around which her life had previously revolved. She also hadn’t attended Edgar’s hypnotic sessions with Quackenboss, Girao, and Layne. Edgar’s public embarrassment on the Holland’s Opera House stage was humiliation enough.
With Edgar’s blessing, Layne convinced Leslie and Carrie to let him try one more experiment. On Sunday afternoon, March 31, 1901, less than two weeks after his twenty-fourth birthday, he and Layne retreated to the Cayce’s upstairs parlor. Edgar lay down on the family’s horsehair sofa, and Layne pulled up a chair to sit next to him. Edgar’s mother stood alongside Layne. Leslie was seated in a chair across from his son.
Edgar put himself into trance, as he had learned to do from having undergone so many previous experiments. Just as Edgar’s pupils began to dilate and his eyelashes fluttered and when he looked as if he was going “under,” Layne made his first suggestion.
“You are now asleep and will be able to tell us what we want to know,” Layne said. “You have before you the body of Edgar Cayce. Describe his condition and tell us what is wrong.”
Edgar began to mumble, then his throat cleared and he spoke. “Yes,” he said. “We can see the body.”
Layne told Edgar’s father to write down what was being said. Leslie scrambled to do so but was so disconcerted by what was happening to realize that a pad and paper were within easy reach. He instead ran into the kitchen and retrieved the pencil that was tied to the grocery list. Even so, he was too flustered to write anything coherent down on the paper. What Edgar said is today pieced together from the recollections of Edgar’s mother and Layne.
In the normal physical state this body is unable to speak due to partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords, produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect and may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition. That is the only thing that will do it.
Layne would note the curious way that Edgar was addressing himself in the third person. He also spoke more slowly than he normally would in a conscious state, enunciating each individual consonant and vowel as if he were translating from some foreign language.
“Increase the circulation to the affected parts,” Layne then commanded.
Edgar replied: “The circulation is beginning to increase. It is increasing.”
Layne leaned over to look at Edgar. Just as the “sleeping” Cayce had said, the circulation to his throat actually appeared to increase. He could see his neck begin swelling with blood to the point that Leslie was compelled to lean over and unbutton his son’s shirt collar. The upper portion of his chest, then throat, slowly turned pink. The pink deepened to become a fire-engine red. A full twenty minutes elapsed before Edgar cleared his throat and spoke again.
“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