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Apparitions · Ghosts of historical figures

Omm Sety – the Englishwoman Who Went Home to Abydos

When
3 March 1956–1981 date from records made at the time
Where
Temple of Seti I, Abydos, Egypt
Verdict
Disputed

Dorothy Eady believed she had been a priestess at Abydos in a past life and that Pharaoh Seti I's spirit visited her at night. She spent her last 25 years there.

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26.19°, 31.92° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Dorothy Eady was born in London in 1904. At the age of three she fell down the stairs and for a moment seemed dead; afterwards she began asking to be “taken home.” At the British Museum, seeing a photograph of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, she cried: “There is my home! But where are the trees and the gardens?” At fifteen she spoke of a night-time visit from the mummy of Seti I. In 1931 she married an Egyptian and moved to Cairo; after her son she became known as Omm Sety, “mother of Sety.” She said that for a year a spirit called Hor-Ra came to her at night and dictated 70 pages of hieroglyphic text: the story of Bentreshyt, a priestess at Abydos who fell in love with Pharaoh Seti I and took her own life to avoid a trial. She worked as a draughtswoman for the Egyptologists Selim Hassan and Ahmed Fakhry. On 3 March 1956 she moved to Abydos, where she prayed in the temple every day and said Seti's spirit still visited her. She died there in 1981.

Witnesses

Dorothy Eady herself, in her notes and in conversations with Egyptologists and journalists; her life was described by Jonathan Cott (“The Search for Omm Sety,” 1987) and the Egyptologist Barbara Lesko, among others. Some anecdotes, such as a test in the darkened temple, are known only from her own account.

Explanations and hypotheses

Egyptologists valued her work highly – Selim Hassan thanked her in his ten-volume publication on Giza, and Barbara Lesko wrote that this poorly educated Englishwoman became a first-rate draughtswoman and writer. Her beliefs about reincarnation and Seti's night visits, however, cannot be tested. She suffered a head injury as a child and was later sent to sanatoriums several times for sleepwalking and nightmares. Her supposed hits – such as a temple garden excavated where she had said it would be – are known mainly from her own telling, and decades of study and life on excavations gave her an enormous knowledge of Abydos. To some she is proof of reincarnation; to others, a fascinating case of imagination and devotion.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

  1. Barbara S. Lesko, Omm Sety (Dorothy Eady) – Breaking Ground: Women in Old World Archaeology (Brown University)
  2. The New York Times – She Had Her Life to Live Over (1987)
  3. Encyclopedia.com – Eady, Dorothy (1904–1981)

More: Wikipedia (en)