Eileen J. Garrett - Many Voices: Autobiography of a Medium

MANY VOICES

by EII.EEN J. GARRETT

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALLAN ANGOFF

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK

Copyright 1968 by Eileen J. Garrett

All sights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
most not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published on the same day in the Dominion of Canada
by Longman Canada Limited, Toronto.

Second Impression

Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number: 68-20947

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

EILEEN GARRETT holds no professional degrees and has no license to practice any of the healing arts, but she has helped and apparently cured hundreds of physicians, scientists, writers, editors, secretaries, psychiatrists, psychologists, bereaved parents and children, and the prime minister of a very large country. She has been doing it for fifty years with undiminished effectiveness and to the continued admiration, bewilderment, or consternation of some of the most eminent scientific investigators.

Mrs. Garrett is a medium, probably the greatest in decades, known all over the world in laboratories where careful investigators of the supernormal and the abnormal seek new facts about human behavior.

She makes no claims to supernatural powers, and yet she seems to perceive facts and events which completely elude most people. She can hold an envelope in her hand and by means of her psychometric powers can tell you with frightening accuracy that it belongs to an unhappy New Jersey girl who has had a disastrous affair with a young man and is now running off to Texas on a bus. A psychologist from the Union Theological Seminary in New York conducted this experiment in my presence in a laboratory recently, and he remarked that even though it had gone well, Mrs. Garrett might have been even more meticulously accurate about details had she not been so tired. He had tested her at other times, when she was rested, and she had scored perfectly.

Mrs. Garrett is a trance medium, and in the entranced state, as the disembodied voices of her controls speak, there come from her abstruse and technical facts and even deep personal secrets of men and women she knows nothing of in her normal waking state. She also seems to get messages from the dead when she is in trance. Recently she has been in touch with the daughter of a Midwestern newspaperman and literary critic who was killed in an automobile accident. The critic, once a skeptic about such phenomena, has forgotten his skepticism and is comforted by those communications Mrs. Garrett sends on to him from his daughter. She never knew the daughter and has never met the father.

Another skeptic was a famous Hollywood screenwriter. He met Mrs. Garrett for the first time in the 1930's, a few days before he was to undergo surgery for removal of a kidney. Depressed by the thought of the invalidism and the ugly death that possibly awaited him, he drove out to Lake Arrowhead with his wife in an effort to escape even momentarily from the horror of his own thoughts. But there was no escape to the calm he sought, for the hotel lobby was filled with people waiting to hear the London medium Eileen Garrett. The sick and depressed writer was "trapped," as he later put it; but it was too cold to go outside and too early to go to bed. There was nothing to do but get a couple of seats far back in the lobby so that he and his wife would only be forced to listen from a distance to this psychic, or sensitive, as some called her. But as the clear and mellifluous Anglo-Irish accents of the speaker reached to the outermost reaches of the lobby, the writer listened more and more intently and became increasingly impressed. She made psychic science as real as medical science, he confessed, and he was heartened by her humor when she remarked that her husband had left her because he had tired of living with her ghosts.

The next day the writer sought out Mrs. Garrett, and then he unburdened himself, as so many do in her presence, of his fears and anxieties. She calmed him and gave him new confidence. She knew he had one son and he would have another.

The kidney operation would be successful. Moreover, she continued, his mother was there in the room beside them, and she wanted her son to know all would be well. She then went on to tell him things about his mother "only I could have known," he wrote years later. "I made up my mind at that moment," he continued in a heartbreaking letter to her, "to live as full a life as possible.... I have carried out that purpose ever since. We have had two children.... I have given no thought to whether I had one or ten kidneys.... Then last summer, my son, who was a baby when I met you, was killed.... My whole world suddenly crumbled, and my wife and I have been left in a state of shock ever since.... He was to have entered Yale in September.... Since that day I have been able to find no peace whatever. At times I find living an almost unbearable burden.... One of my first thoughts was: I must get in touch with Mrs. Garrett. Perhaps she can help me.... I knew I must write you.... I know you must get hundreds of such letters, that you cannot possibly answer them all, that it is unreasonable to expect you to take on yourself the many burdens of grief.... If I could only feel that my son lives on somewhere, such life as is left to me might be made more bearable."

Mrs. Garrett replied in several long letters which brought great comfort to the father and mother. She described the boy accurately and even mentioned the personal belongings still in his room, and she concluded: "This energetic youngster of yours is closer to you now than he would have been had life ordained he should remain. I can only assure you that life continues to be a great adventure for him...."

These are the people who come to Mrs. Garrett wherever she goes. She travels widely, quietly, alone or with one or two very close friends, but somehow people know that she is coming, and they wait for her. She inevitably summons up stories of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the great theosophist who is said to have caused bells to tinkle whenever she approached. But Mrs. Garrett is more impressive, for unlike the Russian priestess, who claimed to be in touch with her mahatmas deep in the fastnesses of the Himalayas, Mrs. Garrett insists she is quite earthbound. I have been with Mrs. Garrett in Boston and Washington, in Palm Beach and Dublin, in London and Rome, in Paris, Nice, Barcelona, and many other places, and always I noted that troubled men and women called or left messages or waited in the lobbies of hotels, hoping for a sitting or a word of solace or encouragement.

She does not publicize this aspect of her work, and despite many interviews with newspapermen, she remains wary of them and their sometimes outrageous misinterpretation of the psychic factor in behavior. But from time to time her powers and her work break through to the newspapers and popular magazines despite her resistance and her abhorrence of the melodramatic. She could not, for example, restrain the press when the facts of her sance of October 7, 1930 , in London became known. That was three months after the death of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and two days after the crash of the British dirigible R-101 in France. The Director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, Harry Price, known as the Ghost Hunter, asked Mrs. Garrett if she would try, in trance, to communicate with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for Australian newspaperman Ian Coster. Mrs. Garrett, Price, his secretary, Ethel Beenham, and Coster met at the laboratory and prepared for the experiment. "Mrs. Garrett," wrote Coster in a magazine article later, "was in an armchair yawning her head off, the rest of us were at a table, Miss Beenham with her notebook. The medium closed her eyes and went on yawning. Her body seemed to slump. She breathed heavily and relaxed into a sort of mournful slumber, tears flowing flown her cheeks.... She was 'entranced.'... Then she spoke in a strange voice...." Her control, Uvani, spoke through the medium, and what followed was not a message from Conan Doyle but rather the agitated voice of Flight Lieutenant H. C. Irwin, captain of the R-101, crying, "The whole bulk of the dirigible was... too much for her engine capacity.... Useful lift too small. Gross lift computed badly.... Elevator jammed. Oil pipe plugged...." On and on went the voice of the dead Irwin, with quantities of technical details, all of which were noted verbatim by Miss Beenham. And finally Conan Doyle did come through after Irwin went silent. Experts at the Royal Airship Works in Bedford, who later read the notes of the sance, called it "an astounding document," replete with confidential details. There were even those in England who suggested arresting Mrs. Garrett on suspicion of espionage, so expert was her apparent knowledge of the mechanics of dirigibles. But, in truth, she knew nothing of airship mechanics then, as now. Harry Price had selected her over all other mediums in England because, as he explained, "she does not become emotional. She takes an academic interest in her powers, but has no explanation to offer concerning them. Not the slightest suspicion attaches to her name or integrity as a medium, and she has achieved some brilliant successes." As for the miracles attributed to her, she answers now in the same words she wrote long ago: "My investigations of the phenomena of mediumship convince me that these are not new or extraneous sensitivities but rather refinements of the physical senses all men possess. I cannot therefore accept the usual explanation of mediumship as an abnormal or supernormal development."