And there have been other apparent poltergeist-type movements. Windows mysteriously open and close when no one is standing nearby. Tapes recorded in the house turn out blank. Once, in front of thirty tourists, four glass domes protecting Christmas candles suddenly levitated and crashed to the floor.
The person possibly most affected by all of this is Mrs. Tatum. She worked at the house giving tours in 1972, when she was seventeen. She says that there are a lot of stories about the place that are not told during tours. One is that it may well have been the first house of ill repute in the United States. “After all,” she says, “it is on Pleasure House Road.” She also tells of the resident who shot himself in the head halfway up the stairwell sometime in the 1700s. “We never talked about that to visitors, but it may be his ghost which comes back,” Cindy adds. “Actually, there was more than one violent death in the house. A psychic came through one day and said she sensed an unhappy, trapped spirit.”
Cindy says that when she worked there, the curator told her they had a few spiritual readings and table tappings in the evenings and that at times the table would rock violently. On another occasion during that eventful summer, she recalls coming in one morning when the hostesses found all of the upstairs furniture pushed up against the walls, as if someone had cleared the room for a dance. “There were some heavy pieces of furniture, too. We couldn’t even move them.” Cindy also tells of the inexplicable cold drafts on one side of the kitchen during the July heat with no air conditioning in the house and of rush lamps that would “singe up” without being lit.
But the occurrence that convinced her beyond a doubt that there was a ghostly presence in the house took place just before closing late one afternoon as she took a group of about fifteen visitors to the master bedroom upstairs:
I was standing inside the doorway with my back to the room, talking to the group. All of a sudden, several of the women started screaming, and then they began running down the stairs. I turned around, and you could see the bed being depressed as if someone was sitting or lying down on it! This is the truth. There was a definite indentation at least a foot deep.
I began screaming, too. We all ran outside, and we closed the house for the day. A couple of the women later said they saw the vision of a small man on the bed. I didn’t see that, but I did see the impression being made. I became hysterical. It really upset me. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. My father, who is a minister, didn’t want me to go back to the house. He said you don’t mess with demons!
EDGAR CAYCE’S GHOSTS
He is universally recognized as the greatest American psychic of the twentieth century. He was also known as the “Sleeping Prophet,” the “Psychic Diagnostician” and the “Miracle Worker of Virginia Beach.” For more than forty years, Edgar Cayce helped save lives, cure incurable ailments and otherwise heal the sick through detailed “readings” he gave while in a trancelike state. Two-thirds of his more than fourteen thousand readings were medically related.
Though he had no more than an eighth-grade education, Cayce, while asleep, somehow had the ability to envision and diagnose the sicknesses, no matter how complicated, of people all over the country. Then, in precise, meticulous and sophisticated detail, he would prescribe the medicines and/or treatments essential to each patient’s return to full health. Often, such prescriptions included lengthy and complex medical terminology and, at times, obscure or long-forgotten remedies of which Cayce had no knowledge when awake. Astoundingly, of those cases verified by patients’ reports, 85 percent of the diagnoses were found to be completely accurate, and those who followed the prescribed treatments got the satisfactory results predicted in the readings.
Consider, for example, a few sample case studies. In one instance, he gave a reading for a man who had been confined to an insane asylum for three years following a nervous breakdown, caused, it had been suspected, by nervous tension. In the reading, Cayce said, “Through pressures upon nerve energies in the coccyx area and the ileum plexus, as well as that pressure upon the lumbar axis, there had been a deflection of coordination between the sympathetic and the cerebrospinal nervous system.”
He further diagnosed that the man’s condition had actually been damaged by a spinal injury incurred by a fall. He didn’t need psychotherapy. Instead, Cayce advised osteopathic adjustment and mild, specially outlined electrotherapy to normalize the disrupted nerve forces. The treatment was followed, and the results were dramatically successful. The man regained excellent health within six months and returned to a normal life.
Cayce’s wife, Gertrude, once suffered from what doctors had determined as incurable tuberculosis. He gave her a reading and prescribed a diet, some simple drugs and a bizarre, unheard-of treatment: she was to inhale brandy fumes from a charred oak keg. Remarkably, it worked, and Mrs. Cayce recovered from her “incurable” disease.
One of the most amazing cures effected by the readings involved a young girl who had suddenly gone mad. Her condition did not respond to any of the treatments administered at the hospital. In desperation, her parents turned to Cayce for help. In his sleep state, he described the trouble as an impacted wisdom tooth that was disrupting nerve and brain function. He said that when the tooth was removed, the trouble would disappear. He had never seen the girl. He was four hundred miles away from the hospital where she was staying, yet when a dentist examined her, the impaction was found exactly as outlined. The dentist removed the tooth. Four hours later, the girl had regained her normal state of mind and never again showed any symptoms of mental disturbance.
Edgar Cayce is widely recognized as the greatest American psychic in history. He also had numerous contacts with ghosts during his lifetime. Courtesy of the Association for Research and Enlightenment.
To further his work for the benefit of mankind—Cayce never profited in a material sense from his psychic powers—he founded in 1931 the Association for Research and Enlightenment at Sixty-seventh Street and Atlantic Avenue in Virginia Beach. Today, the ARE, headed by his grandson, Charles Thomas Cayce, has more than 100,000 members worldwide and is dedicated to physical, mental and spiritual self-improvement programs through researching and applying the information in Cayce’s psychic readings.
Eventually, in addition to medical diagnoses, the scope of his readings expanded to include data and advice on about ten thousand different subjects. These included such topics as world religions, philosophy, psychology, dreams, history, reincarnation, soul growth, diet and nutrition, spiritual development and the fabled lost continent of Atlantis, among others. When he died in 1945, Edgar Cayce left a legacy of readings that have stood the test of decades of intensive research, investigation and study. He remains the most documented psychic of all time.
Paranormal Experiences
Did Cayce ever have any encounters with spirits? Yes, says Charles Thomas Cayce. “I was only three when my grandfather died, so I can only tell you what I heard from members of the family and friends. My father, Hugh Lynn Cayce, and my uncle, Edgar Evans Cayce, mentioned stories about my grandfather communicating with ghosts. Are there such things as ghosts? The answer is yes. Some people are talented or gifted in ways of communicating with spirits. They are psychically talented in the same way a person may be musically or athletically gifted.”
Vada F. Carlson, in a short composition on the early life of Edgar Cayce titled “The Vision of the Promise,” said that Cayce saw and played with a whole group of ghostly playmates, both boys and girls:
It was disappointing to him that the grownups could not see the “play people” with whom he had so much fun, but Anna Seay, a small girl who lived nearby and came over to play with him, saw them as well as he did. She and Edgar played happily with them in woodsy places and in the cool shade of the barn. Edgar’s mother believed him when he told her about the invisible children. His mother was the one person in the world who completely understood him. One day she glanced out the window and saw them waiting in the yard for him. “Go play with your friend
s,” she told him. “They’re waiting.” It made Edgar very happy to know that she, too, could see the children.
Cayce, Carlson reported, seemed amazed that his spectral friends could run in the rain without getting wet, and he wondered why they always disappeared whenever adults came near. Once Edgar was talking and laughing in the field when his father came by and asked him who he was talking to. “My friends,” he told him. “Where are they?” asked his father. “Right here,” the boy said, pointing. But his father saw no one.
There are two specific references in Edgar Cayce’s authorized biography, written by his longtime friend Thomas Sugrue, relating to ghosts. One involved the death of his grandfather when Edgar was a small boy of five or six. They had been out horseback riding together, Grandpa in front and little Edgar behind him, holding on. They stopped at a pond to water the horse, and the boy slid off. Suddenly, the horse threw up its head, reared and plunged into deeper water. “We don’t really know what happened,” says Charles Thomas Cayce. “Perhaps it was frightened by a snake.” The horse swam to the other side of the pond and raced to a fence, failed to jump it and galloped back to the pond, with Grandpa hanging on.
This time, the horse stumbled as it entered the water, and Grandpa was thrown over its head, landing on his back. The horse got to its feet, reared again and brought the full force of its fore hooves down on the old man’s chest. Then it ran off. Grandpa’s head was underwater. Young Edgar called to him, and when there was no answer, he ran for help, frightened. By then, however, it was too late. His grandfather was dead. Edgar said that even at that moment he could still talk with his grandfather, but in the excitement and grief, no one listened to him.
Later, Sugrue wrote, Edgar would see his grandfather “sometimes in the barns, usually when the tobacco was being fired. Of course, grandpa wasn’t really there. You could see through him if you looked real hard.” Edgar could only tell his mother and grandmother about the apparitional sightings, because he knew that it would have angered his father.
A Divine Spectacle
The second reference in the Sugrue biography to Cayce’s spectral meetings occurred when Edgar was twelve years old. “When he was young, my grandfather spent a lot of time alone in the fields,” says Charles Thomas. He would go out often to read his Bible. One afternoon in May, as he sat alone in the woods, reading the story of Manoah, he became aware of the presence of someone else.
Edgar looked up and saw a woman standing before him. At first, peering into the sun after reading, he thought it was his mother. But then the figure spoke, and he realized it was someone he did not know. “Her voice,” wrote Sugrue, “was soft and very clear. It reminded him of music.” The woman told him that his prayers had been answered, and she asked him what he would like most of all, so that she might give it to him. At first, he could not speak. He was frightened, especially when he noticed that she had shadows on her back shaped like wings. She reassured him by smiling. Finally, he managed to say that “most of all, I would like to be helpful to others, and especially to children when they are sick.” Then, suddenly, the woman was gone.
Edgar ran home and told his mother of the ethereal experience. He said that maybe he had been reading the Bible too much and was losing his sanity. She told him that because he was such a good boy, “why shouldn’t your prayers be answered?” They talked about the meaning of the apparitional visit. It might mean, she told her son, that he was destined to become a doctor or a preacher or possibly a missionary. Only later, when he became fully aware of his psychic powers, did he realize the true intent of his experience. It meant that he was to use those powers in a positive way to help others.
And the first true clue to his great gift came the next evening. He had done miserably at school that day, particularly in his spelling lessons. When he couldn’t correctly spell the word “cabin,” his teacher made him stay after school and write the word five hundred times on the blackboard. His father heard about the incident, and that night he told Edgar that he was a disgrace to the family. After supper, the boy and his father sat for hours, poring over the lesson book, and Edgar’s answers were all wrong. Twice, Squire Cayce became so exasperated that he knocked the boy out of his chair.
Then, tired and sleepy, Edgar heard the voice of the woman he had seen the day before. She told him that if he could sleep a little, “we can help you.” He begged his father to let him rest. He reluctantly agreed, telling Edgar that it would be his last chance. The squire then went into the kitchen for a few minutes, and Edgar almost instantly nodded off. When his father came back, Edgar woke up and told him that he knew his lessons. And he did. He got every word right. Not only that, he knew the assignment for the next day. In fact, by sleeping on his book, he had somehow, inexplicably, memorized every word and picture on every page in the book. He could envision the word, where it was on the page and what the illustrations were. When he spelled “synthesis” perfectly, the squire lost his temper and struck him again.
When Edgar told his mother about the episode the next day, and still knew every word on every page in the book, she said to him that she was sure the lady he had envisioned was keeping her promise. After that, Edgar would take other schoolbooks to bed, put them under his pillow and sleep on them, and the next day he would know everything in the book. When his befuddled father asked him how he did it, he told him that he didn’t know, but it worked. Was the angel an apparition or a dream? “I’m not sure,” says Charles Thomas. “But I was told it was something he experienced while he was awake, so I don’t think it was a dream.”
Talking with the Dead
Cayce apparently had a number of encounters with ghosts during his adult years as well, and although this is not specifically addressed in his readings, Charles Thomas says that his father, Hugh Lynn Cayce, remembered Edgar talking about such incidents at times. In a lecture series, in fact, Hugh Lynn told of the gentle tapping one evening at a downstairs window. Edgar rose from his bed to go down and see who it was. It was an apparition, because Hugh Lynn wrote: “It seemed to Edgar a perfectly natural procedure to get up, go downstairs, unlock the front door and let in a rather diffident young woman—who had been quite dead a few years!”
The woman told Cayce that she had died of a toxic throat infection without fully realizing she was dead and that she was having a terrible time adjusting to “the other side.” In this confused state, she had haunted Cayce’s former photographic studio in Selma, Alabama. When she found out that he had moved to Virginia Beach, she had traveled there to see if he could help her. He did. Hugh Lynn said that his father taught her how to release herself from what some people call “the earthbound condition” and to move forward in her path of development. “Edgar Cayce both saw and heard this girl,” Hugh Lynn said. “Actually, he saw through her, because she wasn’t exactly solid, but she was solid enough to ask for his help and to tap on the window loud enough to attract his attention.”
Hugh Lynn himself, along with other members of his family, experienced a ghostly visitation in their house in Virginia Beach shortly after Squire Cayce, Hugh Lynn’s grandfather, died. They heard “puttering around” upstairs when no one was up there. Edgar told everyone not to worry, that it was just his father “returning” to straighten out some papers before he “left.” Edgar said to just leave him alone and he would be gone pretty soon. But Hugh Lynn couldn’t resist the temptation. “I heard the noise so clearly,” he said later. “I insisted on running upstairs to check.” As he reached the landing, before getting to the top of the stairs, he felt a presence that he described as “a cold area, with a feeling like cobwebs.” Hugh Lynn said that “every hair on my head stood at attention.”
One evening in the fall of 1933, Edgar was alone downstairs in his Virginia Beach house, listening to the radio, when suddenly the room got icy cold, and he felt something “uncanny or unusual” taking place. When he looked toward the radio, he realized that a friend of his, who had been dead for several months, was sitting in front of
the radio. Edgar said, “He turned and smiled at me, saying, ‘There is the survival of personality. I know! And a life of service and prayer is the only one to live.’” Cayce added,
I was shaking all over. He said nothing more and just seemed to disappear. I turned off the radio. It still appeared as if the room was full of some presence. As I switched off the light and climbed the stairs, I could hear many voices coming from the darkened room. Jumping into bed and shivering from the cold, I aroused my wife. She asked me why I hadn’t turned off the radio. I assured her I had. She opened the door and said, “I hear it. I hear voices.” We both did.
Cayce wrote of the experience in a short monograph. He noted in it that this particular friend had been a corporate executive, and when the two of them had gotten together they often discussed whether or not there was a survival of personality after death. Cayce said that the friend would usually close the talk by saying, “Well, whichever one goes first will communicate with the other.”
The most frightening paranormal manifestation Edgar Cayce ever experienced occurred in June 1936 on a bright sunny day, when he was hoeing in his garden. He heard a noise he described as sounding like a swarming of bees. Startled, he looked up and saw in the sky a chariot drawn by four white horses. Then he heard a voice saying, “Look behind you.” When he did, he saw a man with a shield, helmet, knee guards and a cape, clad in burnished silver. The phantom figure raised his hand in salute and said, “The chariot of the Lord and the horsemen thereof.” With that, the vision vanished. Cayce was so upset that he bolted into the house and locked himself in his study. Hours later, when he emerged, he said that what he witnessed signaled the approach of World War II and the death of millions.
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