The Hungarian grandmaster Geza Maroczy died in 1951, but on some reports, his chess career didn't end there. He took about 34 years off, and then, with the help of a medium named Robert Rollans, played a game against Viktor Korchnoi that lasted until 1993. (He lost, but hey - he was rusty. You can replay the game here.)
A reader of this blog, "guitarcameron", mentioned this article on the game, in which it the author concludes that it "strongly suggests that consciousness survives physical death and lives on in a spirit world." Should we believe this?
It is in fact difficult to give an answer to the question, posed this straightforwardly. For one thing, while we have the game, we don't have access to the questions and answers that were posed to "Maroczy", which constitute part of the case for its really being him. Second, there are many different levels of belief. Taking the game as proof of post-mortem existence in a spirit world demands a much greater evidential standard than taking it as confirmation of that hypothesis, or of making it plausible. A third issue, obvious but extremely important, is that how one is inclined to evaluate such a claim will be based not only on the evidence in some "stand-alone" way, but on one's background beliefs.
To elaborate on the last point, and to borrow an example from one of my first philosophy teachers, imagine that someone falls onto the subway tracks as the train is pulling into the station, and the train manages to come to a screeching halt inches before killing him. Suppose that among the spectators there's a Christian, a Hindu and an atheist. The Christian says "Thank God!", the Hindu says "Good karma!" and the atheist remarks "Wow, that was lucky!"
So it will be here. Someone who thinks there's nothing more to reality than the subject matter of the natural sciences will be inclined to an alternative explanation of the Korchnoi-"Maroczy" game, no matter how good the evidence might be. A New Agey person might find this story pretty ordinary, just the sort of thing one would expect on his worldview. A Christian (or any other traditional monotheist) might believe that the medium was having real experiences, but not take it for granted that Maroczy was on the other end of the "phone"; it might have been a demonic being, for instance, doing so to draw people away from a biblically-based trust in God over to occultism.
Note that neither the Christian nor even the New Ager is forced to say that the event was with something "spooky". Rather, it's that both, in different ways, are open to a non-worldly explanation in light of their prior ontological commitments. (An ontology is simply an inventory of the kinds of things that exist. If one already thinks that there are non-physical spirits, then there's no a priori objection to Maroczy's existing in that way.) Indeed, I myself am a Christian and think it's a lot more likely that the game is a fraud. "Maroczy's" play was good but hardly amazing for a 7-8 year long "correspondence" game, and the medium hardly needed to seek a GM's help to produce credible moves. Had the game been played in a single sitting, the "Maroczy" = Maroczy conclusion would be far more reasonable. (Or at least that some sort of immaterial agent was involved. I'm strongly disinclined to think that human beings after death and before judgment are playing chess.)
* Recommended reading, for those interested in thinking about this topic further: Beyond Death, by JP Moreland and Gary Habermas. The authors argue to, but do not assume, a Christian point of view, but consider evidence from reincarnation stories and near-death experiences along the way.