In an otherwise nondescript officein downtown Charlottesville, Va., 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 ofa six-letter word converted into numbers, was known only to the 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.