style="font-size:15px;"> “It’s all right now,” Cayce said, still in trance. “The condition is removed. The vocal chords are perfectly normal now. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal, and that after that the body awaken.”
Layne did as instructed. “The circulation will return to normal. After that the body will awaken.”
The red around Edgar’s neck faded to rose and then to pink. He woke up a few minutes later, sat up, reached for his handkerchief, coughed, and spat out blood. The blood that came out was not just a drop or two, but enough to soak the thin cotton cloth.
“Hello,” he said, in a clear voice. “Hey, I can talk.”
Edgar’s mother cried with relief. Leslie pumped Layne’s hand. Edgar’s sisters, Anne and Mary, who had been eavesdropping through the keyhole, also found “brother’s experience,” as they called it, “quite exciting!”
Edgar had no memory of the experience. He repeatedly asked to be told every detail of what had happened. What had Layne said? What did I say? How did I look? Unbelievable as the story sounded, his shirt collar was open at his neck, his handkerchief was bloodstained, and he could once again speak in a normal voice.
Layne had conducted Cayce’s first trance reading. He also made the observation which would result in the second. “If you can do this for yourself,” he told Edgar, “I don’t see any reason you can’t do it for others.”
With his voice restored, Edgar and Gertrude finally set their wedding date!
Edgar and Gertrude married on June 17th, 1903.
CARRIE HOUSE:
HER DYING INFANT
Edgar and Gertrude were married on Wednesday, June 17, 1903, in a small ceremony held in the bride’s rose garden. Among those present was Carrie Salter, herself recently married to the debonair Dr. Thomas House—a rising star in the Kentucky medical community. And it was she, not Gertrude, who championed Cayce’s psychic gifts when Edgar partnered with Al Layne, and she who steadfastly remained at his side and encouraged him to continue providing medical advice when Layne, under investigation by the board of the American Medical Association, left Hopkinsville to pursue a formal medical degree.
In contrast to Carrie, Gertrude was frightened by Edgar’s strange trance abilities. Better that her husband risk losing his voice than his sanity, she believed. She was also concerned about sharing Edgar with what became a growing number of physician researchers who, in secret, were experimenting with her husband and treating him as if he were some strange and exotic specimen, not a flesh and blood human being. Nor did she want this third other—the Source—interfering in their lives. She couldn’t very well have a fairy-tale marriage when her mate might suddenly drift off into a coma-like sleep and become some other person or worse still, might not wake from that sleep. And what of their children? Would they inherit this weird ability?
Carrie had no such concerns. She believed that Edgar was touched by the Divine and that a heavenly spirit spoke in and through him when he was in a trance. Her faith in him had also proven its value. In what may have been his earliest trance reading for a female, conducted by Al Layne, the Source advised Carrie not to undergo an abdominal surgery recommended by her doctors, which indeed turned out to be unnecessary. After Carrie’s marriage to Dr. House, the chief physician at the Hopkinsville’s mental asylum, the Source had also predicted that she would become pregnant, something that Dr. House and two specialists had said was physically impossible. Further, the Source had accurately foretold the date of birth and said she would deliver a boy. And the spiritual message that had accompanied Cayce’s prophetic trance discourses—that God’s love and forgiveness must be foremost in her heart—had inspired her to give up her position at Anderson’s Department Store and minister to the patients at the asylum as an RN working alongside her husband.
Most compelling of all was a reading Edgar subsequently gave to three-month-old Thomas House Jr. in November 1909. As Cayce had suggested in a previous trance session, the child’s delivery might be difficult with complications setting in. This turned out to be the case. Born prematurely, her child suffered from severe infantile spasms, nausea, and vomiting. His condition had deteriorated to a critical point when Carrie sent word to fetch Edgar in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he and Gertrude were operating a photography studio. Little Tommy Jr. was too weak from malnutrition to nurse from Carrie’s bosom or to even wrap his tiny hands around her fingers. She needed Edgar as never before.
Carrie’s husband, Dr. House, and two other physicians—Dr. Jackson, a general practitioner in Hopkinsville and Dr. Haggard, a pediatric specialist from Nashville, who had been attending the child since birth—believed that Thomas House Jr. had little or no chance of living through the night. Carrie wasn’t sure Edgar or anyone else could help her son—no more than Edgar himself was—but she wanted him to try.
Like most physicians in Hopkinsville, Dr. Haggard wanted no part of what he deemed “trickery.” Dr. Jackson shared his colleague’s skepticism, but as the family’s longtime physician, he had seen the inexplicable. Cayce, with Al Layne’s help, had provided trance advice that had helped a child recover from whooping cough and had correctly diagnosed a case of scarlet fever.
Caroline (Carrie Salter) House, c. 1907.
Edith Estella Smith, (Gertrude’s cousin), old Salter home place.
Western State Kentucky Hospital (the Lunatic Asylum built by Gertrude’s grandfather) where Dr. and Carrie House worked and where Gertrude feared Edgar might one day become a patient.
In what was deemed to be an even more startling trance discourse, Cayce had detailed the location of blood clots in a patient’s lung. And along with more routinely recommended treatments, he advised the use of state-of-the-art electromagnetic therapy. Physicians hadn’t followed up; such therapy had never been used before in Kentucky and was considered experimental at best. Jackson had been left wondering if the treatment might have helped. But it was too late now. The patient had died.
Dr. House also didn’t believe that Edgar or anyone else could diagnose illness in his sleep, but he, like Jackson, knew Cayce too intimately to believe that he was a charlatan. His in-law didn’t charge for his services, seek publicity, or encourage anyone to obtain trance readings. After Al Layne had left for medical school in 1904, people found their way to Cayce’s Bowling Green photo studio by word of mouth. House believed that the people who came to Cayce were predisposed that Cayce could help, and hence the people heard what they wanted to hear. Physicians working with Edgar did the rest.
Only a dying child, such as
