Edgar Cayce was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1877, where he lived with his family until his late teens. His childhood was mostly uneventful, according to Tom Sugrue, author of There Is a River, considered by Cayce’s family as the most accurate biography of his life. Raised in a Christian family, Cayce vowed at a young age to read the Bible from cover to cover every year of his life, and family members claim he did so until his death in 1945. Even as he immersed himself in metaphysical mysteries, he served for many years as a Sunday school teacher at the First Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach and later as a church elder.
The first inkling of Cayce’s psychic disposition occurred in 1889, when he was 11. A poor student, Cayce was having trouble with his spelling lesson. Family legend holds that he fell asleep on one of his schoolbooks and awakened with a photographic memory of the spelling words. According to Sugrue, who knew Edgar Cayce and interviewed him several times for his biography, Cayce’s first psychic reading occurred after he developed severe laryngitis. With his father and a local hypnotherapist watching, Sugrue says, Cayce went to sleep, and then, speaking clearly, diagnosed himself with partial paralysis of the vocal cords. Cayce then suggested his own cure, saying increased circulation to the affected area would resolve the condition. As the story goes, Cayce’s chest and throat became rosy red, and when he woke up, he was cured. As with all his readings, Cayce recalled nothing of what he said.
Thus began his singular life. In 1910, The New York Times published an article on Cayce with a sub-heading that read, “Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor when Hypnotized—Strange Power Shown by Edgar Cayce Puzzles Physicians.”
In 1925, at age 48, Cayce moved his family to Virginia Beach. “A reading told him to move,” says Edgar Evans Cayce, age 91, the younger of two sons. Healthy and alert, Edgar Evans still lives in Virginia Beach and plays “wallyball” (a form of indoor volleyball) three times a week. Edgar Evans did not follow in his father’s footsteps. He went to Duke (recommended by his father while in a trance), majored in electrical engineering, then worked for Dominion Virginia Power for 40 years. But he believes that his dad had special insights. He tells a story of being burned seriously in a fire when he was 7 and being unable to walk for three months. His father, in a hypnotic state, prescribed a treatment to heal his wounds—Edgar Evans doesn’t recall what it was. “I got well and was even able to play basketball, football, and baseball in school,” he says. He still tries to follow his father’s dietary strictures. He remembers when sacks of mail came to the house from people seeking readings. “He had to get an unlisted number because people would call in the middle of the night.” While Edgar Cayce led anything but a normal life, Edgar Evans says that he was a “normal [man] 90 percent of the time.”
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