Free Fringe-ology by Steve Volk Page A

one is to thank you and the Reverend [Imara] for all you have done for me. However the second reason I came back is to tell you not to give up your work on death and dying . . . not yet.”
    Kübler-Ross wondered how Schwartz could possibly know she was planning on quitting. But she also continued to question whether the entire event was transpiring at all. At the ghost’s behest, she promised not to quit her work yet. And in return, she asked the ghost for a favor. “Will you,” she asked, “write a brief note for Reverend Imara?”
    Mrs. Schwartz complied, taking a pen in her hand, then disappeared. We’ll get back to that note. For now, understand her old patient’s alleged reappearance as a ghost would become a prominent feature in the story of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. But for the moment, it was private. Kübler-Ross only outed herself as an experiencer of anything odd at all in 1975 when the author Raymond Moody asked her to write the foreword to Life After Life —the book that coined the phrase “near-death experience.” She and Imara looked over his manuscript. The experiences their own patients recounted were accurately mirrored in Moody’s own research. They also believed he had written credibly. But there was something more: Kübler-Ross was changing. “At this point in my life,” she later wrote, “I was open to anything and everything. Most days I felt as if a curtain was being lifted to give me access to a world no one had ever seen before.”
    This was also the problem. Because just then, vulnerable in the confines of a strained marriage, a grueling career path that was wearing her down, and new scrutiny related to her own investigation of the paranormal, she received a phone call. The people on the other end were Jay and Martha Barham, who had been drawn to her by coverage they had seen of her controversial endorsement of Moody’s book. They called her from San Diego and promised her something more incredible than she had ever experienced, something that, deep inside, she longed for. They promised to introduce her to spiritual entities. They promised to reproduce the strange, sporadic mystical experiences Kübler-Ross had enjoyed—and to do so on demand.
    The Barhams had found a fertile target. And the esteemed psychologist quickly booked a speaking engagement in San Diego so she could take a side trip to meet the Barhams, who met her at the airport and hugged her like old friends. From there, they whisked her to the Church of Divinity, where Barham channeled spirits for a congregation of about a hundred people. “On my first day there,” she later wrote, “I joined 25 people of all ages and types in the dark room [of a windowless building]. Everyone sat on folding chairs. Jay placed me in the front row, a spot of honor. Then the lights were switched off and the group began singing a soft, rhythmic hum that built to a loud group chant, which gave Jay the energy needed to channel the entities. . . . As the chanting reached a new, almost euphoric level, Jay disappeared behind a screen [my emphasis]. Suddenly, an enormously tall figure appeared to the right of me. . . .”
    Over the ensuing months, Barham introduced her to spirit guides named Salem, Pedro, and an entity named Willie. This was strictly old-school, séance-style mysticism. In the 1930s people advertising themselves as psychic mediums turned out the lights and channeled the dead, asking the spirits to knock once for yes, twice for no. But really it was an assistant in on the gag or the medium making all the noise. Like the mediums of old, Barham, too, insisted all the lights be turned off—lest he or the spirits be damaged by the terrible power of the 60-watt bulb.
    Kübler-Ross should have known better, but she was too vulnerable, it seems, to see straight.
    Attempts were made to save her.
    Her husband Manny answered the phone once