thoughts, which may be in total contradiction to their conscious FS. Therefore, RS can be used as an effective tool by psychological counselors, legal professionals, parents, teachers, politicians, etc. to discover unspoken truths. However, many less transparent RS sequences involve metaphors, which require elucidation by RS analysts. According to Oates, very young children begin to produce coherent RS (in the form of reversals of babbling, etc.) well before they produce normal FS in their first language (as early as midway through their first year).

Oates’s organization offers teaching materials, courses, counseling, etc., and its practitioners give advice based on RS-without necessarily having had any other relevant training (phonetics, psychology, etc.). On the other hand, they are involved with Neuro-linguistic Programming-a prominent, recent outgrowth of Korzybski’s General Semantics, which owes only a little to linguistics proper-and with various other, more obviously New Age, ideas. All this is rather alarming! Indeed, we know of several individual cases that are very scary indeed. For instance, we heard from a man in the U.S., who reported that after attending an RS course, his wife analyzed their infant daughter’s “speech” and decided that the child was saying (backwards) that her father had sexually molested her. The mother reported her husband to the relevant child-protection agency, and when that failed, she sought custody of the child and tried to have him banned from having any access to her.

If RS really existed, the consequences for our view of human linguistic and mental activity would (as Oates himself says) be very major. However, Jane Curtain and I examined Oates’s claims and found that they were implausible and not supported by the empirical evidence. There are major methodological and theoretical problems. Notably, Oates makes a misbegotten attempt to distinguish between “genuine” RS and phonetic coincidence, the accidental occurrence of very short sequences which are (almost) the same in FS and RS (i.e., phonological palindromes, e.g., dad) or where the reversal of the FS sequence yields another equally possible sequence (so that there is a pair of corresponding forms, each of which is (approximately) the reversal of the other (e.g., say/yes). These phenomena (both types) are labeled constants, and Oates does not regard them as genuine RS. It is actually very important for him to exclude such sequences, because his theory implies that different speakers (even with the same accent) may produce different reversals of the very same utterances, depending on their often covert attitudes, etc. This is also very convenient for Oates, in that it reduces the reproducibility of his investigations! Now, Oates is not actually consistent as to which sequences do and do not count as coincidental reversals; but, more importantly, the distinction between “genuine” RS and coincidental reversals is simply incoherent.

There are several other major problems for Oates’s theory, mostly involving his lack of familiarity with linguistics. All of his criteria for identifying “good” reversals run aground on these.

As well as considering the theory of RS on these fronts, Curtain and I replicated (with refinements) Oates’s initial experiment, which he says showed that RS could be readily heard by naïve listeners. Because Oates continually prompts listeners with the RS sequences he says they should hear, we set out to establish how far the sequences can be heard without prompting. We used Oates’s own favorite examples, as they appear on his own tapes. We were able to show not only that unprompted listeners cannot generally hear the RS sequences but also that it is quite possible to induce them to hear any of a range of different sequences in the same reversed material, as long as the sounds and especially the vowels in the successive syllables are similar.

More recently, Oates has tried to rebut our criticisms, but his remarks are incoherent. There are some further tests which could be done, one of which could be decisive: if Oates is right, it should be possible to obtain otherwise unknown, specific information from RS data alone. But we believe that the basic case for RS is so weak that the onus to demonstrate a case lies with its advocates. (We have offered to advise them.)

As reported in the December 2000 Skeptical Briefs, on New Year’s Eve 1999, a Buffalo, New York, television station interviewed a local psychic for her 2000 predictions. Reporter Pete Gallivan, of WGRZ Channel 2, interviewed Buffalo psychic Lady Marlene on her psychic predictions for the coming year.

She had five major predictions, quoted below. As she read off her list, New-Agey music resembling plaintive whale calls played in the background.

1. “More spirituality: More children and adults attending these local churches. More positive and in keeping higher power [sic] to get through trials and tribulations.”

   This prediction is so hard to quantify as to be meaningless; an increase in spirituality from what to what? A simple increase in church attendance-even if verified-would not necessarily reflect an increase in spirituality.

2. “A new Buffalo business: A Filipino company is investing, sponsoring a factory gourmet [sic]-it’s going to be a garment business to help Buffalo.”

   We were unable to find any business, Filipino-owned or otherwise, that fit her prediction.

3. “Sports boom town: Buffalo is going to be the most talked about sports town for football and hockey to baseball and soccer. Championship wins for the Bills and Sabres.”

   Though “sports boom town” is in some ways a subjective term, it’s hard to imagine how 2000 could be seen in a very positive light. Far from championship wins, both major teams (the Buffalo Bills football team and the Buffalo Sabres hockey team) were eliminated at the second-round playoffs.

4. “More alternative medicine: Prescription drugs will soon be almost off the market. Alternative medicine and holistic healing such as herbs and reiki and power of prayer in healing [will replace conventional medicine].”

   Prescription drugs are selling better than ever, and show no indication of being taken off the market. Alternative medicine hasn't advanced much recently, and in fact has taken a beating in recent years, with reports of dangerous interactions and side effects.

5. “Donald Trump’s Buffalo Waterfront casino: Donald Trump will invest in a casino by August called Donald’s Buffalo Waterfront casino.”

   Never happened.

I had a chance to ask Lady Marlene about her failed predictions on October 28, 2004. A local radio morning show had her on as a guest, and I listened as I boiled water for coffee and munched mini-wheats. As callers asked questions about their lives and futures, I dug out the above article and dialed the radio station. I was on hold for 23 minutes, delaying a shave and much-needed bath, but I finally got my chance to speak live and on the air with the psychic. I did something rarely heard on the air: I challenged her.

Benjamin Radford: “A few years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, she made five predictions for Y2K on Channel 2, and every single one of them was wrong. I was wondering if you could explain that.”

Lady Marlene: “Oh, my, was that a bad year for me? I can’t believe that. What were the ones that were wrong? The Superbowl?”

BR: “Well, you claimed that Donald Trump’s Waterfront Casino would open...”

LM: “Well, it didn’t happen because of [Buffalo mayor Anthony] Masiello.”

Rob Lederman (morning show co-host): “There you go, you let him have it!”

BR: “So it’s Masiello’s fault that you were wrong?”

LM: “It’s not Masiello’s fault I was wrong, it’s Masiello that’s holding back our casino.”

BR: “Okay. The other thing, you said that there would be championship wins for the [Buffalo] Bills and the Sabres. . . .”

LM: “Well, in the meantime-First of all, I feel very bad about the Sabres and the Bills [at the time one of the worst records in the NFL], I mean come on, let’s give it to them this year. . . . No one wants to listen, but I’m telling you, [Bills running back] Travis Henry is going to run it all the way like O.J. did many years ago.”

Snortin’ Norton (morning show co-host): “Travis Henry is not playing now, Marlene, just to let you know...” (Henry was out with a foot sprain, and had been replaced, possibly for good.)

LM: “Let me tell you something-he’s not going to be sitting on that bench forever, is he?”

Rob Lederman (cutting in): “Hey Marlene, I’m on your side.”

Chris Klein (morning show co-host): “-And the Sabres won a championship in their division, see?”

LM: “Right, right. People misconstrue what I say . . . I didn’t say that the Bills would make it, but I said they would win the game...”

BR: “Well, you did say the Bills would get a championship. You also said that prescription drugs would be off the market-”

LM (interrupting): “And they are! And they just called Vioxx back. Do you call that a drug? Do you call Prozac, do you call lithium...I don’t care for them and yes we're going holistic and Western medical fields are out and Eastern is in and Dr. Deepak Chopra is the best doctor yet.”

BR: “But prescription drugs aren’t off the market. You can go and get them.”

LM: “Yes they are! Yes. They are going right off and if you look at Vioxx, aren’t they calling them back?”

BR: “Well, right, but drugs have been recalled for decades...”

LM: “Listen to me! If anyone’s on antidepressants and I don’t care because this is a sore subject with me and I had to be on them...”

Rob Lederman (wrapping up): “What do you see in this guy’s future? Obviously this guy is a skeptic...”

LM: “He is a skeptic, but he’s still a nice guy-”

Rob Lederman: “Who says he’s not? But what do you see in his future?

LM: “I can see that he’s too disagreeable and I wouldn’t like his future!”

So there you go. Her prediction about the casino was somehow invalidated because of the mayor’s actions (which she apparently didn’t foresee); she completely avoided the failed 2000 Bills championship by discussing the current lineup and events; and she made the obviously false assertion that prescription drugs are no longer on the market. (She conveniently neglected to mention that while of course a few drugs have been removed because of safety, some alternative and herbal remedies-such as ephedra-have also been removed for the same reason.) I didn’t have time to list the remaining two predictions that Lady Marlene was wrong about, but at least the radio show listeners got to hear a different side of the story. And often that’s all a skeptic can ask for.