A Life After Death Mystery

One of the most intriguing stories of mediumship on record was told by Hamlin Garland, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, in the last of his 52 books, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses, published in 1939.

As recorded by Garland, sometime in 1914, Gregory and Violet Parent of Redlands, Calif., some 60 miles east of Los Angeles, began finding gold and silver coins as well as currency and other treasures in tin cans, rotted pocketbooks, and various containers buried in places all around Southern and Central California.  They found enough money to buy a house and provide a standard of living beyond what Gregory's job as a grocery clerk would have permitted.   However, the money and other valuables were incidental to their primary discoveries - some 1,500 Indian artifacts, mostly metallic crosses.

According to documents left by Gregory Parent, "dead souls" began conversing with his wife in 1914, just after she had recovered from a serious illness.  Parent reported that his wife had been "strangely gifted" from birth, but it wasn't until after the illness that she began going into trance and seeing and communicating with spirits, one of whom was Father Junipero Serra, the famous California missionary. 

From 1914 until 1924, Father Serra, other deceased missionary priests, and long-dead Indians gave Mrs. Parent instructions on how to locate the buried caches, the purpose being to provide evidence of life after death.  What other than spirit communication might explain the Parents being able to find such artifacts in dozens of places over thousands of square miles? The finding of money, the Parents were told by the spirits, was simply to finance their search for the artifacts. 

In the 1939 book, Garland explains that shortly after giving a lecture in Los Angeles in 1934, he was told by Gregory Parent about the strange happenings in the life of his wife, who had died five years earlier.  Garland told Parent that he wanted to hear more of the story, but he needed to finish a book he was working on at the time.  When, in 1936, he attempted to recontact Parent, he discovered that Parent had died.  After several months of inquiry, Garland found that Parent's belongings on had into the possession of a half-sister, Louise Stack, of Moorpark, Calif.  He contacted her and she turned over boxes of papers and photographs to him while leading him to a small carpenter's shop where there were stored 17 glass-topped cases filled with crosses and other relics, all neatly arranged.  Mrs. Stack turned over custody of her brother's papers, photographs, and some 1,500 relics to Garland.

In studying the 22 notebooks left by Parent, Garland concluded that "this little grocer's clerk, in his bungling and tedious way, had honestly tried to make a scientific statement of his experiences as the husband of "a woman who walked with spirits."  He described Parent as an obscure, illiterate, and poor man who felt it was his sacred duty to make the story known and spread a belief in the return of the dead. Garland found no evidence that Parent was trying to profit from the story.

Parent had noted that the "dead souls" led them to the money and other valuables only to help them carry on the work of finding the crosses and miscellaneous other relics, which had no real monetary value.  These trinkets had been buried by the Indians when the missions were threatened by the Mexicans.  They were usually encased in balls of adobe so that they could not be distinguished from common rocks.

Parent also recorded that the spirits came to his wife night after night to give directions on how to reach the burial places.  As the Parents had no car, they were accompanied by friends and neighbors. Once having reached the area designated by the spirits, Violet would walk around until a "strange chill" came over her. She would then say something like, "We will find 30 crosses here." They would dig and the predictions were accurate.  It took them nine years and 3,000 miles of motoring all over southern and central California to find the relics.

His curiosity further aroused, Garland set out to find the friends and neighbors in Redlands who assisted the Parents in their discoveries.  While many of them had died or moved away, he did locate 15 people and found them all to be credible witnesses.   One man, who operated a business, recalled being very skeptical when Mrs. Parent told him that there were crosses under a large boulder.  Using crowbars, two men moved the boulder, under which they found three crosses.

Garland's own search for relics

Over the next six months, Garland corresponded with five museums, including the Smithsonian and one in Mexico City, but they were all skeptical and, strangely, not interested in the relics.  Even though they had no apparent monetary value, Garland felt that confirmation of the story would go a long way toward proving life after death, as apparently that is what the spirits and the Parents set out to do in the first place. Having had many years of experience with mediums, he decided to find one who might get in touch with Violet Parent and request her help in finding additional relics, as Gregory Parent had noted that there were, according to the spirits, more to be found.  Sometime around July 1937, Garland selected Sophia Williams, an amateur medium who did not charge for her services, to help him in his search.

Williams was a direct-voice medium.  In the direct-voice, the words do not come from the medium's mouth as in the trance-voice phenomenon.  Rather, they come through a trumpet or cone, which magnifies the voice.  After a few very evidential sittings with Williams, Garland was certain she was not a ventriloquist or otherwise a charlatan.  However, to further test her, Garland devised a transmitting box with 60 feet of wire connecting with another box containing a receiver and amplifier.  The purpose was to isolate Williams from his questions to the spirit communicators and thereby completely rule out mental telepathy.  With Williams two rooms away and behind closed doors in Garland's home, Williams could neither hear Garland's questions nor see what he was pointing to or looking at, and since the spirits answered him with detailed information, Garland concluded that this was further evidence that Williams was not drawing the information from his or his stenographer's mind.

When Garland's "Uncle David," who had been dead for some 30 years, communicated, Garland asked him if he remembered the old tune he used to play for him in on his fiddle.  Through the amplifier, Garland then heard the tune When you and I were young, Maggie being whistled and played on a fiddle.  It was not the tune Garland had in mind, so Garland ruled out the possibility that his subconscious mind was communicating with Williams' subconscious.  Moreover, if Williams were a fraud, she would have had to know about Uncle David, anticipate Garland's question to him about the tune, and smuggle a fiddle into and out of Garland's home.

In the third sitting, Violet Parent communicated through Williams and told Garland that she would find Father Serra and ask him to direct the search for more buried crosses. Before Father Serra began communicating, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the physician who created Sherlock Holmes, spoke and said he had been observing.  He added that he had brought George Parker Winship, an ethnologist when alive, to comment on the crosses.  Winship explained that some of them were from Central America - from Yucatan and Guatemala - and preceded Christianity.  It was further explained that the Indians brought them from those countries during the 16^th Century when the invading Spaniards forced them to move to California.

When a voice clearly announced, "This is Father Serra," Garland was astounded and wondered if his mind were playing tricks on him.  He was also surprised that Serra spoke English, as one reference indicated he did not.  Serra told him that the book was wrong and that there was only one language on his side.  Serra told Garland that the crosses were of pagan origin and that the Indians buried them in ceremonies to appease their gods.  He further stated that he prohibited such pagan worship but was unable to control the wild Indians.

Invisible guides

At the direction of Serra and other "Invisibles" who spoke through the medium's megaphone, Garland and Williams traveled hundreds of miles through southern and central California and Mexico searching for more artifacts. They were often accompanied by relatives or friends to help them in the search and in the digging. The spirits would tell them where to go, where to stop, which direction to walk, and then where to dig.   They found 16 artifacts, similar in substance and design to those collected by the Parents, in 10 widely separated locations.  Some were in deep gullies, others high on cactus-covered hills far from the highway.  One was hidden in a ledge of sandstone behind a wall of cactus plants which Garland had to chop away before finding it.  For the skeptic who might have claimed that Williams went all over the state planting the artifacts for Garland to find, Garland wrote that this would have been an impossible task.  Moreover, it was clear that the grounds covering the artifacts, some buried more than two-feet deep, had not been disturbed for many years.  It was equally clear that Williams had neither the time nor the motive to carry out such a hoax.

Before beginning his search for the buried crosses, Garland was still a skeptic when it came to psychic phenomena,  although his skepticism had to do more with whether it was proof of life after death rather than whether it was supernatural.  Although he could not bring himself to state it in so many words, he appears to have finished his 1939 book on the buried crosses as a believer in life after death.   How many readers of his book were convinced is unknown.  The story probably exceeded the "boggle threshold" of the average reader and was looked upon as nothing more than a work of science fiction.

As for the crosses found by Garland and Williams, they were passed on to a granddaughter, who donated them to the West Salem Historical Society, which is housed in Garland's old home in Wisconsin.  The original 1,500 or so cannot be accounted for.   Perhaps they are now "buried" in someone's basement.