were like musical notes,” he later described the experience.
Edgar spent many years pondering the relationship between prayer and music, but it was not until he was an adult that he articulated what he believed in a public lecture. He compared a single person praying to a musical note, rising toward heaven. Two people praying together could create a chord or harmonic, and a roomful of people praying together could create a divine symphony. He would further refer to Jesus as the Master Musician.
Exactly what Lulu thought of his experience is anyone’s guess. A pinched and humorless woman, as described by some, she and her husband, a third generation farmer and Beverly’s postmaster, were also deeply empathetic. When Carrie and Leslie were unable to care for Edgar, Lulu and Clinton took Edgar in and briefly saw to his education, something which proved quite challenging.
Edgar at the Beverly School, (back row, 3rd from left, in front of a window).
As more than one of his teachers would note, the most frightening thing about Edgar was his ability to press his head against a book, close his eyes, and somehow know the book’s entire contents, right down to where on a page a particular word or paragraph could be found. The same was true with unopened letters. He had only to handle an envelope to know what was inside—a talent that soon earned him a nickname, the Freak. These were especially strange abilities for a young boy who had difficulty learning to read or paying attention in class.
Like other accounts of his strange abilities, skeptics would dismiss such stories as fabrications intended to burnish what later became legend. The historical record, however, provides startling evidence otherwise. As a young teen, encouraged by his father who wished to show off his son’s talents, Edgar performed in front of audiences of forty or more people, including the mayor of nearby Hopkinsville and a U.S. Congressman. Edgar recited, verbatim, a 110-page congressional speech.
Reading the Bible soon became the only subject that interested Eddy. This was triggered by a conversation that Edgar had had with a black woodcutter who lived on his grandfather’s old farm. People in Beverly called him “Crazy Bill” because he was, as Edgar himself later said, “not quite right in the head.” They happened to meet on his way home from school one day when Bill was clearing a tree that had fallen across the road. “I’m feeling as strong as Samson,” Bill declared, swinging his ax. As Edgar didn’t know who Samson was, Bill recounted the Old Testament stories of how the heroic Samson, invested by God with superhuman strength, pulled a temple down with his bare hands and subdued a lion.
Edgar now wanted to know all about the Bible. His mother and father didn’t own one, but Lulu did. She was especially pleased to let him handle her Bible and then to accompany him to Liberty Church where she said people studied it. That prayer was part of the equation excited him all the more.
Lulu’s Bible, handed down through her family, was quite large and heavily illustrated. She showed him woodcuts of the divinely inspired Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple and holding open the gaping jaws of a ferocious lion with his bare hands. Also among the illustrations was one of Archangel Michael with wings spread. Edgar soon asked for a Bible of his own, which was presented to him by Elijah Hopper of Hopper Brothers Bookstore in Hopkinsville where Edgar would one day work.
Edgar immediately tried to read the Bible. At first he couldn’t pronounce the names and had to have Lulu and then his mother follow along with him. Reading sessions would always end with a prayer. By early the following year Edgar could read many passages without help. He was especially drawn to the Old Testament stories of what today are considered supernatural or psychic phenomena. From age ten onwards, a Bible was seldom out of his reach, and he would read it cover to cover once each year of his life. He carried it with him so often that his mother sewed what he called a “hind pocket” on his overalls in which to protect it on his way back and forth to school or on long walks into the woods.
Edgar soon joined Liberty Church, part of the immensely popular Kentucky-based Disciples of Christ, which rejected all “man-made” creeds and accepted the Bible alone as its full and final authority. Aunt Lulu and Uncle Clinton, and other Cayces, would witness his baptism by immersion into the Little River at age twelve.
Lulu, no doubt, was relieved that he should take to church the way he did. He sat through the two-hour services, attended meetings of the church elders, and became the church’s sexton—a position that had never before or since been held by a child. He could also quote long passages and interpret scripture. Like his experience at school, however, his entry into the church presented unexpected challenges. The miracles of the prophets, he declared, were still possible. He knew because God had spoken to him through an angel.
The angelic encounter took place in his bedroom, after Edgar had spent a long day reading his Bible and asking how he could be of service to the Lord. He had eaten dinner with the family and had gone to bed at sundown as usual. His three younger sisters were fast asleep in the bed beside him when he suddenly awoke and saw what he described as a powerful light coming through the doorway.
I felt as if I were being lifted up. 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. I was sure it was my mother and called [out], but she didn’t answer. For the moment I was frightened, climbed out of bed, and went to my mother’s room. No, she hadn’t called. Almost immediately, after I returned to my couch, the figure came again. Then it seemed all gloriously bright—an angel, or what, I knew not, but gently, patiently, it said: ‘Thy prayers are heard. You will have your wish. Remain faithful. Be true to yourself. Help the sick, the afflicted.’
Edgar couldn’t go back to sleep. He instead walked outside and sat beneath his favorite willow tree, where he often went to read his Bible. He knelt, thanking God for answering his prayers and providing direction in his life. What he would do and how he was to prepare himself were questions he hadn’t thought to ask.
Three years would elapse before he summoned the courage to tell anyone 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