PSYCHIC QUEST : Prize-Winning Author’s ‘30s Account of Spirits and Indian Artifacts Featured at Book Fair

Hamlin Garland hired a woman who said she could talk to the spirit of Father Junipero Serra.

The year was 1937, and the San Fernando Valley was still mostly orchards and wilderness. Garland was convinced that hundreds of Indian artifacts lay buried out there, and only the spirit world could lead him to this treasure.

He didn’t want money or fame--he already had those. He wanted something better.

For a year, the old man and the psychic hiked through peach orchards in Van Nuys and isolated foothills in the Ventura Canyon. Garland, one of America’s best known authors and a Pulitzer Prize winner, was close to death.

This would be his last adventure.

A rare copy of “The Mystery of the Buried Crosses”--Garland’s tale of psychic experimentation--will be for sale at the California Antiquarian Book Fair at Glendale Civic Auditorium on Saturday, April 30.

The book comes with 15 crude, metal crosses the author uncovered during his adventure, as well as his notes and photographs. The set is priced at $7,500.

“From a historic point of view, Hamlin Garland was a major figure of the first half of the 20th Century,” said Keith Burns, one of the book fair’s coordinators and a longtime Garland fan. “The notes are extremely valuable, and the crosses are valuable because nobody else has them. It’s the stuff of a culture.”

Garland is certainly prominent in the history of American literature, but few history books mention his interest in the occult. The majority of the author’s two dozen works dealt with simple people of the West. He was known as a dirt-farmer novelist from Wisconsin who rose to acclaim for his portrayals of the stark and grim realities of pioneer life. In 1922, his book, “A Daughter of the Middle Border,” won a Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, “The Mystery of the Buried Crosses” wasn’t Garland’s first brush with what he called the “supra-normal.” He spent much of his life dabbling in such matters and wrote a book, “Forty Years of Psychic Research.”

Garland had not planned to publish another book on the spirit world. But after moving from the East Coast to Hollywood, he received a letter from a Los Angeles store clerk named George Parent. Parent wanted someone to know about his late wife’s psychic talents.

Thus began Garland’s mystery of the crosses.

“He was coming to the end of his life, and he was trying to figure out what was going to happen next,” said Mark Rocha, an assistant English professor at Glassboro State College in New Jersey who wrote a biography of Garland. “This was his personal exploration into life after death.”

Violet Parent had been dead for 5 years when her widower wrote to Garland.

George Parent insisted that, when she was alive, Violet could talk to dead people. She could see the future. She took snapshots of furniture and, somehow, spirit figures appeared in the photographs.

Violet Parent had also become friendly with deceased Catholic missionaries and Indian chiefs. These spirits told her of buried treasures.

From 1914 to 1924, the Parents scoured Southern California. They uncovered coins and rings, Indian pipes and tablets. At one point, when the couple needed money, the spirit of Chief Sugerts possessed a woman on the street and instructed her to hand $10 to Violet, George Parent said.

But most of all, the Parents dug up crosses that they believed had been buried by Indians more than a hundred years before. These lead crosses were decorated with the heads of wolves, cougars, birds and apes. They collected 1,500 such artifacts over 10 years.

George Parent kept detailed notes on this work, and in 1937 he gave these and several of the crosses to Garland.

“Garland went nuts,” Burns said. “He fell in love with this thing.”

The author had experts examine the crosses to determine if they were fakes. He studied histories of California missionaries and Indian tribes. In the end, he concluded, there was only one way to verify Violet Parent’s claims that she had been led to these crosses by spirit voices:

“My only hope lies in finding some devoted man or woman with the same mysterious power which Mrs. Parent undoubtedly possessed,” Garland wrote. The author intended to “go out into the wilds and personally dig up a few similar artifacts.”

So he auditioned a number of psychics. Tests were involved, including: Could the psychic evoke voices in a closed room? Through a car radio?

Sophia Williams got the job. She and Garland spent most of the next year taking automobile trips into the Valley, then hiking to places where the voices told them to go.

“I was led to the places . . . by voices over which I had no control and which had no connection, so far as I could discern, with my own speech patterns,” Williams wrote in an appendix to “The Mystery of the Buried Crosses.”

Garland described an expedition when Father Serra spoke through William’s mouth:

“Go to the center of San Fernando town, then proceed north along the Mint Canyon Road . . . you will see an overhanging bank on the right-hand side and a hill with large trees on it. On top of this hill is a pointed rock. You will find the crosses buried about two feet deep around the base of this rock.”

Garland wrote that when they reached the hill with large trees he made a bold request:

“Can you go with us, Father Serra. . . ?”

“Yes, I will go with you to the hilltop and tell you just where to dig. Take a spade.”

On another occasion, the spirit of an Indian chief led Garland and Williams to the side of a mountain. Garland, who was 77, complained that the mountain was too steep. The Indian spirit offered to take him to other crosses that were buried on flat land.

Garland and Williams dug up more than 100 crosses before their experiment had ended. The author then sat down to write.

“Garland was warned against publishing this book,” Rocha said. “His editor said, ‘You have a reputation as a great American writer. What the hell are you doing?’ ”

E.P. Dutton & Co. published “The Mystery of the Buried Crosses” in 1939. Soon after the book came out, its author died.

Did Garland believe he was speaking to the spirit of Father Serra?

In the book, his discussions with the dead are recounted with straight-faced seriousness. The author states that he cannot prove these were actual communications with another world. But he challenges others to disprove it.

“A lot of people thought he was a crazy old man,” Rocha said. “He was not senile, but he was indulging himself.”

Garland was not alone in the literary world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the “Sherlock Holmes” novels, was writing similar accounts of the psychic world from London and the two authors corresponded regularly.

Yet in some moments, Garland took his work less than seriously, Rocha said.

Compared It to Golf

“He told his daughter, ‘Well, some old men play golf. This is what I do.’ ”

E.P. Dutton & Co. won’t say how many copies the book sold. Rocha said it had only one printing of 5,000. And though “The Mystery of the Buried Crosses” is now difficult to find, several collectors contacted did not think the rare book and accompanying crosses are worth $7,500.

“Something like that is sort of colossal joke played on people,” said one collector who, like the others, asked not to be named. “It’s that way with all collectors’ items. All you have to do is convince one person that it’s worth it.”

Said Burns: “Someone just paid $4,000 for Liberace’s driver’s license. People want to touch something that was touched by a celebrity.”

And, with the current interest in metaphysics, he thinks Garland’s book could sell for even more money because it represents a study of the occult by a well-respected intellect. It will be one of the highlights of a book fair that will feature more affordable first editions--books priced in the $10 to $100 range.

Burns has read “The Mystery of the Buried Crosses” several times, but he doesn’t particularly buy such notions of the spirit world.

“For the non-believers, it’s just entertainment,” he said. “It’s the kind of book that you can read while you’re eating popcorn.”