Death Ain't Got No Sting

THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY (256 pp.) -- Morey Bernstein -- Doubleday ($3.75).

. . . But that the dread of something

after death, The undisco'ver'd country from whose

bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

A simple Irish lass named Bridey Murphy has now resolved the puzzle that so troubled Hamlet. Bridey died in Belfast in 1864, but in 1952 and '53 she came back from "the undiscover'd country" to tell a well-to-do Colorado businessman and amateur hypnotist named Morey Bernstein what it is like after death.

Of course this was not quite the same Bridey that married the son of a Cork barrister and danced Irish jigs. Thanks to the mystery of reincarnation, she is now Mrs. Ruth Simmons, wife of a Pueblo auto dealer. Stretched out on a couch in a deep trance, with witnesses aplenty and a tape recorder taking it all down, Bridey-Ruth under hypnosis answered a few questions about life beyond the grave:

Q: Was there any such thing as love and hate?

A: No.

Q: Did you ever have any changes in temperature, any hot or cold?

A: No.

Q: Did you ever have any wars?

A: No.

Q: You couldn't smell or touch?

A: You could see. You could hear.

Q: Were there any such things as death, disease or old age in that astral world? No laws, no regulations?

A: No.

Q: You did what you willed to do?

A: Uh-huh.

In The Search for Bridey Murphy, Author Bernstein has nothing new to say about hypnosis or reincarnation. But his amateur zeal, and perhaps the need for something to take the place of the slipping Power of Positive Thinking, has made his sessions with Ruth Simmons one of the fastest-selling books in the U.S. today. Already more than 70,000 copies have been printed, and another 100,000 are coming from the presses. The movies have picked up the book for a rumored $50,000, and 30 newspapers have taken it for serialization. As might have been expected, Bridey is doing best in California.

Although research in Ireland has failed to back up much of Bridey's story, Ruth Simmons is remarkably precise in "reliving" her previous "incarnation," e.g., she calls herself the daughter of a Protestant barrister, tells how she married a Roman Catholic ("Father John had the banns published") and hovered at her own funeral ("I watched them ditch my body").

Suggestible readers who want to continue the seance can buy an LP record ($5.95) on which Bridey can be heard gasping out her story. She sounds somewhat like a savagely beaten gun moll who is being quizzed by the opposition gang.

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