Eileen J. Garrett (March 17, 1893 – September 15, 1970) was an Irish medium, founder of the Parapsychology Foundation in New York City, and a leading figure in the scientific study of paranormal phenomena during the mid-20th century.
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She was born in Beauparc[1], County Meath, Ireland. Shortly after her birth, her parents, Anthony and Anna, as well as an uncle (Charles) committed suicide. She was then adopted by an aunt and uncle who ostracized her for her parents' deaths and for the psychic abilities she exhibited from an early age. During her youth Garrett frequently suffered from tuberculosis and other respiratory conditions, so at age fifteen, she left Ireland for the milder climate of England.
Garrett married three times. Her first marriage to Clive Barry produced three sons, all of whom died young, and a daughter, now Eileen Coly, who after her mother's death succeeded her as the president of the Parapsychology Foundation. Following her divorce from Barry, Eileen opened a hostel for convalescent soldiers who had been wounded during The Great War (World War I). Many of the soldiers who recuperated at her home would later return to the trenches and she had visions of which ones were destined to die. She would present them with a white flower to signify that she knew they would die; however, those who left her care without flowers all returned from The Great War.
One patient proposed marriage to the clairvoyant young woman shortly after she had presented him with his white flower and she accepted. One month after the wedding, Garrett awoke to a premonition that he and several others had been killed in an explosion. She wrote to the families of those killed and only later was it confirmed that they had all died. Just before the end of the war in 1918, she married J. W. Garrett, another wounded soldier in her care. The marriage did not last long, ending in 1927 after which she remained single.
In 1919, Garrett met a writer and social activist named Edward Carpenter who was a profound influence on her life, convincing her that she should share and study her gifts. Carpenter told her that she had been born to a state of "cosmic consciousness" that others would spend their lives searching for in vain. It was at this point in her life that she began to see her gifts not as a series of pathological hallucinations but rather as true premonitions. She realized that she was living two lives, as two women: the normal "average Irish woman" as she would later call herself, and the "medium," whom she later described as "being outside myself, a truly spiritual being."
It was around this time when she became entranced by a spirit, an fourteenth-century Arab soldier called Uvani who expressed his interest in helping her to develop her abilities. Uvani would remain at her side as her friend, companion and protector for the rest of her life and was in primary control of her mediumship. Garrett had three other trance spirits. Abdul Latif, a seventeenth-century Persian physician, dealt primarily with healing and would often cause her to speak in unknown dialects. The other two spirits, Tahotah and Ramah, very seldom contacted her and spoke only on spiritual matters. They claimed no earthy incarnations; however, several other mediums thought that they had a Native American connection.
Around the time of Uvani's appearance, Garrett began receiving messages from the dead daughter of a soldier whom she had met during the war and told him about them. Her visions and messages were so accurate that he immediately reported to all of his friends in the local spiritualist movement that he had "met a medium with the truest of gifts." Shortly thereafter, she began holding regular trance sessions during which she would experience seeing the dead relatives and friends of those present.
These trances would leave her physically drained and she would often vomit in an adjacent room before returning to tell her clients of her visions. Her friend, the writer Edward Carpenter, forbid her from returning to the group of local spiritualists, citing the danger to her mental, physical and emotional health.
Over the following years, she consulted a number of hypnotists and the British College of Psychic Science where she met the psychic researcher James Hewat McKenzie. He and a number of more advanced mediums impressed upon her that she should develop her abilities further. Shortly after McKenzie's death in 1929, she severed her ties to the college but took with her an advanced understanding of her abilities.
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.