The Afterlife Codes: Searching for Evidence of the Survival of the Soul

There is no shortage of books by mediums. They range from the purely anecdotal to thoughtful attempts - such as those by Eileen Garrett - not only to give details of veridical communications but to explore and understand the mediumistic gift itself. Most books belong to the first category, but Susy Smith's latest book (and sadly her last - she died just after publication) comes firmly into the second. As a writer she needs Gladys Leonard and books like Confessions of a Psychic and The Power of the Mind. In all she wrote some 30 books, and The Afterlife Codes is probably her best. In it, she looks back, without bitterness or regret, over her 90 years of life - much of it an extraordinary struggle against financial difficulties and desperate ill-health (amongst other things a hip-infection in early adult life left her permanently crippled). The book, written with great modesty and self-honesty, and with delightful, self-deprecating humour, is a tribute to a brave and gifted woman who loved life, met it with spirited optimism, and enriched it with her warmth and her compassion.

Read simply as autobiography, the book is hard to put down. Susy Smith's experiences in journalism, the accounts of her adventures on her frequent and risky journeys by road from one side of America to the other, and her descriptions of her emotional highs and lows make the book a wonderfully human document, full of common sense wisdom and of revealing descriptions of people and places. Furthermore, she writes with extraordinary acuity and powers of recall for someone in her ninth decade, and with a fluent and engaging style. But it is the insights she gives into the inner world of the medium that will particularly commend it to many readers of this Journal. Susy Smith would demur at the use of the word 'medium' of course. She tended to downplay her abilities, never attempted to make her living as a professional medium or psychic, and remained to the end of her life as ready to sit with other mediums as to develop her own gifts.

Somewhat unusually for mediumship, these gifts made their appearance relatively late in life, when Susy was in her early 40s. They began with an experience of the warm, loving presence of her mother, who had died six years previously - 'She was so real, so there that I almost felt she was giving me one of her big bear hugs ... Life took on an immediate new dimension which I knew it would never lose'. Though with little previous interest in the subject, from that moment on Susy became an ardent investigator into the paranormal. Instructed during a ouija session to take up a pencil, automatic writing quickly developed and remained, along with mental mediumship, the mainstay of her psychic gift. Two communicators, her mother and, later on, an entity calling himself 'James' who she became convinced was none other than the great William James, remained with her for long periods of the years that followed. It is up to readers, on the strength of the material in The Afterlife Codes and in Susy's other books (particularly The Book of James) to draw their own conclusions as to whether she was right or wrong about the identity of her second communicator, but unless we suppose that this remarkable woman kept up an elaborate deception (perhaps deceiving herself as well as others) for close on half a century, the reality of her psychic gifts per se appear, on the strength of the evidence she provides, to be beyond reasonable doubt.

One of her great disappointments was that after a single-handed drive in an old car and towing her trailer-home from Santa Monica to Duke University she found Rhine and his team to be 'scholars and scientists ... whose intentions were not to get involved in anything that might spoil their other fine work by causing them to receive the label "ghost chasers" ... what I stirred up at Duke was a lot of complete indifference ... nobody would admit to knowing anything about survival'. (pages 98-99)

Even her automatism failed to impress, and she learned that the Rhines had expressed the firm conclusion that 'there was not one iota of evidence that automatic writing ever came from anything other than the writer's subconscious mind'. Somewhat discouraged she turned to Professor Hornell Hart in the Sociology Department at Duke who made no secret of his belief in survival, and who had 'had enough personal psychical experiences' (how important such experiences are for the researcher) to know that there was a great deal more to the subject 'than meets the eye of a merely dispassionate critical scientific observer'. Hart was a great help, taking her work seriously and assisting her to develop a practical philosophy that made sense of her gifts. Nevertheless, in spite of Rhine's indifference to her work, Susy left Duke after seven weeks of voluntary work as a research assistant with a tremendous respect for him and for his role in helping her to see that although as a journalist she made few mistakes in observation and in narrative, she needed to be wary of errors of inference. This grounding in the objectivity of good science stood her in good stead in her subsequent approach to her own gifts and to those of others.

Relatively early in her career as an automatist she encountered so-called earthbound spirits who interfered with her automatic writing, blocking out other communicators, making false claims as to their earthly identities, and endeavouring to pass on misleading, malicious and even dangerous ideas. She came to distinguish them from genuine communicators by the hesitancy they showed when asked for veridical information about their earth lives, and except for one persistent intruder calling himself 'Harvey', she quickly rid herself of them. However 'Harvey' became such a nuisance that for longish periods she was forced to suspend her automatic writing altogether and use only mental mediumship. Each time she picked up the pencil he came through, blocking out her mother and her other communicators. Various mediums tried to remove him, but he finally disappeared only when she discovered that her motor automatism extended to the keys of her typewriter, and he informed her plaintively that he had never learnt to type.

However, other earthbound spirits soon came to interfere with her automatic typing, sometimes pulling her hands away from the keys 'by a force I could not fathom', and at others intruding with their own messages and once more blocking out her usual communicators. Alarmingly, they then began to invade her thoughts, telling her she was going crazy; and in once case bombarding her with profanities and threats to kill her by driving her out of her body. Release from the long interlude with these tormentors came only when her mother introduced 'James' into her mediumship, who then took over the keyboard with his benign influence. .

Psychologically, these invasive inner voices are of great interest (Susy gives a more extended account of them in Confessions of a Psychic). There are obvious similarities between her invading entities and the inner voices heard by sufferers during psychotic episodes (Barbara O'Brien's Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic is one of the best first-hand account of such voices). Was Susy merely experiencing psychosis? Or does playing with a ouija board and automatic writing really serve as an invitation to earthbound spirits, as her mother apparently informed her, and as many mediums insist? Not only did Susy take this latter view, she implies that invading entities may actually account for at least some cases of psychosis. By detailing her experiences her hope was to keep 'at least a few persons who hear voices ... out of institutions, and help them to learn how to cope with the situation'. She tells us that during the whole of the episode of her voices she 'felt exactly as sane and sensible as at this moment ... [the episode] was irritating and tiring ... even frightening ... but ... the thinking part of me was existing aside from these activities, observing what was going on at all times'.

We can of course argue that she was not a good judge of her own mental state. We can add that her experience of having her hands held forcibly away from the typewriter keys by some unknown power could also be evidence of psychotic disturbance. However, hysterical paralysis (to use the old term for such psychological motor inhibition) is typically consequent upon a traumatic experience of some kind; something that was conspicuously lacking in Susy's case. When seen in the context of the rest of her apparently highly successful mediumship, it seems right at least to take her own explanation of this strange experience seriously, and consider whether she has something valuable to tell us not only about the mind of the medium but about the vulnerability of the human mind in general.

In the concluding chapters of her book, Susy puts forward a protocol for leaving codes which individuals can attempt to communicate to others after their death. The history of such codes is a long and confused one. Some attempts, such as Arthur Ford's receipt of Houdini's code, have been completely successful, only to fall foul of the charge that the codes were not kept secret during the lifetime of the sender. Others, like Mrs. Verrall's receipt of Myers' post-mortem message, have appeared to be spectacularly unsuccessful, only to reveal on closer inspection tantalising signs that something of the spirit of the message may after all have been conveyed. Nevertheless, Susy Smith felt it is worth having another try. With the help of Professor Gary Schwartz and Dr. Linda Russek (who both treated her with exemplary kindness and of whom she writes with great and touching affection) she founded the Susy Smith Project at the University of Arizona, and her Afterlife Codes Web Site grew out of the Project, and is now open for business.

The idea behind the website (www.afterlifecodes.com) is to invite as many people as possible each to think of a short key phrase that they are likely to remember if they survive death. These key phrases are then individually coded by the computer and the codes stored in its memory. Should anyone feel that they have received a key phrase from a deceased associate they then communicate this phrase to the website, and the computer checks to see if it breaks the code. The strength of this protocol is that if the phrase is incorrect, the code remains intact and available for further attempts should they occur. The drawback is that a deceased person may have told his or her key phrase to someone while alive, and the latter prove sufficiently unscrupulous to pretend it only came through after their death. But this is an inescapable weakness with any attempt to leave a message for after-death communication. Everything depends not only upon the individual's ability to get such a message through if they survive, but upon their integrity and that of their associates while still on earth. As an attempted safeguard, anyone who receives a key phrase that breaks the code will therefore have their background and that of the deceased sender thoroughly investigated by Professor Schwartz and his colleagues, and their honesty checked and double-checked before anything is made public.

Susy Smith readily accepts that, given the inescapable difficulties over the protocol, receipt of a correct key phrase will not prove survival. But it will, she suggests, 'do more to indicate it than has so far been achieved'. We could quarrel over this suggestion. Arguably the cross-correspondences and many of the cases associated with mediums of the calibre of Piper, Leonard, Willett, Wriedt et al will not be bettered simply by the production of a correct key phrase or two in circumstances where fraud can never be entirely ruled out. Nevertheless, the Susy Smith Project is an imaginative undertaking, and the thanks of everyone interested in survival must go to Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek (who contribute Introductory and Concluding Chapters to The Afterlife Codes) for managing the Project, and to Robert Bigelow for funding the undertaking. And of course particular thanks are due to Susy Smith, who died in the firm conviction of survival, and who leaves us as testament to this conviction the Susy Smith Project and this moving and challenging book.