IS IT POSSIBLE to dress up like a ghost and fool people into thinking they’ve seen the real deal? Happily, there is published research to answer this question, research carried out at no lesser institution than Cambridge University. For six nights in the summer of 1959, members of the Cambridge University Society for Research in Parapsychology took turns dressing up in a white muslin sheet and walking around in a well-traversed field behind the King’s College campus. Occasionally they would raise their arms, as ghosts will do. Other members of the team hid in bushes to observe the reactions of passersby. Although some eighty people were judged to have been in a position to see the figure, not one reacted or even gave it a second glance. The researchers found this surprising, especially given that the small herd of cows that grazed the field did, unlike the pedestrians, show considerable interest,[42] such that two or three at a time would follow along behind the “ghost.” To my acute disappointment, “An Experiment in Apparitional Observation and Findings,” published in the September 1959 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, includes no photographs.
Several months later, the researchers revised their experiment, changing the venue and adding “low moans” and, on one occasion, phosphorescent paint. One trial was set in a graveyard right off a main road and clearly in the sight line of drivers in both directions. Here observers hid in the bushes not only to record reactions, but to “avert traffic accidents” and “reassure anyone who became hysterical.” But again, not a single person of the hundred-plus who saw the figure thought it was a ghost, including two students from India. “Although we are superstitious in our country,” the men told one of the researchers, “we could see his legs and feet and knew it was a man dressed up in some white garment.”
In their final effort, the research team abandoned traditional ghost-appropriate settings and moved the experiment into a movie theater that was screening an X-rated film. The author of the paper, A. D. Cornell, explained that the X rating was chosen to ensure no children were traumatized by the ghost, as though that somehow explained the choice of a porn theater as a setting for a ghost experiment. This time the “ghost” walked slowly across the screen during a trailer. The phosphorescence was not used this time, and presumably low moans were deemed redundant. No mention is made of the specific images showing on the screen behind the ghost, but clearly they were a good deal more interesting: The audience was polled after the film, and forty-six percent of them didn’t notice the man in the sheet. Among those who did, not one thought he’d seen a ghost. (One man said he’d seen a polar bear.)
And so we can safely conclude that if John Chaffin had attempted something as uncharacteristic as dressing up as his father’s ghost and moaning in his brother’s bedroom doorway, James Pinkney Chaffin would not have been convinced. Though his cows, were they in a position to observe, would have been fascinated.
I HAVEN’T SPENT much time in the South, and I didn’t realize how helpful people are there. They help you even if you don’t ask for help. I went to Food Lion yesterday, and the checkout clerk told me my yogurt was on special if I had an MVP card. “Trudy,” he said to the bagger when he found out I didn’t. “Give me your MVP card.” It’s the kind of place where you call a total stranger on the phone, and his wife will say, “Hang on, I’ll go run and see if I can catch him before he goes off on his tractor!” The closest thing to impoliteness that I’ve come across so far has been a license plate holder ordering me to EAT BEEF. Eat beef, please, I chide.
Thanks to southern hospitality and the kindness of strangers, finding the Chaffin wills turned out to be as simple as telephoning the records office. The woman who answered put me through to the clerk of the court, who regularly picks up his phone. The clerk, Ken Boger, said the old records were in the courthouse basement and I could come down any day of the week and he’d help me find them.
Today is that day. I’m meeting a Tennessee-based questioned document examiner and forensic handwriting expert named Grant Sperry. I found Sperry through the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, of which he’s president. Sperry has been an expert witness in some three hundred federal and state cases, including the Waco mess, where his testimony resulted in the conviction of an assistant U.S. attorney who had denied any knowledge of the pyrotechnic devices used on the compound. Sperry found imprints of his notes about the devices on the page below the page where he’d written them. (Note to the careless: These guys can read the imprints of your writing on a pad as much as ten pages down from the page you wrote on.) Sperry was coming to North Carolina to visit his parents and the Chaffin case intrigued him, so he agreed to help me out for about, oh, 1/100th of what he charges the trial lawyers.
We’re waiting at the metal detector in the front vestibule, along with a pile of Sperry’s equipment. We’ve been here several minutes. After a while, a man in a security uniform spots us. “Ain’t been nobody manning that for two months.” He waves us in.
It’s a busy Monday morning, but Boger gets right up from his desk to take us to the basement. Within five minutes, we’ve got both wills. Sperry sets up a makeshift desk on a stack of boxes full of old case files. Most are boxes designed to hold files, but one says: ORRELLS WHOLE HOG SAUSAGE. Sperry puts on bright blue latex gloves, picks up the wills one at a time, and lays them on a scanner. Now he’ll be able to look at them side by side on his computer screen and line up any two elements he chooses. Since both wills are handwritten, we’d thought that we had two lengthy handwriting samples to compare, but Sperry quickly determines that the body of the first will has been written out by someone other than the signer—presumably a lawyer, for the document is written in standard-issue legalese on legal-sized paper. The second will, he says, is all one handwriting. This one is a curious mixture of legalese and down-home sap, penned on a page from a ruled school tablet:
After reading the 27 Chapter of genesis I James L Chaffin do make my last will and testament and here it is i want after giving my body a desent burial my little property to be equally devided between my four children if they are living at my death both personal and real estate devided equal if not living give share to there children and if she is living you all must take care of your mamy now this is my last will and testament. Wit my hand and seal on other side
Sperry can tell right away that whoever wrote out the second will wasn’t attempting to copy someone else’s handwriting. The writing is too fluid and relaxed, too swiftly and confidently written to be a forgery. Forged writing is more like drawing, he says. The person moves slowly and deliberately, stopping and starting and sometimes even touching up letters. I read about this in Questioned Documents, a classic in the field, written by the enormously learned and occasionally crabby Albert Osborn. “A genuine writing does not often suggest that the writer is thinking of what he is doing with his pen,” Osborne wrote, “while a dishonest writing, when examined with care, often shows quite conclusively that the writer was thinking of nothing else…. This is another subject beyond the understanding of the stupid observer.” It’s clear the second will was written with a relaxed hand. So either James L. Chaffin wrote the second will, or it was written by someone who wasn’t overly concerned with creating a convincing match for Chaffin’s hand.
42
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.