Was Dolores really Gretchen? -- The Woman Who Suddenly Spoke German

An Ohio man whose wife was suffering back pain in May 1970 suggested to her that he try to ease her suffering by using hypnotism, a craft he had practiced as a hobbyist for 16 years.

While Carroll Jay had his wife Dolores under hypnosis in their Mount Orab, Ohio home, he asked her a question, then was surprised to hear Dolores answer: “Nein.” Though he spoke no German, Carroll Jay recognized that as “no” in the language. Yet as far as he knew, his wife, who was in her late 40s and had been married to Carroll Jay since she was a teenager, also had never learned German.

Once awake, Dolores Jay confirmed that she indeed had no knowledge of the German language. Three days later, Carroll Jay again hypnotized his wife so he could gain some insight into whether that apparent answer was a fluke, or perhaps just a German-sounding mumble or groan from the back pain.

But instead of reassuring the couple that all was normal in their conventional household 20 miles east of Cincinnati, the second hypnosis session showed that the spoken “Nein,” was just what it sounded like – and the Jays were launched on a bizarre linguistic adventure that defied rational explanation.

This time, the hypnotized Dolores Jay was speaking entire sentences in German, even though for her entire life, she had been an English-only speaker. As Carroll Jay used a German language dictionary and his own wits to try to follow what his hypnotized wife was saying, he was able to determine that she was assuming the persona of someone else. Though details of her many sentences were beyond Carroll Jay’s grasp, he clearly picked up that his wife was identifying herself as “Gretchen.”

Carroll Jay decided to invite a few friends and acquaintances who spoke German to come to the couple’s home to listen in at more hypnotism sessions in mid- and late-1970 and on into 1971, relying on the visitors’ German proficiency and his language dictionary to try to learn more about this “Gretchen.” The German speakers told the Jays that she described herself variously as a 16-year-old, or as young as eight. At whatever age, the same “Gretchen” persona always manifested under hypnosis and kept doing so after the Jays moved to Elkton, Va. in 1973. But wherever she was hypnotized, Dolores Jay always reported after regaining consciousness that she did not recall Gretchen or anything her German speaking voice had produced.

Carroll Jay, an ordained United Methodist minister who had served in churches in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama and Ohio, had never professed a belief in reincarnation. Though he and Dolores had associated with some people who believed previous lives were real, they had never joined any pro-reincarnation groups or attended any events or lectures on the matter.  Nor had they joined any hypnotism organizations; he practiced the craft primarily to help relieve people’s pain.

Carroll and Dolores Jay continued the hypnotism sessions, and they invited German-speaking researcher Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia to converse with “Gretchen” during several of them. Stevenson wrote: “During the experiments it was possible to influence Gretchen to assume different ages between eight and 16. She did not like to be 16, however, and firmly refused to advance beyond that age. She said she had died at 16, but gave fragmentary and somewhat differing accounts of how she had died.”

In some accounts, Gretchen said she died of illness; other times she vaguely indicated that being imprisoned led to her death. Though Gretchen spoke in German only, she responded to questions put to her in German or English. Stevenson, a psychiatrist and researcher from the UVA Medical School’s Division of Psychiatry, reported these findings in a 1976 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.

Despite these variances, most of the story told by “Gretchen” was consistent in each hypnosis session – and it was elaborate. Stevenson wrote that Gretchen identified her family name as Gottlieb and said she was from the German town of Eberswalde. “Gretchen” said her father was Hermann Gottlieb, the town’s mayor. She said her mother was dead and her closest companion was “Frau Schilder,” her family’s housekeeper.

In keeping with the story of someone who died so young, life was not easy for this person, character, or voice -- Gretchen expressed fear of the “Bundesrat,” and identified the head of her religion as Pope Leo. Stevenson said those statements would place the persona Gretchen in Germany in the 1870s, when the Bundesrat (“federal council”) was the governing body of the states of the North German Confederation. A century before Dolores Jay’s first hypnotism session, Stevenson wrote in the Journal, a power struggle between the secular Bundesrat and the Roman Catholic Church was resulting in persecution of Catholics in Germany.

Stevenson and others fluent in German – including German natives -- attended a few of Dolores Jay’s hypnosis sessions and heard audio tape recordings of others. They also read transcripts typed up from several other recordings.  In all, Stevenson attended or heard recordings of 19 of the sessions where “Gretchen” manifested.

"Xenography" was also part of this mystery. Dolores Jay, as "Gretchen" wrote in (sort of) German while she was hypnotized. Jay's awake handwriting, at bottom, differs.

“Having been convinced that Gretchen could speak German responsively I extended my investigation into the question of whether Dolores Jay might have learned German normally in childhood or later,” Stevenson wrote. “She and her husband both firmly denied any knowledge of German prior to the development of the experiments at which Gretchen emerged and they both signed affidavits to that effect. Dolores Jay stated that she had never studied German in school or otherwise and had never even heard it spoken apart from occasional phrases on radio and television programs. She took a polygraph test for lie detection with results affirming the honesty of denials of previous knowledge of German.”

Hmmmm. What we have here is by no means a failure to communicate. This was a failure to explain communication. The term in parapsychology for what happened when Dolores Jay was under hypnosis is “Xenoglossy.” That means an occurrence of a person speaking, without assistance of any kind, a language which they have not learned.  It is called a paranormal phenomenon, putting it up there with channeling, telepathy and other tabloid news.

Yet, a homemaker from small-town America was experiencing Xenoglossy – with no apparent motive for fakery. The Jays were seeking no financial windfall and fairly limited publicity in a time when sensational stories like Gretchen didn’t instantly “go viral.” The couple gave interviews to only The Washington Post, one newspaper in Virginia and NBC Nightly News, then by the mid-1970s they withdrew from public life.  Carroll Jay said he used those mainstream news media only to counteract accusations from his and other Christian denominations that he pursued the “Gretchen” case as part of cultist or satanic rituals.

Stephenson did exhaustive research into the history and geography of the area where Gretchen’s words indicated she would have been. He wrote that the only Eberswalde he could find was 60 kilometers northeast of Berlin (making it then in East Germany) and that inquires to that city “failed to uncover any evidence of a person corresponding to Gretchen’s statements.”

Stevenson wrote that his research showed Eberswalde had not had any mayor named Gottlieb, though he added that Gretchen’s anxious talk about the Bundesrat matches the mood a Catholic in that region would have had about that ruling body during the 1870s. Only after Pope Leo XIII and Chancellor Bismarck of the German Empire began to reconcile their differences about a decade later did the repression of German Catholics ease, he wrote.

From Eberswalde in the east, researcher Stevenson turned his focus to the north, and the city where Carroll and Dolores Jay grew up and met as teenagers. He traveled to Clarksburg, W. Va., about 100 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pa. and conducted “a searching inquiry into their childhoods with regard to the possibility that she might have learned German then and afterwards forgotten that she had done so.”

Though throughout his career as a psychiatrist and researcher, Stevenson drew criticism for advocating the possibility of the pop-science idea of reincarnation, with the Jay case he employed considerable skepticism.

Stevenson interviewed 19 Jay family members, friends and neighbors in Clarksburg and other Harrison County, W. Va. communities, including Eastview, which he described as the suburb of Clarksburg where Dolores Jay lived almost all her childhood after being born in May 1922. His research indicated there were no German speakers in Eastview during Dolores’ youth, and Stevenson also checked census totals from 1920 and 1930 to figure how many Harrison County residents listed their birthplaces in Germany, Switzerland or Austria. (It was 217 in ’30, the year Dolores turned eight.)

Stevenson wrote that Dolores Jay’s father was of mixed ancestry, but no German. Her mother had two great-great grandparents (who likely would have been born around 1800) who were German, but they died long before Dolores’ birth. A local historian told him of a few German speakers in the 1920s and ‘30s a mile to the west and a few others a mile to the north of Eastview.

“So far as I could learn, there were no German-speaking persons within the ordinary range of a young child, even one less supervised than Dolores Jay appears to have been,” Stevenson wrote. “The German language was not taught in the schools of Harrison County during the period when Dolores Jay (and Carroll Jay) attended them.”

But what of the 16 years during which Carroll Jay used hypnotism as a hobby and to help people reduce pain? In the years after the couple’s four children were grown and moved out, Dolores was Carroll Jay’s only co-resident, which would have given him unfettered access to her mind had he wanted to plant ideas inside it while she was sleeping, or perhaps unknowingly hypnotized. Whereas there is no evidence Carroll Jay did this or anything else dishonest, Ian Stevenson wrote straightforwardly in the Psychical Society Journal of holes in the theory that “Gretchen” was speaking from the past.

“Gretchen’s German grammar,” he wrote, “was much more defective than her vocabulary. She spoke mostly in short phrases consisting of only a few words, and her word order, a feature of much importance in the German language, was quite faulty. She rather often simply omitted words, especially auxiliary verbs. She showed no knowledge of the inverted word order used in German subsidiary clauses. And she seemed to have almost no ability to use the past and future tenses of German verbs.”

To me -- a person who studied German for three years in high school and two in college -- those tendencies by Gretchen say: “first year student.”

On April 23, 1971, the Gretchen case entered the realm of “Xenography,” as on that day she wrote German words on a paper under hypnosis that were strung together in phrases that were about “Gretchen’s dominant theme of religious persecution,” Stevenson wrote. Some were misspelled, but then Gretchen had said early on that she had never learned to read or write.

Were Dolores’ abilities and shortcomings combined with Gretchen’s to produce such mixed results? Dolores could read and write, but knew no German.

Moreover, could the pronunciation errors be explained by the fact that German “Gretchen” spoke her language through the larynx and jaw of American Dolores, who had not developed even an iota of the precise tongue movements and disciplined, firmed-up jaw positioning that do not come naturally to people who don’t grow up speaking German. After five years of devotion to learning the language, I still have that laid-back English speaker’s jaw that Germans can spot instantly.

And “Gretchen” often said she was worried about being overheard by the authorities, Stevenson wrote. Anxiety will mess up anybody’s concentration.

But that is cutting the Gretchen theory a lot of slack – like enough to reach from Virginia to Eberswalde.

“Some of Gretchen’s grammatical errors were those typical of Americans who have learned German imperfectly,” Stevenson conceded. “Her grammar fluctuated in quality, at some times being appreciably better than at others.  It did not, however, show any noticeable improvement during the three years she was exposed to correct German spoken to her by persons from whom she might have learned to improve her own language.

“Gretchen’s pronunciation was excellent at some times, satisfactory or good at most other times. Occasionally she grossly mispronounced a word. Neither I nor my three German colleagues who spoke with Gretchen detected in her accent (or other aspects of her language) features that were geographically localizing, that is suggestive of the dialect of a particular region of Germany or Austria.”

Caveats like those from one of the leading practitioners of parapsychology tell us that whereas you had a good run, and chilled us with awe, it’s auf wiedersehen, Gretchen.


Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA believes the Dolores Jay story has a rational explanation, but he confesses to sometimes freaking out over "Gretchen."