about the angel’s visit. To have done so would surely have further upset Lulu and the rest of the family, and even if he had felt up to facing an interrogation at home and the one that would inevitably have followed at church, he didn’t feel he had the skills to convey the intensity of his vision or to avoid public mockery. “I had no way of knowing which was more real,” he later confessed, “the vision of the lady or the pillow I rested my head upon.”
Many more years would pass before he was able to understand his vision in the broader context of his childhood experiences. Edgar concluded that he had been born with special abilities and that as a youth he frequently experienced a reality that existed beyond his five senses. That the angel who appeared in his bedroom was strikingly similar to an illustration in his aunt’s Bible didn’t invalidate the experience, nor did seeing his dead grandfather dressed in the same long coat he wore out into the fields. Such visualizations were the only means by which a psychically gifted adolescent could interpret what he would, as an adult, experience when he entered a hypnotic trance.
Did his Aunt Lulu become convinced that her nephew’s visions were a gift from God and not the work of the Devil? Unfortunately, about this—the earliest documented long-term relationship Edgar had with someone besides his mother and father—few intimate details are now known. All that can be said with certainty is that Lulu and the vast majority of the Cayces in Beverly were loath to discuss or even say what later became of Eddy when he moved from Beverly. Even decades later some extended family members believed that Edgar and his trance readings had sullied the family name. Parishioners at Liberty Church, well into the 1950s, were reluctant to acknowledge that he had once been the sextant.
Lulu’s role in the Cayce story, however, would be substantively different from that of her other Beverly relatives or the Cayce family’s neighbors. In January 1893, when Edgar’s father, Leslie, had lost his share of the family inheritance and moved his wife and their three daughters to Hopkinsville, sixteen-year-old Edgar remained behind in Beverly. That he chose to live with Lulu and Clinton and work their farm for the next nine months is indicative of the love and trust that existed between them. Lulu’s side of the family was also the first to accept what they referred to as his “calling.” Lulu’s sister was the first of the extended Cayce family members to receive a dedicated trance reading, followed by Lulu’s husband, Clinton, and eventually Lulu herself at age sixty-five.
Bedridden, she had contracted a life-threatening congestive condition and couldn’t stop coughing. Her nephew, then living in Virginia Beach, went into trance, immediately diagnosed her condition, and recommended a unique blend of medicinal herbs, hot packs, and spinal adjustments. Days later she was back on her feet, and in two months she was cured. Though she personally didn’t write to thank Edgar or reference to friends and neighbors that she had had a reading, Clinton did so on her behalf. Further, after Lulu and Clinton retired and moved to Hopkinsville, they would always invite Edgar to stay with them on his yearly visits back to Kentucky. As she and Clinton finally acknowledged by welcoming him home, God works in mysterious ways.
ANNA AND BARNETT SEAY:
TOGETHER AGAIN
The ghostly appearance of Tom Cayce was the start of a revolving door of spirit entities in Edgar’s life. His first childhood playmates were the “make-believe” kind—so his parents believed. Only the “Little Folk,” as Eddy referred to them, were not your usual imaginary friends. They had names, distinct personalities, and they told him stories about Egypt and Persia—subjects not ordinarily discussed by rural farm children in Beverly. The only things that troubled Eddy were the facts that the Little Folk never seemed to get wet when it rained and they didn’t like being seen by other people. They would disappear. Troubled by their precocious child’s overly vivid imagination, Edgar’s parents were relieved when Eddy made friends with neighbor Barnett Seay’s daughter. Hallie, a petite dark-haired girl a year older than Edgar, was called “Little Anna” because she shared the same first name as her mother.
Little Anna and Eddy were always together. In the winter they would run through the fields trying to catch snowflakes and play under a covered bridge. Their summer activities included chasing dragonflies and picking flowers, playing on the banks of Little River, or watching the farmers at work. As Edgar later told the story, the Little Folk liked Anna as much as he did—only she got to know them better because she was always asking them questions.
Edgar and Anna’s favorite hideout was in the rafters of a neighbor’s barn, where they hollowed out a space for themselves in a haystack and played house together. Anna was his wife, he was her husband, and the Little Folk were their children.
On one occasion they borrowed a neighbor’s flat-bottomed skiff and drifted downstream on Little River, where they came upon a small island near a fork in the river. Here, too, they were joined by the Little Folk. But as Edgar later related the story, they were also joined by creatures that were not much larger than insects. He called them “sprites” as they gave off unusual sparkling colors. He and Anna didn’t get to visit with them long because they didn’t like to play with children or, for that matter, any other humans.
Little River in Beverly, Kentucky, where Edgar and Little Anna played together.
Edgar’s family naturally dismissed the notion of sprites, but Edgar never did. Like the vision of the angel and the Little Folk, they were all part of the multifaceted spirit dimension. Only sprites, Cayce came to believe, were “energy forms” which lived in and among plants and trees and played an integral role in their growth process. Just as the Little Folk appeared to him as children, the sprites appeared to him as twinkling stars, which was how he, an adolescent, could best understand or decode what he observed in his mind’s eye. That Edgar shared the experience with another, Little Anna, made it all the more real to him.
The eighteen months Edgar spent with Little Anna were the happiest of his childhood. They ended when Leslie sold the cabin where they were living and moved into a hunting lodge several miles from the Seay homestead. He and Little Anna’s separation was made permanent when she contracted and died of pneumonia. Edgar was reported to have walked six-and-a-half miles through deep snow to be with his friend when the end came, only to arrive too late to say goodbye. She was buried in a small coffin near her home in Beverly, where she was joined a month later by her father, Barnett Seay, who is believed to have died from pneumonia contracted while nursing her. The remaining members of the Seay family eventually sold the Beverly farm, and their descendants settled in Virginia and California.
This story, however, does not end with a bereft young boy and the tragic death of his only friend. As with Edgar’s grandfather, Little Anna, too, would make another appearance, only not as a delicate brown-haired young girl with whom he had explored Little River.
Nearly five decades after Little Anna died, Edgar Cayce received a letter from a twenty-nine-year-old bookkeeper, Beatrice Coffing, from Altadena, California. She had read an article about Cayce’s medical clairvoyance in “Miracle Man of Virginia Beach,” which had run in the popular Coronet Magazine. She sought and then received trance advice from Cayce on behalf of her fiancé, Richmond, a violinist and music teacher, suffering from a blinding case of cataracts.
Edgar, then sixty-two years old and living in Virginia Beach, provided a remarkable medical diagnosis. He described her fiancé’s condition as stemming from an injury his mother had sustained in pregnancy, which had resulted in his premature birth—information which had
