Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Jerome Clark
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Karen Maralee described seeing dancing, blue-colored tiny fairies whose singing was like that of children (iStock).
Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” was born on March 18, 1877, near Beverly, in Christian County in southwestern Kentucky, a few miles from the Tennessee border. He was the son of Leslie Cayce—also called “The Squire,” he was a small landowner and sometime justice of the peace—and his wife, Carrie. Besides Edgar, the Cayces had four daughters. Two others, a boy and a girl, died in infancy.
From a very early age, Cayce was not quite like anybody else. When young Edgar—”Eddy” then—was four, a freak accident killed his beloved grandfather Tom Cayce as the two were out riding horses. Soon, while living temporarily with an aunt and uncle as his parents cared for Tom’s widow, Eddy claimed to hold regular conversations there with his grandfather.
In life, according to family tradition, Tom possessed remarkable psychic powers. In death, according to his grandson, he resumed his old habit of watching over farmhands as they hung tobacco to dry in the barn. Though the workers were unaware of his presence and his directions to them now were only—if that—intuitively grasped, Eddy related, he was able to perceive his grandfather’s apparitional form in beams of sunlight that shone through cracks between the ceiling rafters. Cayce biographers allege that the boy unnerved relatives when he related obscure, closely held family-history matters which he insisted his grandfather had imparted in their conversations in the barn. His devout relatives feared that he was under the devil’s influence.
At the age of three, he stumbled and fell on a board with a protruding nail, which penetrated his skull and pierced his brain. Fortunately, his father, who saw it happen, was there immediately to remove the nail, and his mother bandaged him after pouring turpentine into the open wound. Eddy recovered soon, at least to appearances, and soon resumed his normal youthful activities. This was not the only occasion in his youth that Cayce would suffer a potential (or actual) brain injury, possibly affording at least a partial explanation of the extraordinary states of altered consciousness and perception that would recur throughout his lifetime.
After suffering a head injury, Edgar Cayce said he could see a variety of spiritual beings, including fairies and sprites (BigStock).
In his fourth year “little folk” became his frequent companions. Cayce would maintain all of his life that they were not imaginary playmates but spirit entities—mostly, the souls of boys and girls, first only seven or eight in number, awaiting reincarnations into their physical bodies—who were there to prepare him for challenges and difficulties that he would encounter in later years. When he moved in with his uncle and aunt, the number of spirit entities multiplied as relatives, including parents, joined them. They were no longer interested in childish pursuits; now they wanted to teach him. The adult Cayce claimed that while the beings were invisible to everybody else, his friend Hallie “Little Annie” Seay, one year older than Eddy, also saw them. They liked her and enjoyed answering her many questions.
Once they encountered a different variety of little folk. One day, they noticed an unmoored boat that had drifted on to the sand along Little River. On impulse they boarded it and sailed it on the water till they came to a tiny island. They climbed out of the boat and proceeded to entertain themselves with their usual pursuits. In short order their supernatural friends joined them.
At one point, Cayce would write in his autobiography, the spirits showed them some smaller entities of varying colors and shapes. He described them as fairies or sprites. They were unfriendly, evincing no interest in human beings in general and children in particular. Cayce’s account accords more closely to the traditional fairies of world folk belief than to the sentimental fairies of popular Victorian children’s literature to which young Eddy would have been exposed. Little Annie, who died of pneumonia in January 1892, never provided an independent account, and Cayce’s claims about her involvement rest solely on his own testimony.
Another defining early experience took place in 1889, after he’d retired to his bedroom after a day spent in good part reading scripture. In the middle of the night, he found himself ascending slightly into the air as a “glorious light as of the rising morning sun seemed to fill the whole room and a figure appeared at the foot of my bed.” Surprised and confused, Eddy could only deduce that it was his mother, but he got no answer when he called out her name. When the figure vanished, he went off to check his mother’s whereabouts. She told him she had not been in his room. On his return the apparition made a second appearance. This time Eddy recognized it, surely not coincidentally, as an angel bearing a noteworthy resemblance to one illustrated in his aunt’s Bible, with which he was well familiar. The angel told him his prayers had been answered, urged him to be faithful and true, and predicted that he would help the sick and afflicted.
Eddy attracted attention in his area for his keen intelligence, eloquent speaking, and remarkable powers of memorization, sometimes so fantastic as to seem clairvoyant (as when he allegedly committed books and documents to memory by sleeping—or even just laying his head for a few moments — on them). Though most who knew him thought of him as good-hearted and friendly, he was seen by some as different and thus—in their fearful judgment—an intolerable presence. The religious thought he had the devil in him, and the more secular diagnosed him as mentally ill. All of this led to trouble from teachers, classmates, and church folk (though Cayce was a Bible-memorizing Christian, if an unconventional one, to the end of his life). Conflict and hostility drove him from school by the eighth grade, and he never returned. From then on, his education would be an autodidact’s, informed by wide if erratic reading as well as by the many and diverse people he would meet in the decades ahead.
One afternoon in November 1892, toward the end of his school career, another pivotal life event occurred. During recess he was playing ball with schoolmates when a baseball struck him in the lower spine. In his sister Annie’s account—she was on the playground at the time—Eddy fell over, then got back on his feet, apparently unhurt. Back in his class, however, he began to behave strangely, speaking up, joking, and insulting others, actions uncharacteristic of Eddy in his normal state. On the way home he jumped in front of cars, rolled in the ditches, and smiled maniacally all the while. When he continued to conduct himself in this unusual fashion at home, his mother angrily ordered him to bed after dinner.
As soon as he lay down, he seemed to enter yet another unusual state. While still apparently fully conscious, he embarked on an odd, rambling discourse, covering a range of subjects. One was a secret illicit relationship between two of the county’s most respected men—something, his father believed, Eddy could not have known about. Once he shouted, “Hooray for Cleveland!,” announcing that Grover Cleveland was winning the Presidential race, as in fact he was, even though news of his victory did not reach the rural district until later. Most significantly, however, Eddy provided specific directions to his parents on how they might cure him of his affliction. They were to gather herbs, corn mush, and other household food items and place them in a poultice to the back of his head. The request, coming from someone who was already making them feel uneasy, so unnerved the Cayces that they refused to comply. More accepting of ostensible psychic communications, Eddy’s grandmother Sarah Cayce, however, moved promptly, and by morning the boy was well.
ROBSON’S ISLAND
The S.S. Jesmond, carrying a cargo of dried fruits, was sailing in the open Atlantic on its way to New Orleans one night in early March 1882. Its captain was the Ireland-born David A. Robson. This much of the story seems undeniably true. It may also be true that while at latitude 26° north and longitude 22° west, Robson and his crew noticed