Out of Body?
Hugh Lynn Cayce (1907-1982), Edgar Cayce’s eldest son, was an avid investigator of paranormal phenomena. In the early 1970s he wrote down some of his personal encounters with ghosts – including this experience as a young college student at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. The topic of life after death often led to spirited discussions amongst Hugh Lynn and his roommates, especially Thomas Sugrue. Tom would later write Edgar Cayce’s first biography: There Is A River (1942).
“You are nuts, Cayce,” Elias concluded, “to believe your ‘ole man can talk accurately about people at a distance. And you, Sugrue, are just as bad to believe in miracles.”
The argument had been going on for over two hours. Gus Elias, Tom Sugrue and I met frequently at the Post Office in Lexington, Virginia. We were all students at Washington and Lee University. A chance remark based on a letter from my father, Edgar Cayce, triggered a discussion on psychic phenomena. Tom had been drawn in because of his espousal of miracles of Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in France. Gus Elias prided himself on being an agnostic. He never missed a chance to set us straight on the impossibility of what he called natural laws being broken. We had argued a while standing and then sat down on the Post Office steps. Various students stopped to listen, then went on their way smiling. Freshmen were not really very bright anyway, but at least for the moment they were not walking on the grass.
Gus was sharp. It took both Sugrue and me to keep him at bay. On that day he came out ahead. Tom and I went back to the dorm to study, Gus went off to a dance at Natural Bridge, in those days of 1926, miles away over some very twisting roads.
I went to sleep that night still arguing in my mind with Gus over his pig-headedness on refusing to accept some of the stories of my father’s experiences as valid evidence for psychic power.
I became conscious with a weird sensation of realizing I must be dreaming. My flesh body lay sleeping on the narrow bed in my dormitory room, but in consciousness some part of me was sitting up. At least my mind was several feet above my body. I had a strange sense of freedom. By willing myself to move my consciousness, was able to instantly be in any part of the room. I moved to the molding near the ceiling. By closing my eyes, even now, it seems to me I can see again the accumulated dirt on that molding. Suddenly, remembering that I had read somewhere that you could only enter the flesh body through one of the holes in it, I tried to get my consciousness back into my sleeping form. It was easy and I didn’t have to use any of the holes. I could slide in and out at will, even come up thru the mattress. This was a remarkable feat for that mattress was not soft, rather very solid.
Suddenly, the room began to fill with what seemed to me to be a cloud. While my flesh body slept and even snored, I moved in consciousness to the middle of the floor. The cloud moved down on me. Without warning I heard Gus’ voice exclaiming, “Cayce, come up here. This is terrific. I gotta’ show you.” Then what I thought, at the time, was his hand came out of the cloud. I tried to move up to follow it as it was withdrawn. As my consciousness touched the cloud, I became frightened and snapped back into my body. Now all of me, consciousness and the flesh body sat up in bed. I began to wonder what kind of crazy dream I had been having. I saw, when the light was turned on, it was a little after 2 A.M.
As I sat there trying to figure out what had happened, someone pounded on the door. When I got up to answer, a friend of Gus’ who lived on our floor told me, “Cayce, you may want to get over to the hospital. They are bringing Gus Elias’ body in. He was killed at 12 o’clock in an automobile accident.
Through the years this experience has haunted me. Was I indeed out-of-body? Had Gus changed his mind about survival of bodily death?
