Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife

11. CHAFFIN v. THE DEAD GUY IN THE OVERCOAT In Which the Law Finds for a Ghost, and the Author Calls In an Expert Witness

IN THE SUMMER of 1925, the ordinary life of a Mocksville, North Carolina, farmer shifted a few acres shy of ordinary. James Pinkney Chaffin lived with his wife and daughter in a four-room house on a stream in a field that he planted with sugarcane and cotton. Chaffin picked and baled his own cotton and made molasses from the sugarcane he grew. He carried the molasses in jugs on his back to sell to his neighbors and the townspeople in Mocksville. He did the same with the butter his wife made and the axe handles that he carved and sold for twenty-five cents. On Sundays he walked two miles with his family to the Ijames Baptist Church, where he sat each week in the same seat, beside an open window—“so he could spit his tobacco,” recalls his grandson Lester. Evenings, James Pinkney Chaffin sat by the fire and greased his boots and sharpened his blades. He did not drink or smoke. He was, says Lester, “just as plain as an old shoe.”

One morning in June 1925, James Pinkney Chaffin announced to his wife that his father—who had been dead four years—had appeared to him at his bedside. Chaffin was not given to dreams of prophecy or to ghost stories or practical jokes, and one can imagine that the breakfast mood that morning was a bit strained. He confided to his wife that several times over the past month, he had dreamed of his father, James L. Chaffin, appearing at his bedside with a sorrowful expression. The previous night, his father had appeared in a black overcoat,[41] which the son recognized from when his father had been alive. James Senior stepped closer to the bed and opened up one side of his overcoat, in the manner of a man selling purloined watches. “He pointed to the inside pocket,” Chaffin is quoted as saying in Mocksville’s Davie Record, “and he said: ‘You will find something about my last will in my overcoat pocket.’”

At the time, as far as anyone knew, the last will of James L. Chaffin was the one on record in the Davie County Clerk’s Office, dated 1905. In a perplexing act of filial betrayal, the old farmer had directed that his entire estate—farmland amounting to one hundred and two acres—go to his second-youngest son, Marshall. Nothing was left to James Pinkney Chaffin or his elder brother John, or to the youngest of the four sons, Abner. To John, especially, it was an egregious slight, as land in that day was typically bequeathed to the eldest son. Though the three sons must surely have been bitter about the will, they did not contest it.

After some searching, Pink, as he was known to his family and friends, located the old man’s overcoat, in the attic of his older brother John. “On examination of the inside pocket,” his testimony goes, “I found the lining had been sewed together. I immediately cut the stitches and found a little roll of paper tied with a string which was in my father’s handwriting and contained only the following words: ‘Read the 27th Chapter of Genesis in my daddie’s old Bible.’” (Chapter 27 is a parable of two brothers, one who cheats the other out of his rightful inheritance.) With his daughter Estelle and his neighbor Thom Blackwelder along as witnesses, Pink proceeded to his mother’s house, where they found the old Bible in the attic. Blackwelder opened the dilapidated book to Genesis and discovered that the facing pages that make up Chapter 27 had been folded over to embrace a single piece of ruled yellow tablet paper. It was a second will, dated 1919 and dividing the land equally among the four children. Marshall was by now dead—he died from a faulty heart valve less than a year after inheriting his father’s land—but his wife Susie, described by grandson Lester as a more “downtown” sort of person than any of the Chaffin brothers, immediately contested the second will. A date for a trial was set.

The story spread—as stories combining ghosts and large chunks of money and feuding relatives will—and by the time the day for the trial arrived, members of the press were thick as the flies in Pink Chaffin’s unscreened living room. Pink arrived in court with ten witnesses in tow—family, friends, and neighbors—all prepared to attest that the signature on the second will was indeed that of James L. Chaffin. (The will itself bore no witness signatures.) After the jury was sworn in, the judge called a lunch break. Apparently Susie and the brothers reached a deal during the recess. In a move that stunned and deeply disappointed the gathered crowds of reporters and townsfolk, Susie stated that the signature was genuine and withdrew her opposition. The widow and three brothers had agreed to share the estate equally. The court thus formally decreed that the document in question—a paper whose secret location had been pointed out by an apparition—was indeed the last will and testament of James L. Chaffin.

Though the reporters were denied the gleefully anticipated spectacle of shouting, finger-pointing loved ones, they left with an even better story. “Dead Man Returns in Dream,” ran a local headline. “Can the Dead Speak from Grave?” asked another.

About a year later, Britain’s Society for Psychical Research got wind of the case and hired a local lawyer to interview the parties involved and submit a report. The lawyer, J. McN. Johnson of Aberdeen, North Carolina, said he held “scant respect” for the beliefs of SPR members, but promised to pursue his task with mind held open. He obtained sworn statements by James Pinkney Chaffin and Thomas Blackwelder, the man who had driven Pink and Pink’s daughter in his Model T on the twenty-mile journey to find the old coat and, later, the grandfather’s Bible. Johnson was impressed with the sincerity of the Chaffin clan. “I believe I am safe in asserting that if you once talked with these honest people and looked into their clear, unsophisticated countenances, your criticism would vanish into thin air, as did mine.” He wrote these words in a 1927 letter to the SPR, and concluded that the will was genuine and the farmer’s ghost story improbable but true.

Johnson ruled out the possibility that the second will was a fake on the grounds that not only the witnesses but the defendant herself, Marshall’s widow Susie, agreed that the handwriting on the second will was that of James L. Chaffin.

You would think that the SPR would need no more convincing. You would think that a letter like this, following a courtroom victory, would be trumpeted in the pages of the SPR’s journal as proof positive of the soul’s survival after death. But you would be wrong. In response to his report, Johnson received a contrary ten-page letter from SPR honorary officer W. H. Salter, which remains to this day in the Chaffin Will file in the SPR archives. Salter felt—and you’d have to agree with him—that the case presented puzzling irregularities. If the old farmer had changed his mind and now wanted his land divided among all four sons, why would he hide the new will so carefully and not tell any of his sons—indeed anyone at all—about it? Wrote Salter: “There is, I admit, no limit to the folly of testators or the secretiveness of farmers, but the present testator seems to have pushed both these characteristics to the limit. But for the apparition, his testamentary wishes would never have been carried out, and one can hardly suppose that during his life he counted on being able to appear as a ghost.”

The SPR party line on apparitions is outlined in SPR cofounder Frederick Myers’s seven-hundred-page opus Phantasms of the Living (which includes a chapter on phantasms of the dead). Myers felt that most are the products of the viewer’s own mind. Especially suspect is “an apparition which seems to impart any verbal message,” as did the ghost of James L. Chaffin; these are described as “very rare.”

Attorney Johnson replied to Salter’s letter with a possible explanation. Johnson had been told by a neighbor that the old farmer lived “in mortal terror” of his daughter-in-law Susie, who had in her possession the 1905 will. Changing his will would have meant confronting her, a task James L. was no doubt loath to undertake. So perhaps he hid the new will and planned to tell his three sons about it in his dying moments, so that in death he might escape the wrath of Susie. And then, I suppose, he misjudged his timing, and died before he could tell them. “This man J. P. Chaffin is an honest man and he thoroughly believes his father’s spirit appeared to him and gave him the clue to the 1919 will,” concludes Johnson’s letter. “And his manner appeared to me to be entitled to such respect that to doubt him would be to sin against light.”

Salter didn’t buy it. He came up with his own scenario, which held the will to be a fake, yet salvaged the innocence of James Pinkney Chaffin. He imagined that the eldest son, John Chaffin, perhaps with the help of his brother Abner, faked the will and the slip of paper in the overcoat pocket. James Pinkney Chaffin was made the unwitting pawn in the plot, for it was he who would be moved to discover the will. This would be accomplished by making Pink believe he’d seen his father’s ghost, when what he’d really seen was his brother John dressed up in his father’s overcoat.

And there the mystery lay. Until April 2004, when yours truly decided to take a trip to Mocksville. I would talk to the descendants of the Chaffin brothers and unearth the two wills. I would hire a forensic document examiner, the best in the business. I would let science decide, once and for all, if the second will was a forgery and our overcoat-wearing ghost a fabrication.

THE DIRT ROAD along which James Pinkney Chaffin walked with his molasses and his axe handles is now four lanes wide. Yadkinville Road grew up to be the shopping mall strip, the predictable, just-outside-town plop-down of Burger Kings and BoJangles. My room in the Mocksville Comfort Inn looks out onto this road, and I try to picture old Pink shambling along with his load, vest fronts flapping in the after-blast of passing four-ton Chevys.

There are fewer farms in Mocksville today, and no farmers at all in this branch of the Chaffin clan. Pink’s grandson Lester Blackwelder is a retired Ralston-Purina salesman. He has a salesman’s smile, accessorized with a wink and a toothpick. His sincere, clap-you-on-the-shoulder congeniality served him well in his career; he and his wife Ruby Jean live comfortably in a roomy house on an upscale street. Pink’s grandson Lloyd is an engineer with Ingersoll-Rand. Neither man so much as grows lemons in the backyard. This all came as a surprise to me, having spoken to Lester and Ruby Jean by phone and having placed them—mostly because of their accents and the “might-coulds” in their speech—in homey farm kitchens with gingham curtains and eggs in wire baskets on the counter.

This afternoon, Lester and Ruby Jean and I have gone visiting. We’re sitting in Lloyd Blackwelder’s living room, and the two men are reminiscing. (Lester and Lloyd are James L. Chaffin’s oldest living descendants; Marshall and Abner have no living descendants, and John’s living descendants are the next generation down—too young to recall any details.) Lester was a teenager when Grandpa Pink used to tell him the story of the dream and the will. His mother Estelle rode in the Model T with her daddy Pink the twenty miles to John’s house, to look for the overcoat. “Dirt roads the whole way,” Lester is saying. “No windows on the car. Mama said she remembered what the coat looked like. The pocket was hand-sewed and there was dirt dobber nestin’ all over it.”

I don’t know what this means and apparently they can tell, because Ruby Jean sets down her iced tea and says, “Wasps’ nests, Mary.” Sometimes it’s just the accent that loses me. “Pie safe” required four repetitions and a trip to the kitchen.

I ask them what James Pinkney Chaffin looked like. “He was real thin,” says Lester. “Six foot. Rugged. Mustache. Not a good-looking man.”

Ruby Jean twirls the ice in her glass. “He didn’t have no mustache, hon.”

Lester considers this. He juts his lower lip. “I thought he had a mustache.”

Later, Ruby Jean finds a photograph for me: Pink Chaffin and his wife and baby daughter posing in their Sunday clothes. Pink’s striped shirt looks new and his hair is combed and pomaded, but you can see the dirt worn into the rims of his fingernails. He confronts the camera with a calm, somber, baldly direct gaze, probably the same one that so impressed attorney Johnson. He doesn’t have a mustache.

Lloyd is the younger of the two grandsons. He is dressed in Levi’s and a corn-colored polo shirt. His memories of Pink are a child’s memories; he recalls the time he sat in his grandfather’s lap, the rocker rocking so hard it flipped over backward, and the toy horses Pink made out of pieces of dried cornstalks, with tufts of cotton for the manes. Lloyd crosses the room to a glass-fronted curio cabinet and takes down a glass walking stick, twisted at the neck and bobbed into a rounded handle. “Here’s his Sunday cane,” he says. The glass is ribboned with red and blue, like stick candy. Having seen only posed sepia photographs of these people, I find it hard to add this colorful, foppish item to the grimy, monocolor tableaus of James Pinkney Chaffin that I’ve built in my mind. They might as well have shown me the man’s floral nosegay and spats.

Neither Lester nor Lloyd remembers his great-uncle Marshall, the original recipient of James L. Chaffin’s entire estate. Lloyd recalls a vague aura of ill will surrounding Marshall’s wife Susie. Susie, to refresh your memory, is said to have been the one in possession of the earlier will, the one that left everything to Marshall. Interestingly, the first will was written the year after Marshall married Susie. Perhaps Susie pressured her father-in-law into drafting the will. Lester says Grandpa Pink loved to tell the story of the apparition and the secret will, but he can’t recall hearing him say anything at all about Marshall and his wife, or the circumstances of the first will. The one thing he recalls is that James L. Chaffin lived with his son Marshall after his own house burned down, so perhaps the father felt beholden to his son. Indeed, Marshall is listed on the “informant” line of James L. Chaffin’s death certificate, which suggests a closeness between the two.

Lloyd and Lester are not open to considering that Grandpa Pink might have made up the dream and been part of a plot with his brothers to forge a new will and take back the land. That the ghost and the overcoat and the Bible were all just elements of an imaginative scam dreamed up by the three spurned brothers.

“Pink would just never have thought of that,” says Lester.

“Nope,” says Lloyd. “He would have considered that crooked.”

The old farmhouse where Pink lived when he had the visions of his father still stands, and Lloyd and Lester offer to take me there. Lester and Ruby Jean squeeze into my rented Hyundai, and Lloyd and his son Brad follow in Lloyd’s truck. Lester is driving the Hyundai, so that I can take notes while we talk. At one point he puts the left turn signal on, though there’s no road or driveway in view on our left, just an open field of tall grasses. The house sits on the far perimeter of the field, and that is where Lester is headed. “Used to be some tracks here, but not no more.” The weeds brush the underside of the Hyundai, making worrisome car-wash sounds inside the car. Lester and Ruby Jean seem accustomed to driving in fields. “Lester, there’s the old persimmon tree,” trills Ruby Jean.

“Uh-huh,” says Lester. He drives in overgrown fields at more or less the same speed as he drives on asphalt. “Grandma made the best persimmon pie, didn’t she?”

One side of Pink’s house is obscured by a thick climb of honeysuckle. Parts of the house are down to framing now, partly because it’s been abandoned so long, and partly because Lloyd pulled some boards away to make a pie safe. The men take me on a tour, pointing out the kitchen, their mama’s courting room, the bedroom, the outhouse, the earthen wells to keep the milk cool. There’s a doorway out the back wall of the bedroom. If John A. Chaffin came out here to play ghost in his father’s overcoat, that’s probably how he’d have come in. I tell Lloyd and Lester about the SPR officer’s theory. “Har,” says Lester. “I doubt that. John was just like Pink. Didn’t talk much. Didn’t go for foolishness.”

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:

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.

Sperry moves on to a comparison of the James L. Chaffin signatures on the two wills. It’s likely that the first will was indeed signed by Chaffin, as there are two witnesses. Sperry’s job now is to see if the writer of the second will, which had no witnesses, is also James L. Chaffin. The task is complicated by the fourteen years that span the two documents. Handwriting—especially signatures—often changes over time.

Nonetheless, Sperry has reached a conclusion. “There’s an old axiom we have,” he says, peeling off his gloves. “You can’t write better than your best.” In other words, I could never do a convincing forgery of my mother’s signature. My mother had beautiful, gliding, even penmanship, and mine has always been rat scrabble. She could forge mine, but not vice versa. Once you reach your “age of graphic maturity”—usually sometime in your teens—you’ve hit the peak of your ability and are unlikely to get much better. If anything, your writing gets worse: Handwriting deteriorates with old age and its decrepitudes—bad vision, stiff fingers, hand tremors.

In the Chaffin case, the situation is backward—and thus suspicious. The skill level in the signatures on the 1905 will is substantially worse than in the 1919 will. Which doesn’t make sense if it’s the same writer. Sperry pulls up the 1905 signature, written when Chaffin was in his fifties. The letters are awkwardly formed and there are hesitations—not the type of hesitations that suggest forgery, but the type that suggest this person is not a highly skilled penman. That seems likely, given the state of education in Davie County around that time. According to James W. Wall’s History of Davie County, illiteracy was common among rural families in the mid-1800s. In 1860, when James L. Chaffin was fifteen, only 690 of 1,230 school-age boys in Davie County were enrolled in public schools, and the school year was just a few months long (in winter, when the fields lay fallow). Lester says Grandpa Pink only went as far as third grade, and had a total of nine months of schooling. It’s likely his father would have had even less.

“Now look at the later will,” says Sperry. “The letter formations are much more fluid. Look at the fs. How much less awkward they are.” And here Chaffin would have been seventy. “If the J. L. Chaffin signatures on the 1905 will are representative of that particular writer’s skill level, and I see no evidence that they are not, then that writer could not have written the signature on the 1919 will.” It would seem to be a fake.

Sperry also finds some of the language of the second will suspiciously sophisticated for a nearly illiterate farmer. “Wit” is legalese, as is the phrase “both personal and real estate divided equal.”

Sperry highlights a line in the 1919 will. “Look at the wording here,” he says. “He wants his property to be divided between his four children ‘if they are living at my death… and if not living give share to there children…’ Let’s say the 1919 will was forged and backdated by Chaffin’s other sons in an effort to get the land back from Susie Chaffin after Marshall died. We know there was some ill will between her and the other brothers. With that clause in place, she’s technically out of the picture: The will leaves Marshall’s share of the land to their son, not to her. So let’s imagine the scene on the day of the trial. The family goes to lunch—which is a matter of record—and the brothers sit her down and spell it out: ‘We’ve got ten witnesses prepared to vouch for this signature. You’ve got your choice, Susie. You can go in there and agree that it’s his handwriting and we’ll cut you a one-fourth share—even though you’re not entitled to it in this new will. Or you can let the jury decide, and risk losing it all.’”

Sperry’s theory makes some sense. And if the forger’s intent was to corner Susie and force her hand—rather than actually convince her of the second will’s authenticity—then the breezy, unconcerned handwriting makes sense. Why bother fooling her, if you’ve got her where you want her?

WHOEVER CHOSE THE epitaph for the gravestone of James L. Chaffin would seem to have had a twinkle in his eye. It says: THY WILL BE DONE. Lester and Ruby Jean and I are out at the Ijames Baptist Church cemetery, visiting the family plots.

Lester has wandered over to the grave marker of a local acquaintance. “He shot hisself on the back porch.” He continues on down the rows, narrating death in the flat, evenly paced tones of a stock report. “There’s that baby died in the four-wheeler accident. And Thom’s son there: struck by lightning on a combine—” Ruby Jean cuts him off. “Look at this, Mary. Man put his two wives on the same tombstone. Wonder how they’d have felt about that!” Three stones down is the grave of one Flossie Gobble. You don’t have to meet some people to know you’d like them, and Flossie Gobble is one of those people.

I tell Lester and Ruby Jean about what the handwriting expert found. I am careful to add that Sperry compared Pink’s signature on the court papers with the questioned James L. Chaffin signature, and it isn’t a match.

“So Grandpa Pink didn’t do it,” says Ruby Jean. She sounds relieved. I don’t add that he must have played some role in the brotherly ruse—unless we buy the scenario of John or Abner Chaffin dressing up in the overcoat and playing ghost.

“Hunh,” says Lester. “Do you feel good about it?”

I tell him I’m not surprised by Sperry’s conclusion about the signatures, but I am disappointed. I would have loved to have evidence, even shaky, nonconclusive evidence, that the ghost of James L. Chaffin was real. Next I relate Sperry’s theory about the brothers confronting Susie Chaffin over lunch. In repeating it, the story sounds hopelessly oversophisticated for a bunch of dirt farmers’ sons. And why would they bother with the ghost, the overcoat, the slip of paper? Why not simply claim to have found the second will in the Bible?

“Well,” says Lester, toeing an upended flower pot. “It’s hard for me or you or anybody else to try to interpret the few facts we’ve got.” I think he means, I wish you and your fancy-pants forensics man would stop trying. But he’s too polite for that.

The car is quiet on the drive back to Mocksville. It’s late on a Saturday afternoon. Families are sitting in kitchens and on porches, trading gossip, shucking corn, shooing flies. Tomorrow the churches will fill with men and women who hold no doubts about the existence of the human soul and its joyous postmortem journey, men and women who could not care less about the hog sausage opinions of a forensic document examiner and a writer from California. To them, these things are simple and certain: The Chaffins are honest folk. The soul is real. Flossie Gobble lives on.

Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings. I have one more stop: a research venture taking place at the University of Virginia. I have saved this for last, because it represents what I think is my best chance for a speck of evidence that people leave their bodies when they die.