1877 – 1945 · A portrait
A Kentucky photographer who lost his voice, then found he could fall into trance and diagnose illness. Over forty years he gave thousands of readings, and one prophecy: that Atlantis would rise. It did not.
A photographer whose voice had failed him for a year, he let a hypnotist named Al Layne put him in trance. Asleep, he described the cause and a cure for his own paralysis — and woke unable to recall having said a word. Layne asked him to try it on patients.
He ran a photography studio in Selma while giving trance readings on the side, mailed or phoned in by strangers seeking health advice. From 1923 his secretary, Gladys Davis, took every session down in shorthand.
Supporters organized the Association for Research and Enlightenment that year, in Virginia Beach, to archive the readings and continue the work. It still operates today, holding what has grown to more than fourteen thousand transcribed sessions.
In a reading he said Atlantis had been real, and that part of it would rise again near Bimini by 1968 or 1969. He died five years before the date arrived, so he never saw whether it held.
The A.R.E. still runs from Virginia Beach. A dedicated foundation, chartered in 1948, holds the archive of readings. Atlantic University, which he co-founded in 1930, closed within two years but reopened in 1985 and is now an accredited graduate school.
The trance readings gave medical and psychic advice that was never put through controlled testing; skeptics who examined them have found specific claims wrong. The Atlantis prophecy failed outright — no continent rose near Bimini in 1968 or 1969, though some later pointed to an offshore rock formation as if it had.