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Eileen Garrett

Because Eileen Garrett appeared to know so much about the mechanics of dirigibles some people in England even suggested she should be arrested on a suspicion of espionage. But she was considered by all who knew her to be a woman of absolute integrity and an exceptional medium. Price chose her to contact Conan Doyle which he said she eventually did because ‘she does not become emotional. She takes an academic interest in her powers, but has no explanation to offer concerning them.’

Eileen Garrett

She has been described as the most thoroughly investigated medium of modern times. Most of her life was devoted to encouraging research into mediumship and its meaning, and she frequently offered herself to journalist as a guinea pig in new experiments, being as curious about the outcome as the researchers themselves.

Her personality and appearance surprised many people who had fixed ideas as to what a medium should look like. In her youth she was Eton cropped and elegant; later she attracted many by her vivacious and outgoing personality. She married three times and lost three sons, one at birth and two through illness, but she also had a daughter who shared her interests and carried on her work at the Parapsychology Foundation which she founded in New York in 1951. Eileen Garrett was born in the historic town of Beauparc, County Meath (now in the Republic of Ireland) on March 17, 1893. One of the most familiar sights of her childhood was the Hill of Tara, ancient, mystic capital of Ireland. Her mother, Anne Brownell, who belonged to a stern Protestant family, had married a Catholic Basque named Vacho, and the religious strife that ensued led to tragedy. Eileen’s mother drowned herself two weeks after her birth and her father committed suicide a few weeks later. She was brought up by an aunt and uncle, who had just returned to Ireland after service in India. The tragedy left its mark, however. In later years she rejected religion and often became impatient with the dogmatic pronouncements of some Spiritualists.

Like many sensitive children, Eileen had playmates who were invisible to others. She went to school in Meath before being sent to a boarding school in Merion Square, Dublin, where painful loneliness alternated with the joy of discovering Yeats, Synge and Joyce. When her uncle (who had been both kind and understanding) suddenly died she felt as though there was no one in the world she could turn to. Two weeks after his funeral she had her first major paranormal experience, and described it in her autobiography Many Voices. She wrote: ‘One evening my dead uncle “appeared” to me in a vision, younger and more alert than I had known him; his Vandyke beard was well clipped and he stood strong and straight. He told me that in time I should leave my aunt and the farm and go to London. …’ From that moment on she became interested in the whole question of life after death.

She went to London as her uncle had predicted, married an architect when she was little more than a schoolgirl and in the years that followed lost two of the sons she bore him in an epidemic of meningitis, the third at birth. The experience drained her spiritually. Left alone a great deal by her husband and perturbed by the new sensations she felt both waking and dreaming, she decided she must make anew, busy life for herself. She opened a tea room in Heath Street, Hampstead, which prospered and finally became a meeting place for some of the most famous literary men of the age. She came to know D. H. Lawrence well.

With the outbreak of the First World War Eileen and her husband drifted apart and eventually divorced. She opened a hostel for wounded soldiers and on impulse married a sensitive artistic young soldier who was haunted by a premonition that he was going to be killed. Within a month he returned to the Front. Dining with friends at the Savoy Hotel in London one evening, she had a clairvoyant vision of her young husband being blown up with two or three of his comrades. As she sat at the dinner table she felt part of the action, and seemed to be enveloped in smoke and the stench of blood. Almost fainting, she begged to be excused. A few days later she was advised by the War Office that he was missing, believed killed. She never saw him again. Her third marriage was to another wounded soldier, James William Garrett.

After the war she was introduced to Hewat McKenzie, director of the British College of Psychic Science, and under his guidance she began to discover the extent of her psychic powers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle worked with her during the early days -’He was a gentle soul and made a deep impression on me’ – and Sir Oliver Lodge carried out a number of experiments with her. She was once invited to witness a Black Mass conducted by Aleister Crowley in a room in Fitzroy Square and came away unimpressed. ‘If there was authority in Crow- ley’s meetings with Lucifer I never knew it,’ she wrote. ‘I have really seen more uncanny things in the voodoo rites in Haiti.’ She declined W. B. Yeats’s invitation to collaborate with him in trying to contact the fairy people. Her scepticism was too strong.…more…Part-3…

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