fresh tomatoes, and cake. Outside of town they parked at the foot of the towering rock formation and made the rest of the journey up Pilot Rock on foot. As was customary on this day, and on the many dates they would have in the future, they were accompanied by a chaperone. Their Pilot Rock picnic was followed by a more adventurous trip to a mineral spring (boys and girls bathed separately) and then an exploration, by lantern light, of an abandoned mine.
Edgar and Gertrude soon became a couple, joining one another at parties, church socials, presentations at the Union Tabernacle, and shows at Holland’s Opera House. Both greatly enjoyed sitting in the bleachers whenever the Hopkinsville Moguls took the baseball field. Gertrude’s brother, Lynn Evans, played shortstop. Sunday mornings were devoted to church—Edgar attending the Christian Church and Gertrude the Methodist Church. Afterwards, Edgar would ride his bicycle to The Hill, and they would sit together on the large veranda or in the parlor playing games or reading out loud from books that he had brought from Hopper Brothers.
As a future in-law would later write, theirs was an appeal of opposites. “He [was] excitable, earnest, born of extremes, a social outsider; and she—calm inquisitive, practical, an embodiment of southern gentility. He became charismatic and extroverted [as their relationship developed]; she kept her own counsel. Their immediate rapport held their relationship intact through one crisis after another.”
The first crisis was the disapproval of the senior Salters. Edgar wasn’t educated, had no refinement, and most important couldn’t raise a family working as a bookstore clerk. Even when, several months into the courtship, Edgar received a substantial raise at the bookstore, he was still having difficulty supporting his parents. Leslie hadn’t yet found a job, and Edgar’s mother earned money taking in laundry and working as a seamstress. His sisters helped out as well, but Edgar was the primary breadwinner.
The younger Salter generation—Ethel, Hugh, Lynn, and others—however, embraced Edgar as a brother. They truly enjoyed his company as he did theirs. Hugh and Lynn also engaged him in ways that few others dared. They challenged him to psychically read a deck of playing cards face down (which he did without apparent difficulty). They also tested his uncanny ability to find lost objects (which he invariably was able to do) and to read unopened letters. To them, he wasn’t a freak, but a wonder to behold.
Edgar and Gertrude at the house known as The Hill, c. 1902.
Gertrude’s aunt Carrie wasn’t interested in these activities, but she, too, appreciated his unique abilities. She was more fascinated by his experience with the angel, and how, when praying, he sometimes heard heavenly music. Feeling secure in her company, he shared aspects of himself he had kept hidden. Among other things, he revealed that he could sometimes see colors or patterns of colors around people when the person was feeling strong emotions.
Gertrude didn’t embrace this part of Edgar’s life. Concerned, she discussed the matter with one of her college professors. He told her in no uncertain terms that Edgar would become mentally unstable if he continued to experiment and indulge in psychic-related activities. Likely he would one day have to be committed to the Hopkinsville asylum. This was a particularly difficult thing for Gertrude to put out of her mind. She had only to step out on the veranda of her house to see the asylum’s spires, built by her grandfather, on the horizon. They became a constant reminder of what might be. Unable to remain silent on the matter, she finally discussed the subject with Edgar. He told her the truth. He didn’t like or understand the strange abilities he seemed to possess and wanted nothing more than to live a normal life. He also promised not to engage in further experimentation.
Two incidents, however, left Gertrude frightened. One Sunday evening, when Edgar was nodding off on the sofa in the family’s parlor, Gertrude told him to “go to sleep.” Edgar immediately went to sleep and couldn’t be woken up that night or the following morning and afternoon. Not until a frantic and frightened Gertrude shouted, “Edgar, wake up!” did he instantly open his eyes, acting as if minutes, not an entire day, had passed. Somehow or another, Edgar’s unconscious self had responded to her words as a command. It was as if her voice had a hypnotic effect upon him.
Another curious incident took place at the Cayce’s home on Seventh Street. On a particularly cold winter night, Edgar and a friend from out of town were returning from a revival meeting at the Tabernacle. The plan was for his friend to spend the night with Edgar in his bedroom. But when they walked into the Cayce house, they were surprised that extended family had unexpectedly dropped in from Beverly. Leslie had requisitioned Edgar’s bedroom, and there was no place for him or his friend to sleep. Edgar was steaming mad. This was his bedroom. Further, he was paying the rent on the house. While Edgar and his father exchanged angry words, Edgar’s friend bid a hasty retreat.
Edgar, fully dressed, went to sleep on the sofa in the living room. As he later told the story, which was corroborated by family members, at some point after everyone had gone to bed, the sofa upon which Edgar slept burst into flames. He ran outside and rolled in the snow, putting out his burning clothes. By this time everyone else in the house had awakened and helped to haul the burning sofa out the front door as well. As Edgar had not been smoking, the lamps were extinguished, and the sofa had not been near the stove, the cause of the fire remained a mystery. However, evidence suggested that the fire had started in Edgar’s clothes before spreading to the sofa and that somehow or another, the incident was directly connected with Edgar’s state of mind.
But as he and the Cayce family, and Gertrude too, would one day experience when they entered the photography business, fires had a strange way of igniting under unusual circumstances when Edgar was angry. Two of Cayce’s four photo studios would burn down, and a third suffered serious fire damage. In later years, special efforts would be made to fireproof the various storerooms which housed the Cayce trance readings.
The impact that such incidents had on Gertrude were more profound than commonly thought. She would be the last of her family members to receive or witness a trance reading. For the first eighteen months of their courtship and for years to come, she and Edgar would not talk about or discuss anything related to his psychic gifts. This was how she wanted it, and it may have been a condition when Edgar, on March 7, 1897, days before his twentieth birthday, proposed to seventeen-year-old Gertrude.
“It’s true that I love you,” she told him. “But I will have to think about it.”
Edgar naturally wanted to know when he would have an answer, and a part of him still believed she wouldn’t accept his proposal. There were times when Gertrude looked at him, he said, as if he were “a strange fish that ought to be thrown back.”
Perhaps, even in their relative youth, both suspected that theirs would never be a normal life together. They would never simply be Edgar and Gertrude. There would always be a third unseen “other,” what in years to come would simply be called “the Source.” It seemed at times to threaten to end their relationship and as events would unfold, was ultimately what held them together.
On the evening Edgar proposed to her, however, Gertrude was holding her ground for a different reason. One of her aunts had counseled reserve in matters of the heart. She shouldn’t seem too eager. Gertrude went to a calendar in the parlor, closed her eyes, and put her finger on a date. “I’ll tell you on the twelfth.”
Five days later, in a driving rain, Edgar arrived back at The Hill on horseback. Gertrude, after giving the matter consideration, said she would marry him. As Edgar later related the story, he didn’t know what to do next. She was standing in front of him, waiting for him to kiss her. When she asked him why he hesitated, he explained that he had never kissed a woman before. Gertrude showed him how.
The matter of how her voice, in particular,
