Eileen J. Garrett - America

America

In 1931, she was invited to America by the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) to participate in a series of experiments under the direction of Hereward Carrington. During that period she was studied at Duke University where she was brought into a circle of mediums that had been arranged by William McDougall. He was impressed and said of her that she was "one of the finest mediums I have ever met."

In 1939, she was considering ending her participation in experiments when McDougall convinced her to assist Nandor Fodor in the investigation of The Ash Manor Ghost. She was in southern France visiting friends and doing readings for clients of William McDougall in 1940 when Germany once again invaded France. She stayed there in relative obscurity until 1941 when she was allowed to travel to Portugal where she found passage on a refugee boat to the United States. She remained there and became an American citizen in 1947.

Garrett pursued a lifelong study of her own in the United States in the field of parapsychology, identifying "subspecies" of ghosts and spirits. She worked with the publishing company H.S. Stuttman & Co. and collaborated on several books on the subject of ghosts. She established a moderately successfully publishing house of her own, the Creative Age Press in New York City, and in 1943 she founded a less-than-successful magazine called Tomorrow magazine employing Mercedes de Acosta as associate editor. It specialized in very accurate horoscopes and the topics of parapsychology.

In 1951 Garrett founded the Parapsychology Foundation using her own money as well as a number of federal grants and international conference fundraisers. She encouraged others with extrasensory gifts to develop them into mediumship and to pursue paranormal sciences and made strides in bringing real science into the field.

In the 1960s, Garrett worked with psychologist Lawrence LeShan in his studies of alternate realities, describing the "clairvoyant realities" in a number of his papers and books. She continued to write, participate in studies and research projects, and identify ghosts and demonic spirits until her death on September 15, 1970 in Nice, France where she was investigating the appearance of a series of ghostly apparitions. This particular investigation left her exhausted and she told her friend Uvani that she worried the apparitions were the direct cause of her period of declining health.

In addition to her numerous contributions to the works of others and her work to advance the science of parapsychology, Garrett left a total of seven nonfiction books of her own, the Parapsychology Foundation which operates to this day, eleven popular short manuals on the expulsion of demons and spirits, and a number of novels under the pen name Jean Lyttle.