Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

[Garland and Psychic Investigation, 1937]

[159] X [Garland and Psychic Investigation, 1937] Isabel Garland Lord In the last years of his life, Garland devoted much of his energy to psychic investigation . His final book, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939), records his efforts to verify the survival of personality. Aided by the nonprofessional psychic Sophia Williams, Garland was directed by spirits to uncover buried crosses; these crosses, he believed, offered “proof” that spirits exist. In this excerpt from her memoir, Lord reveals the family’s concern that Garland was being deceived and their efforts to demonstrate that deceit. “Jon” is Mindret Lord, Isabel’s second husband. that night, Father embarked on the psychic business. He was at this point, he admitted frankly, troubled in his mind, and he gave us the whole story from the beginning. In condensed form, it seemed that in 1904 a woman named Violet Parent, a resident of Southern California, claiming to have clairvoyant powers, announced that she had established communication with the founding California padres and that they had told her there were, lying buried in various natural spots in California, small crosses and other metal artifacts made by the early Indians and hidden by them for safekeeping. So convincing was her tale and the evidence she had to substantiate it that a large group of friends—and skeptics—formed into search parties, and under the direction of Mrs. Parent’s “voices” went out into the field and began digging up the crosses she had described. They also located various caches of money in widely separated places. Many of the crosses and artifacts were concealed in balls of hard dried mud that could only be opened with a hammer and often were deep under several feet of packed earth and rock that had plainly not been disturbed for many years. In 1932, Gregory Parent, the husband—Violet had died some time previously —came to Father with some of the crosses and his extraordinary tale and asked him to write it as proof of the spirit hypothesis. As a psychic investigator, Father was intrigued and spent much time mulling over the garland in his own time [160] story, the careful journals that reported all the circumstances of the finds, and the mysterious little objects themselves, but it wasn’t until Father himself happened on a medium who claimed that she, too, could tune in on the padres that he became actively involved. Father’s medium was, apparently, telling the truth. On various expeditions , with the small, faint “psychic voices” of the padres speaking in the car or out on the hillsides, giving detailed directions, Father himself dug up metal crosses and curious little artifacts that he was assured had been hidden there by the Indians many years before. Naturally, he became highly excited and, as he wrote us in the East, told himself that here might be the actual, physical proof of the survival of personality. The Parent story was fascinating, and Jon and I were enthralled with it. It was so full of “whys.” One could assume that the Parents made the crosses themselves and planted them in an area covering many hundreds of miles—their only transportation in those days was a horse and buggy—but why wait for them to be dug up by someone else many years later? Where did the caches of money come from? Mr. Parent was a thirty-dollar-amonth grocery clerk. What about the signed statements of witnesses attesting to the authenticity of the finds and the fact that before each mud ball was opened, the “voices” would give a detailed and accurate description of what it contained? And how to explain the mysterious, paper-doll-like photographs that reliable citizens maintain Violet took with her Brownie camera of a living room table covered with a sheet and set about with nothing but bits of greenery and rocks? Constance had told us of the advent of the new medium in Daddy’s life and the further interest that she provided. My sister had been on some of the expeditions and had herself unearthed a cross out of the solid earth at the base of an old tree. She was deeply impressed at first, she admitted, but gradually doubt crept in. Father had set up a sort of intercom system between his study and his bedroom, and while the medium sat in one room, Father addressed questions to the voices from another. Presumably, the medium could not hear the questions, but Connie inadvertently...