Montgomery, Ruth

Montgomery, Ruth (1912–2001)

(religion, spiritualism, and occult)

Born Ruth Schick on June 11, 1912, in Princeton, Indiana, she attended both Baylor and Purdue Universities though she never obtained a degree. Ruth went into journalism, despite an early desire to be a missionary, and eventually got a job with the International News Service in Washington D.C. She married Robert H. Montgomery, a management consultant whom she met in Detroit. In St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1956, Montgomery attended her first Spiritualist séance with direct voice medium Malcolm Pantin. She later attended other séances in Washington, including those given by Hugh Gordon Burroughs. She wrote a newspaper series about séances and started using a Ouija® board. Through it, Montgomery believed that she contacted her dead father and also Burroughs’s control, Father Murphy.

Montgomery said in an interview, “That initial story led to an assignment to go to a Spiritualist camp in Silver Bell, Michigan, to produce an eight-part series. In it, I pointed out the obviously phony things, such as materialization séances, but I honestly reported what I couldn’t understand that did seem authentic. I did a straight reporting job that was carried in just about every city in America.” After meeting medium Arthur Ford, and being encouraged by him, Montgomery started doing automatic writing and producing material which she published.

From automatic writing she moved on to do automatic typing. In 1965, she wrote a book about medium Jeane Dixon, titled A Gift of Prophesy. It became a national bestseller. The following year she wrote A Search for the Truth, which dealt with her personal spiritual explorations. In 1970, she gave up her syndicated column and moved to Mexico with her husband. By the late 1970s, Montgomery was writing about aliens and UFOs, in Strangers Among Us (1979) and Aliens Among Us (1985). Her last book, The Worlds To Come: The Guide’s Long-Awaited Predictions for a Dawning Age, was released in 1999 by Harmony Books, New York. In it, Montgomery gave her predictions for the future of planet Earth. These included the view that the planet would shift on its axis and that “in a lot of areas the waters will be where the land is, and vice versa. Lands will rise from the sea.”

Sources:

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen: Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience. San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1991Montgomery, Ruth: A Search for the Truth. New York: Bantam Books, 1968