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 not been provided to Cayce, but was later confirmed as true. Further, Cayce said that Richmond’s cataracts could be cured and recommended a treatment comprising of specific osteopathic spinal adjustments in his upper dorsal and cervical area and his taking Codiron, a health supplement composed of cod liver oil and iron with vitamins A, B, C, and G.
After undergoing these and other recommended treatments, his condition rapidly improved. As Beatrice and her fiancé reported several months later, for the first time in nearly half a decade he could read the notes on a page of sheet music. Before the New Year his cure was complete. So successful was the experience that Beatrice wrote to Edgar to request readings for herself and to say that she and her fiancé would be driving from California to Virginia, a distance of nearly three-thousand miles, with her fiancé behind the wheel, to thank Edgar in person.
Beatrice Coffing’s fiancé, Richmond Seay.
The information that came through in Beatrice’s reading was quite a surprise to the Cayce family for rarely did a trance session speak directly to events and karmic connections with Edgar’s childhood in Beverly. Beatrice, age twenty-nine, hadn’t even been born when Edgar, in 1893, had moved from Beverly to Hopkinsville.
Edgar Cayce and Beatrice Coffing in Virginia Beach.
Reincarnation, at this point in Cayce’s career, was not a new subject. In addition to upwards of nearly ten thousand medical readings, he had given several hundred “Life Readings,” in which a soul’s previous incarnations were identified and descriptions were given that would help the recipients of the reading understand how their behaviors and relationships in previous lifetimes impacted their present lifetime. In Beatrice’s case, many of those relationships in her previous lifetimes had been with Edgar.
Something highly unusual during the Life Reading happened when the reading began with the curious statement, “This isn’t the name! [But] yes, we have the records here of that entity now called Beatrice Coffing.”
Then, the reading continued:
In the present, then, we find that the entity is one of those that may indeed be said to be the consistent thinker