Virginia Morrow; Was ‘Bridey Murphy’

Virginia Tighe Morrow, whose revelation under hypnosis of a purported past life as a 19th-Century Irishwoman sparked a 1950s debate over reincarnation and served as the basis for the best-selling book and subsequent movie titled “The Search for Bridey Murphy,” has died. She was 72.

Mrs. Morrow, who was identified as Ruth Simmons in the book and in the movie role played by Teresa Wright, died July 12 in her suburban Denver home, family members said Thursday.

She was a Pueblo, Colo., homemaker married to automobile dealer Hugh Tighe when she met the book’s author, Morey Bernstein, at a party. Bernstein, a local businessman interested in hypnosis and reincarnation, offered to hypnotize her as a means of relieving her allergies, particularly incessant sneezing.

In half a dozen hypnosis sessions from Nov. 29, 1952, to Aug. 29, 1953, she related a detailed story to Bernstein of her birth in Cork and death in Belfast as Bridey Murphy. She told the story of a previous life in a thick Irish brogue completely unlike her normal speech.

She said she was the daughter of Duncan and Kathleen Murphy, that she was born in 1798, married Sean Brian MacCarthy in 1818 and died in 1864 and watched her own burial.

A national controversy over reincarnation arose after Bernstein revealed her story, especially after he decided in 1954 to spell it all out in a book.

Born Virginia Burns in Madison, Wis., on April 27, 1923, Mrs. Morrow grew up with relatives in Chicago and denied naysayers’ claims that she had been inculcated with Irish lore, speech, and names and dates by her family. For many years she refused all interviews, and she declined to participate in the making of the 1956 movie and later said she did not like the film.

She once estimated that her 5% of royalties on the book, which she said was unplanned at the time of the hypnosis sessions, amounted to only $11,000.

Mrs. Morrow never again submitted to hypnosis by those who were seeking to test her story.

After 20 years of reflection, Mrs. Morrow told The Times in 1976 she remembered nothing of what she said of Bridey Murphy under hypnosis but considered the recollections valid. She expressed personal ambivalence about reincarnation.

“I have been conditioned all my life not to believe in reincarnation,” she said during a visit to Los Angeles then, “but the weight of evidence seems to be going toward that belief.”

Divorced from Tighe in 1968 and married to Denver steel company executive Richard Morrow in 1971, Mrs. Morrow is survived by her husband, three daughters, a stepdaughter and a stepson, and 10 grandchildren.