Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

Literally, upon occasion: EVP literature holds that Jürgenson has had cameos on the tape recordings of an Italian EVP enthusiast, while Konstantin Raudive has made repeated appearances in the static on the TV screen of a couple in Luxembourg.

A note about spirit guides. You will occasionally read piffle about differences between the EEG of a medium and that of her guide, or control, and how this proves the guide’s existence as a separate entity. In 1981, Gary Heseltine, now an epidemiologist with the Texas Department of Public Health, experimented with the EEGs of two unnamed mediums and their spirit guides Shaolin and Monsanto (the “Comanche chief,” not the fertilizer concern). Heseltine writes that since sensory and metabolic input affect EEGs, you would have to go to the extreme of “paralyzing and maintaining the medium on life support” to control these factors. Even then, he doubted you’d have proof. “Short of a high brain stem transection,” Heseltine concluded, “it is difficult to conclude that differences in the EEG cannot be a consequence of differing sensory inputs.”

Oh, for the days when a nation’s highest-paid recording star could be a beefy six-foot-two oysterman’s daughter named Clara Butt. So remarkable was her voice that Madame Butt, as she was known early on, was recruited at a tender age to sing private concerts for Queen Victoria. Her lauded career in opera paved the way for what must have been a much-welcomed shift in titularity to Dame Clara.

The Ometer decline has continued, largely at the hands of the textile industry, who have given us the FadeOmeter, the Crackometer, and the Launder-Ometer (not to mention the Atlas Perspiration Tester, the Shirley Stiffness Tester, and the Evenness Tester 3 With Hairiness Module). Further Ometer abuse comes from the Centers for Disease Control (the Flu-O-Meter), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds—their Splatometer tracks the abundance of flying insects, whose decline spells trouble for birds—and Gary Ometer, former Director of Debt Management for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. I was hesitant to phone Gary, for his title led me to expect a man of, shall we say, high scores on the Shirley Stiffness Tester, but he was a good sport about it. Gary blames shabby Ellis Island bookkeeping for his family’s contribution to the Ometer situation.

The publicity stunt is one of the lesser-known Edison inventions. In 1903, as part of a scheme to discredit the alternating current system (Edison was a DC man), he got involved in the Topsy-the-elephant situation. The Coney Island pachyderm had been sentenced to die for having killed three of her handlers. (One fed her a lit cigarette, so in my mind the jury’s still out.) The swift and humane execution of an elephant was proving troublesome. Cyanide had failed, and hanging promised all manner of logistical turmoil. Edison called the ASPCA and suggested electrocution. He filmed the highly effective dispatch, and used it as proof of the dangers of AC.

Until he figured out that his “halo” was a reflection of sunlight at a certain angle, Watson believed himself to have been singled out for some great purpose. “I told my mother about my halo,” he writes. While Mrs. Watson did not come right out and say she could see it, she did the motherly thing and said it “didn’t seem at all strange to her that her son was thus distinguished.” Emboldened, Watson confided in Alexander Graham Bell. Bell told him to get his eyes examined.

I can easily relate to the feeling that one’s spell-checker is possessed. Mine recently informed me that “fucking” is not a word, but that “cucking,” “rucking,” and “funking” were all good words that I might like to substitute.

When I got home, I wrote to the Dairy Cattle Complex researcher, Javier Burchard, and asked him if the cows ever behaved as though there were an invisible presence in the chamber. He replied that he’d never seen any behavior that was so abnormal as to cause him “to pursue research in that direction.” This suggested to me that he had in fact seen cows behaving in a mildly abnormal manner, so I wrote back again and encouraged him to pass along any anecdotes. I clearly sounded like I had a dairy cattle complex of my own. “I’m sorry,” came the exasperated reply. “But I cannot give you any cow story.”

A gripping moment that capped an otherwise drab existence. A proponent of what Encyclopædia Britannica calls “a plain style of writing,” Greville failed to publish much of anything while alive. Well-born but repeatedly passed over for appointments, he was eventually dubbed Knight of the Bath. (The Knights of the Bath are an official Order of Her Majesty the Queen, who does not take enjoyment from Monty Python–style send-ups thereof. Or possibly she does: John Cleese was offered—and declined—an Order of the British Empire.)

Tandy is speaking metaphorically. Humans don’t have erectile hair or feathers on the backs of their necks. Looking into this, I learned that hackle feathers are popular for fly-tying. It took a while to figure this out, because the Google entries would say things like, “This is a Metz Grizzly Hen Neck hackle. It could be used for a Matuka-style streamer wing, however, and it’s a top choice for streamer collars, as it’s soft and pulses when the barbules are ‘unzipped.’”

The principle known as Occam’s razor was not, curiously enough, William of Occam’s idea. Occam simply used it—frequently and “sharply,” to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry—so much so that it became known as his razor. The entry goes on to say that “he used it to dispense with relations, which he held to be nothing distinct from their foundation in things; with efficient causality, which he tended to view merely as regular succession,” a sentence that cries out for Occam’s editing pencil.

SPR cofounder Frederick Myers muses at some length upon “the question of the clothes of ghosts—or the ghosts of clothes…. If A’s phantom wears a black coat, is that because A wore a black coat, or because B [the person who sees A’s ghost] was accustomed to see him in one? If A had taken to wearing a brown coat since B saw him in the flesh, would A’s phantom wear to B’s eyes a black coat or a brown? Or would the dress which A wore at the moment of death dominate, as it were, and supplant phantasmally the costumes of his ordinary days?” Myers’s guess is that A triggers a remembered image of himself in B’s mind, and that therefore A’s ghost would be clad in black, and not the brown coat he wore when B wasn’t around, or his funeral suit, or the field hockey kilt C liked him to put on when he’d had one too many glasses of port.

This comes as no surprise to yours truly, who has twice, on separate continents, carried out an experiment designed to prove the considerable curiosity of cows. This is an experiment I urge you to repeat, simply for the giddy thrill of it. Go into a pasture where cows are grazing in the distance. Shout to get their attention, and then suddenly lie down. The moment you do, they will hurry over to investigate, encircling you and staring down at you with unmitigated bovine fascination.

Or occasionally, ex-husbands. A celebrity website reports that Elizabeth Taylor saw Mike Todd during her near-death experience. “He pushed me back to my life,” she is quoted saying. Whether this was done for her benefit or his was not clear.