Conjuring Gretchen
by Larry W. Bryant

ISBN: 978-1-931942-49-2
Size: 5 1/4 x 8 • 90 pgs.
Price: $10.95

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This book-length retrospective essay retraces the tribulations and survival heroics of the late United Methodist minister Carroll E. Jay, whose practice of hypnotherapy in pastoral counseling sessions engendered fierce religion-based persecution from his own parishioners in Rockingham County, Va., back in the early seventies. When Pastor Jay went public with an account of his wife's series of hypnotic regressions to determine the origin of a disembodied soul speaking through her, he and she incurred almost unbearable harassment orchestrated in the mountain town of Elkton.

Excerpt from Conjuring Gretchen:

The turning point occurred when Jay granted an interview with a reporter for the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record. The ensuing article—dated February 24, 1974—bore the banner headline “Her Identity Changes While Hypnotized.” In his memoirs, a few years hence, and with a touch of understatement, Jay remarks: “That marked the beginning of the end of our stay in Elkton.”

The “identity” to which the headline refers belongs to Jay’s wife, Dolores. One night in May 1970, as the couple was dozing off, Jay heard her say something in a language unlike English. When he (apparently) called out, “Who’s there?” the answer came back in a girl’s voice: “Gretchen ich bin” (“Gretchen, I am”). German, as it turns out. Dolores Jay—devoted wife, 40-year-old helpmate, mother—was now labeled a xenoglot, a person who speaks in a language not normally learned.

The troubled, confused, and illiterate disembodied personality who called herself Gretchen Gottlieb revealed that, as a sixteen-year-old resident of a small German town during the 1870s, she’d been murdered in a nearby forest by marauding members of a battle party dispatched by one of the factions in a local political conflict.

The resulting question remains unresolved to this day, despite many man-hours of research spent by a number of investigators and by the Jay family itself. Does the Gretchen case constitute proof (and how much proof) of reincarnation or of spirit possession?

Larry W. Bryant, who enjoyed a 36-year career in writing and editing for U. S. Army publications before his retirement, operates the Washington, D. C., office of the public-interest group Citizens Against UFO Secrecy from his home in Alexandria, Va.  A native of Shenandoah, Va., he attended high school and college in southeast Virginia. Bryant is currently a contributor to both FATE and UFO Magazine. His other Galde Press title is UFO Politics at the White House.