The Spanish moss in Selma’s Live Oak Cemetery droops above the tombstones with nightmarish splendor. For a kid, the cemetery’s dirt roads were a bicycle racetrack by daylight. At night, the cement angels, tombstones, and artificial flowers were the ideal backdrop for a seance.

Just one block away was my grandparents’ house, and the proximity was pretty eerie on those evenings when my grandmother would turn her attention from the National Enquirer and spread out a deck of Tarot cards to read fortunes. My grandmother even said she had seen her mother’s ghost roaming through the yard in the months immediately following her death. As for the Tarot, I always assumed it was only a game. Little did I know of my grandmother’s flirtation with mysticism decades earlier when she contacted psychic Edgar Cayce for one of her myriad of hypochondriatic ailments. Cayce convinced her, and many others, that he could divine oil.

Known as “the Sleeping Prophet,” Cayce was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1877. He maintained an astonishingly accurate rate of healing the sick, if the thousands who claimed to have been cured by him are to be believed. From 1901 to his death in 1945, Cayce gave more than 14,000 “psychic readings,” sessions where Cayce put himself under hypnosis to prescribe methods —ranging from change of diet to surgery—for a variety of physical impairments. Most of the readings are on record in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

 

Renowned American psychic Edgar Cayce healed thousands with his power to diagnose and heal illness while in a self-induced trance. Oddly, his mystic skills could never divine wealth.

Cayce developed a severe case of laryngitis at age 21, eventually turning to a traveling hypnotist for a cure. While in a trance state, Cayce began describing a cure for his own ailment, the laryngitis completely gone as he talked. Others began to seek out the mystic for treatment for respective maladies. Cayce eventually moved from healing pronouncements to interpreting religion and history. A devout Christian, Cayce was shocked to learn upon awakening that he had declared reincarnation to be the true nature of existence. In 1910, the New York Times featured a long article on Cayce’s unique abilities. He eventually dabbled with predicting the future, including the stock market crash of 1929. Other predictions have yet to come to pass, such as the resurfacing of the lost city of Atlantis and the destruction of New York and Los Angeles. He remains the subject of countless books and mystic literature.

 

Cayce moved to Selma, Alabama, in 1913 to open a photography studio. My grandmother’s sister Willie James Holston went to work for Cayce as a photograph retoucher several years later. She reportedly filled in as a stenographer on Cayce’s healing sessions from time to time. Years later, she and my grandmother told of acquaintances who had been cured by Cayce’s readings. Two years after Cayce moved to Selma, his son was blinded by an explosion of flashpowder. A local eye specialist, Dr. Eugene Callaway, who treated my family, was the first to examine the Cayce child. Doctors could do nothing for the boy, other than apply an ointment, so Cayce did a reading for his son. He suggested that tannic acid be included in the ointment, to which the doctor objected. But because Dr. Callaway believed the boy’s sight had been permanently impaired anyway, he relented. Two weeks later, the child regained his sight.

As Cayce’s psychic reputation grew, requests for readings increased. Although people were being helped, many were having a difficult time convincing doctors to cooperate with the treatments suggested by a psychic. Cayce decided to establish a hospital staffed with doctors, nurses, and therapists who would carry out the treatments he prescribed during readings.

To raise money for the hospital, Cayce formed a partnership with some wealthy Texans to drill for oil, which he would locate by placing himself in a trance state. Among the investors for the project was my grandmother. In 1921, Cayce wrote her a letter emblazoned with The Cayce Petroleum Company of Texas as the letterhead. Addressed to Mrs. E. H. Reynolds, it began: “At a meeting of the trustees of the Cayce Petroleum Company of Texas held on October 14, 1921 . . . it was also decided to sell some fifty thousand [stock] units at a reduced price, realizing the necessity of obtaining money quickly to take care of the production that we feel so certain of having.”

I stopped by Live Oak Cemetery recently. I stood over my Aunt Willie’s grave and thought about the afternoon that I was a pallbearer at her funeral. She had saved money her entire life to purchase a cherrywood casket, and on burial day my cousins and I marveled at its weight. Nearby lay my Aunt Elizabeth’s tombstone, with no death date. She’s still alive, but installed a six-foot slab anyway to preserve a spot in the family plot’s diminishing space. Then I stared at my grandmother’s tombstone and wondered how our family’s fortunes might have changed had Edgar Cayce made good on her investment. To this day I have no idea if Cayce healed my grandmother of her ailments, but he definitely never found her a drop of oil.

Cayce did eventually build a hospital in Virginia Beach in 1928. The Great Depression forced investors to pull out, closing the hospital’s doors in 1931. &