Anna was totally and undeniably lost. More than anything she felt completely connected to Robert, and yet he could not or would not change. All her life she had only wanted to be a wife and a mother. When her marriage collapsed in divorce, she collapsed as well.
After a brief stay at her parents’, she knew she had to leave the area. The pull Robert had on her was unbelievable. Regardless of what he had done, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Her mental health sank so low that she moved to New York to live with Vera! They worked out a deal: Anna would pay all the bills and the rent, and Vera would finish school. In return, Anna would have a place to stay and Vera would repay half of the monty to Anna as soon as it was feasible. To lessen their expenses, the two sisters took a third girl as a roommate.
Although Anna tried briefly to get a job as a singer—she had a beautiful voice—she ended up as a waitress. Nightly she would bring home her tips and keep them in a box. After a while, however, she noticed that the money seemed to be disappearing with regularity. To convince herself about what was happening, she began keeping careful track. Before too long she discovered that she was right and even caught the thief in the act. It should have come as quite a surprise to Anna to find that it wasn’t the third roommate taking her money, but her own sister!
The incident was brushed aside. Later, when the two of them were rooming alone and Vera had gotten a job in a different restaurant, they agreed to split all of their earnings fifty-fifty. For a long while, Vera brought home no more than $5.00 per day. The elder girl claimed that $5.00 was the best she could do even on “a good day.” However, eventually Anna had to substitute for a period of time because Vera became ill. The younger woman was shocked to find that even on some of the slowest days she averaged $18.00. It turned out that the elder sister had been pocketing the extra money all along. Vera felt that anything she could take from Anna was her due; it never seemed to bother her conscience.
Finally, Anna met a man she decided to marry. She wasn’t infatuated with him and she didn’t love him—that place still belonged to Robert. However, she wanted a family and felt that she was running out of time; besides, he really seemed to want her.
Vera couldn’t stand to be in the same room with Anna and her fiancé, Alan. Though Vera seemed to like Alan, and she and Anna were getting along as well as could be expected, she refused to be part of a threesome. The situation didn’t improve much after Alan and Anna were married; all that changed was that Vera supported Alan in everything he did and continued to find fault with everything about Anna.
Alan couldn’t find work in New York, so Anna returned home with him, where her father tried to set Alan up with a job. Anna’s desire to be with Robert had not subsided, so she was thankful that his life had taken him in a direction where their paths did not cross. For a time Anna thought everything would turn out for the best, but it soon appeared that she was wrong.
Her marriage became unbearable. She didn’t love her husband and at times resented the fact that they were together. When she was unhappiest, she fantasized that Robert would return and take her away. As miserable as she had been with Robert, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. She only stayed with Alan for the sake of having children; she was nearly thirty years old and running out of time.
One of her darkest moments came when her physical condition indicated another tubal pregnancy. She felt defeated and lost. She was unhappy with Alan and hopelessly connected to Robert. She had been referred to Edgar Cayce by several friends. Prior to visiting Mr. Cayce she had thrown herself to the floor sobbing, wishing to die. It was nearly the end of January 1938, and though she thought her life over, it was about to change dramatically.
In order to verify for herself the authenticity of Mr. Cayce’s clairvoyance, she did not tell him of her problem nor did she mention her previous operation. She merely stated that she needed a physical reading. Although desperate for help, she was quite suspect of this psychic business and had pursued the possibility only at the insistence of one of her friends.
Her doubts were laid to rest, however, when Mr. Cayce, in the midst of the reading while “asleep” on the couch, uttered one sentence: “. . . disturbances with the activities of the pelvic organs, and as in the present there is the false conception that has produced in the tube that is left—there’s one . . .” Because of the tone of the overall reading and its undeniable accuracy, she followed Cayce’s suggestions to the letter, which included a change of diet, internal medications, and massage; within two weeks there was vast improvement and within two months she felt physically normal. No operation was necessary.
In April of that year she had her first life reading, and its information transformed the way she thought about herself, her hardships, and her family. Cayce began the reading by stating, “Yes, we have the records here of that entity now known as or called [Anna Campbell].” (1523-4) Although Anna had never even considered something as foreign to her as reincarnation, the insights she gained from the reading changed her life forever and became as real to her as the present. Anna would later tell Mr. Cayce that having come in contact with him and his family meant “more to me than anything that has ever come into my existence . . .” for the past seemed connected to the present in the most remarkable way. The story which emerged from the Akashic Records contained striking connections to her present-day problems.
A hundred years previously, she had been born as a daughter into the household of a frontier family. Her parents were settlers who tried hard to eke a living from the land. Apparently, at the time, Anna was interested most in herself, not caring for the lifestyle advocated by her nineteenth-century parents. Her reading summed up Anna’s motivation during that period as “What she desired she took; what she wanted she got!”
In an interesting preview of her present, when she was seventeen, an unsuitable drifter convinced her to run away from home as his “companion.” She agreed without hesitation, and the two journeyed westward to an area then known as Fort Dearborn, near present-day Chicago.
Before long, she was befriended by a saloon madam who owned one of the taverns. The woman was a great source of help and inspiration to many of the girls who worked for her. In fact, the elder woman helped many of them get back on the right track when their life seemed darkest. The madam saw their work as a way of giving companionship to lonely men and a means of giving women time to reconsider their lives. On the other hand, Anna saw it as a way of obtaining whatever she wanted. In spite of their different approaches, the madam would become her dearest friend and closest advisor—and her own mother one hundred years in the future. By choice, Anna became an entertainer in the tavern and didn’t hesitate to provide private amusement to the saloon’s clients. In time, she had a child fathered by her drifter-companion, though she insisted on retaining her position as entertainer, waitress, and bar moll.
Except for one of the fort’s guides, few problems seemed to impinge upon her life. The guide, a self-styled minister, was abhorred by the “abominations” that occurred within the tavern. In contrast, he found his life to be rather exemplary. Because of his judgments about the inappropriateness of what was occurring, he found frequent occasion to condemn the tavern’s activities, its entertainers, and even its patrons. This led to frequent confrontations (and fistfights!) between Anna’s drifter-companion and the guide. A number of times the guide had the tar whipped out of him, and the conflict between the two was never really settled: it was no surprise to Anna to find that her drifter-companion would return as her brother, Warren, and the fort’s guide was none other than her pa.
Eventually, Anna’s nineteenth-century counterpart grew tired of her relationship with the drifter and took up with a frontiersman named John Bainbridge. Life remained pretty much the same until Indian attacks on the fort caused Bainbridge and Anna and a group of others to escape. During one attack and the ensuing escape, Anna was forced to abandon her child. Although having no choice in the matter, Anna apparently never gave the child a second thought—it would provide for an interesting turnabout in the next century when all she could think about was children and wonder why she was barren.
Indians pursued the group, at one point surrounding them as they drifted through the slow-moving waters of a river. Becoming very afraid, Anna