January 3, 1945
How did Edgar Cayce die?
He died at 7:15 in the evening of January 3, 1945, at his home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, aged 67. A stroke in September 1944 had left him partly paralyzed, and the staff of the A.R.E. later wrote that his heart had enlarged and fluid had gathered on his lungs. Behind that sat the two heaviest years of his working life, 2,010 readings in 1943 and 1944 against 557 in 1942.
- DiedJanuary 3, 1945, 7:15 p.m.
- PlaceHis home on Arctic Crescent, Virginia Beach
- Age67
- Last readingSeptember 17, 1944, Roanoke (294-212)
- StrokeAbout a week after that
- FuneralJanuary 5 at home, January 8 in Hopkinsville
- BuriedRiverside Cemetery, Hopkinsville, Kentucky
- GertrudeDied April 1, 1945
Day by day
Every day of 1943 and 1944, by readings given
Each reading has its date in the header, so his workload can be counted a day at a time. Every square below is one day, shaded by how many he gave on it. The empty stretches are real, and the A.R.E. file notes explain most of them: a visit to Florida, an illness, a trip to rest in Roanoke. Tap a day for its count.
On the days he worked, he gave about two readings in 1942, about three in 1943 and just over six in 1944. In round numbers the transcripts ran to 527,000 words in 1942, 920,000 in 1943 and 757,000 in 1944, which stops in September. The busiest day was April 22, 1944, with 15, and 49 days across the two years reached eight or more. The A.R.E.’s January 1945 bulletin has him giving eight to twelve readings in the periods where he once gave two.
Wikipedia says he gave 1,385 between June 1943 and June 1944. Counting by header date we get 1,400 for June 1943 through May 1944 and 1,562 if June 1944 is included, so their figure fits a twelve-month window that ends near the start of that June. May 1944 is the heaviest month in the whole record, with 197.
The same two years by month
| Month | 1943 | 1944 | What the file notes say |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 44 | 181 | 1944 is his busiest month so far. |
| February | 52 | 59 | 1944, in Florida until the 13th, then ill from the 23rd. |
| March | 57 | 95 | 1944, ill until the 13th, close to pneumonia. |
| April | 69 | 155 | The 15-reading day is April 22, 1944. |
| May | 73 | 197 | The busiest month of his life. |
| June | 74 | 162 | |
| July | 91 | 112 | 1944, off to Florida on the 28th. |
| August | 71 | 40 | 1944, home on the 10th, ill again from the 12th, left for Roanoke on the 30th. |
| September | 97 | 1 | 1943 has the Coronet issue. In 1944 the one reading is 294-212, on the 17th. |
| October | 116 | 0 | 1944, no readings. |
| November | 107 | 0 | 1944, brought home on the 21st. |
| December | 157 | 0 | 1944, a coma on the 13th and a doctor’s visit on the 19th. |
| Year | 1,008 | 1,002 | 1942 had 557. |
From a magazine to a grave
The last sixteen months, in order
Coronet runs Miracle Man of Virginia Beach, by Marguerite Harmon Bro, in its September issue. The A.R.E. file notes say it brought a flood of requests that kept him working overtime for the rest of his life. Monthly counts climbed after it, from 71 in August to 97 in September and 116 in October. The newspaper pages show what the press had printed about him before that.
Reading 294-207, the first of six he took for himself in his last year. It is 129 words about a congested gall duct, with castor oil packs for an hour a day, three days at a time.
157 readings, then 181. Nothing before them in the record comes close.
He was ill and near pneumonia. His doctor told him he would give him the sulfa drug if he wanted it but would not prescribe it, and he asked for it. Gertrude was upset, since the readings had generally not approved of the drug for other people. His readings for himself later tied adhesions in the left lung to it, in 294-209 and again in 294-212.
95, 155, 197, 162 and 112 readings a month. On April 22 alone he gave 15, fourteen of them health readings by our sort.
A second visit to Florida, to Tom Sugrue, who had written There Is a River two years before.
Reading 294-210 puts his heart at about a third larger than it should be. He asked whether he should give any readings at all. The answer was “It isn’t the readings - it’s the worry!”
Ill again from the 12th. The dated record still holds 36 readings between August 21 and 29, the last of them on the 29th, which makes August 29 the last day he worked in his office.
Reading 294-211 told him to go away for complete rest. Two days later he and Gertrude left for Roanoke. His right hand had gone weak enough that he could no longer use his typewriter.
Reading 294-212, the last, given at the Patrick Henry Hotel in Roanoke from 11:00 to 11:45 in the morning. Gertrude conducted, Gladys Davis took it down, and two osteopaths, Dr. Harry Semones and Dr. Henry George III, sat in and put the questions.
The stroke. By the A.R.E. staff answer he was left partly paralyzed, and the file notes say the left side of his body was affected from the face down.
His son Edgar Evans Cayce, home on leave from service overseas, got him back to Virginia Beach by ambulance. He was too weak to speak above a whisper.
A coma that lasted from the evening of the 13th through the night. On the 19th Dr. Henry George III said he thought it was pulmonary edema and asked for nurses, oxygen and digitalis around the clock. The nursing chart started on the 21st.
The night before, by Gladys Davis’s account, he told Gertrude he loved her. He stopped breathing at 7:15 the next evening. The A.R.E. bulletin of that month carried an editorial by Thomas Sugrue saying that overwork had put him on a sick bed and that his own reading in September had named nervous exhaustion.
A service at the house on the 5th at ten in the morning, led by the Rev. Joseph B. Clower, then a train to Christian County. The Rev. Monroe G. Schuster held the burial service at Riverside Cemetery in Hopkinsville on Monday the 8th.
Gertrude died at Virginia Beach at sunrise on Easter Sunday, three months after him, and was buried in Hopkinsville beside him.
Six readings for himself
What the readings told him to do
From October 1943 he took six readings on his own body, and they read like a chart of a man being told to stop. The quotes are short on purpose, and the rest is in our words. Members can look up all of them through the A.R.E..
| Date | Reading | What it told him |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 21, 1943 | 294-207 | Congestion in the gall duct. Castor oil packs for an hour a day, three days at a time, then olive oil and a massage. |
| Mar 14, 1944 | 294-208 | A check after the near pneumonia. Walk in the open air each morning, keep the body’s acid and alkaline balance, and live in line with what he taught. |
| Jul 27, 1944 | 294-209 | Inflammation and adhesions in the left lung, which it blames on the sulfa drug, and a digestive tract that was failing to absorb food. |
| Aug 11, 1944 | 294-210 | Heart about a third too large. “Rest is what is needed most - but mental and physical rest.” Asked whether to go on giving readings, the answer was that the worry was the problem. |
| Aug 28, 1944 | 294-211 | Exhaustion on top of a toxic blood supply. Colonic irrigations, gentle osteopathic work and rest, away from the office. |
| Sep 17, 1944 | 294-212 | Asked whether he needed bed rest, the answer was not necessarily, but rest from anxiety, and “Rest - rest - rest, but in the open as much as practical.” It also says there was no organic heart disorder. It runs 2,636 words, the longest of the six. |
Reading numbers and dates from the header of each. The words in quotation marks are Edgar Cayce’s, as the transcript has them.
Death and dying
What he said about dying
The question comes up in three forms: what happens at death, what happens to the body afterward and whether he saw his own end coming. The words “no death” turn up in 12 of the 14,301 readings, between 1926 and 1944, and five of them fall in 1943 and 1944. His position never changes. Death is a change of state for a soul that goes on, and he treats it as a birth into another plane.
Cremation gets less attention than people expect. A form of the word appears in the text of only three readings, and what he says in them is mild.
- 1926 · reading 136-33
- There is only a transition from the physical plane to the spiritual one, and the birth into the physical is paired with a birth into the spiritual.
- 1933 · reading 5749-3
- Asked about the planes a soul passes into, he describes a slow waking. The soul often does not notice its surroundings at first, as a newborn only gradually learns time and space, and then it recognizes a fourth or higher dimension.
- 1935 · reading 262-86
- At the change called death the soul is free of the material body but not of matter, only changed in form, and just as alert to the realms of consciousness or more so.
- 1935 · reading 516-4
- Asked why the questioner had seen a father and two uncles as young men, when they had been white-haired in life, he says they are growing on the eternal plane, because a death is a birth.
- 1937 · reading 1472-2
- Many people stay in what we call death for years without knowing it, he says, held there by appetites and desires that outlast the body.
- 1943 · reading 3420-1
- Here the word is moral. Life is growth, and death is the opposite of growth, a turning away.
- 1944 · reading 5155-1
- Asked on May 23 whether he would overcome death in this incarnation, the answer begins that there is none, and goes on to say death is overcome only through Christ.
Cremation
Two answers, and a past life
In reading 378-11, dated January 5, 1933, a man asked whether a crematorium is the best place to burn a dead body. He answered that it depends on the person’s own feelings about it, and that a crematorium would be the safer and better place. Nearly five years later, in 1472-2 of November 13, 1937, a woman asked whether the body would feel it. His reply: the physical body is not the consciousness, and “Can you burn or cremate a mind?” A 1935 life reading, 914-1, also credits its subject, in an earlier life, with beginning cremations in a land that left no burial grounds.
He himself was buried, in Hopkinsville, in the county where he was born.
His own death
A dream in 1926, and a date that is not his
On April 8, 1926 he took reading 294-70 on a dream of March 31 in which he scalded to death in a bath. The answer lists his physical defects, with high blood pressure in the heart’s action, as needing attention, then goes through the funeral in the dream and ends by saying his work would go on without his body. That is the nearest thing to a forecast of his death that we found, and it gives no date.
The one reading that names January 3, 1945 is 5049-1, a life reading of May 1, 1944 for a young woman in an institution. It suggests she keep herself for that day, because it could be her wedding. Nothing in it concerns him. For his actual forecasts, scored against what happened, see the predictions page.
How we counted
Three dates we had to settle
Every count here rests on the date in a reading’s header, and three of those dates do not hold up against their own file. Reading 3529-1 is headed December 17, 1944, but the requester wrote on December 27, 1943 to thank him for the reading of the 17th, and the numbers on either side of it are December 1943 readings. We counted it as December 17, 1943. Reading 1187-12 is headed October 8, 1944, yet it sits between 1187-11 of 1940 and 1187-13 of 1943, so we left it out. Reading 1409-8 is headed April 30, 1943, while its notes show a request of December 22, 1943. It stays where the header puts it, and either way it is a 1943 reading.
The cause of death comes from the A.R.E.’s staff answer and the physician’s note of December 19, 1944, both in the file notes, not from a death certificate, which we have not seen. The burial and funeral details come from the same notes, from a Norfolk newspaper of January 4, 1945 and from Wikipedia. Each date on this page was read in at least one of those and in the readings file. For a list of everything in the readings by date, see the index or look any of them up in the Reading Finder.
Questions
About his death
What was the cause of Edgar Cayce's death?
A stroke in September 1944 left him partly paralyzed, and he died at home in Virginia Beach on January 3, 1945. The A.R.E. staff answer to this exact question says his heart had enlarged and fluid had collected on his lungs. A doctor who examined him on December 19, 1944 thought he had pulmonary edema. We have not seen a death certificate.
What did Edgar Cayce say about dying?
He described death as a change of consciousness and not an ending. Reading 136-33 in 1926 says there is only a transition from the physical plane to the spiritual one. Reading 5749-3 in 1933 compares it with a baby slowly becoming aware of the world, and reading 516-4 in 1935 calls a death a birth. In 3420-1, from December 1943, he uses the word differently, as a turning away from growth.
What did Edgar Cayce say about cremation?
Very little. Across all 14,301 readings, three use a form of the word cremation. In reading 378-11 of January 1933 he said it depends on how the person feels about it but that a crematorium is the safer and better place to burn a body. In 1472-2, from November 1937, he answered that a body is not the consciousness and that nobody can cremate a mind.
Where is Edgar Cayce buried?
In Riverside Cemetery in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, where he grew up. The service there was held on Monday, January 8, 1945, three days after a funeral at his Virginia Beach home. A file note from the A.R.E. says Gertrude was buried in Hopkinsville next to him.
Did Edgar Cayce predict the date of his own death?
We found no reading that does. The only one that names January 3, 1945 is 5049-1, a life reading of May 1, 1944 for a young woman, and it is about her wedding plans. A 1926 reading for himself, 294-70, interpreted a dream of dying in a bath, listed his heart and blood pressure as things to look after, and said his work would go on without him.
Why did Edgar Cayce stop giving readings?
His health failed. After a bout close to pneumonia in February 1944 he gave readings at the highest rate of his life through July, then fell ill in August. He gave 294-212, the last, on September 17, 1944 in Roanoke, Virginia, for himself, and about a week later he had the stroke.
Sources
- Counts are ours. Every reading we had was sorted by the date in its header, and the monthly table above holds the totals.
- Last illness, funeral and burial: the BACKGROUND and REPORTS notes the A.R.E. filed with reading 294-212, including its staff answer to the question of how he died, the Hughart and Beard funeral records, and its January 1945 bulletin.
- The same filing carries the notes on his sulfa drug, the Roanoke trip, the stroke, Dr. Henry George III’s visit and Gertrude’s death on April 1, 1945. The A.R.E. chronology filed with reading 254-1 agrees on April 1 and on the date of the last reading.
- Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch obituary of January 4, 1945, for the time of death and the funeral plans.
- Coronet, September 1943, volume 14, a scan on the Internet Archive listing Marguerite Harmon Bro’s article. The article’s effect on requests comes from the A.R.E. note in reading 294-207.
- The Wikipedia article, read on November 14, 2026, for the death date, the September 1944 stroke, the Hopkinsville burial and the 1,385 readings of June 1943 to June 1944.
- Waymarking entry for his grave at Riverside Cemetery.
- Edgar Cayce Readings © 1971, 1993-2007 by the Edgar Cayce Foundation. All Rights Reserved.