In an otherwise nondescript office in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, a small leather chest sits atop a filing cabinet. Within it lies a combination lock, unopened for more than 50 years. The man who set it is dead.
On its own, the lock is unremarkable — the kind you might use at the gym. The code, a mnemonic of a six-letter word converted into numbers, was known only to psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, who set it long before he died and years before he retired as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, a parapsychology research unit he founded in 1967 within the University of Virginia’s school of medicine.
Stevenson called this experiment the Combination Lock Test for Survival. He reasoned that if he could transmit the code to someone from the grave, it might help answer the questions that had consumed him in life: Is communication from the "beyond” possible? Can the personality survive bodily death? Or simply: Is reincarnation real?
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.