Venturing Inward. Hugh Lynn Cayce

       —The Oregon Sunday Journal (Portland, Ore.)

       Kentucky Farmer Effects Cures While in Trance

      In 1912 Edgar attempted to stop giving psychic readings. He moved with his family to Selma, Alabama, and opened a photographic studio. In 1914 he went to Lexington, Kentucky, to give a reading for a Mrs. DeLaney, who was paralyzed with what may have been a type of arthritis. She recovered.

      While in Lexington Edgar met some neighbors of the DeLaneys, Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Kahn and their eight children. This family, especially the mother, Fanny Kahn, and the oldest son, David, became lifelong friends and in many ways played an important part in Edgar’s life and psychic pursuits. Mrs. Fanny Kahn recognized something of the significance of the phenomena which she witnessed. It was her interest, perhaps, which focused the interest of her eighteen-year-old son, David. Through the years he brought Edgar Cayce and his work to the attention of a remarkably diversified cross section of the American public, under circumstances which provided some of the best evidential clairvoyance in the history of psychical research.

      David E. Kahn’s interest was fired by the DeLaney case and early readings for members of his own family. Later while in the army his questions ranged into troop movements in which he was involved. According to him, the accuracy of the precognition of these readings enabled him to astound his superior officers on many occasions. He got the reputation of knowing more than his general about the division’s movements.

      When World War I ended David Kahn turned to an Edgar Cayce reading for advice. The reading which recommended that he leave his family grocery business and go into “wood and metal products” was only one of many personal readings which contained evidence of Edgar Cayce’s strange insight into a business world completely unfamiliar to his conscious mind. The fact that radios were just being developed and were soon to be put into wooden cabinets in millions of American homes may have been coincidence. It may have been just hard work and coincidence that David Kahn for several years manufactured and sold more radio cabinets than any other man in America; but Mr. Kahn was and is more than willing to attest to the fact that the Edgar Cayce readings were important factors in his choice of vocation as a manufacturer of radio cabinets.

      The files of readings given by my father contain the names of businessmen and their families all over America who were introduced to readings by David Kahn. From New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, anywhere that David traveled, would come telephone calls and telegrams with names and addresses of business associates and their families who needed assistance. David Kahn wanted to help people. He also wanted to prove his friend’s power. He was used to laughter and skepticism. Telegrams contained no leading questions, and telephone conversations in the presence of the man who was to secure the reading gave no opportunities to look up information. The results were a series of startlingly accurate and helpful psychic readings given frequently for critical, unrelated people scattered all over the United States.

      One of David’s most treasured pieces of correspondence is a letter from a physician in a Southern hospital admitting that his diagnosis of the physical ailment suffered by a superintendent of one of David Kahn’s factories was not so accurate as Edgar Cayce’s.

      It is one thing to give psychic information on a man’s health after talking with him or his family and quite another to work from a name and address hundreds of miles away. David Kahn knew this very well. He made effective and dramatic use of Edgar’s gift. Yet, back of every request was the desire to help another human being. Perhaps it was this basic concern to serve others that enabled Edgar Cayce and David Kahn to use my father’s power effectively.

      In 1920 Edgar gave a reading for men in Texas who were drilling an oil well. The information was thought to be so accurate that they urged him to join them. For many years my father hoped to build a hospital someday where readings could be checked and the treatments outlined in them carried out exactly as given. Moved by visions of the money needed to build his “dream” hospital and the excitement engendered by the activity in the oil fields, Edgar began a Ulysses-like search for fortune and adventure. David E. Kahn returned from France and joined him in Texas. For three years Edgar and David followed readings that were frequently proved to be right but never brought lasting success.

      The following heading appeared on an article in the Birmingham Age-Herald October 10, 1922. Edgar Cayce was in Birmingham at the time giving a series of readings.