S4 Ep31: "I Want to Go Home." The Many Lives of Dorothy Eady/Omm Sety
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Ryan Seacrest here.

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Have you ever felt that this life is not the only one you've led? How would it impact the way you live day to day if you knew this was not all there is, that you might get another chance? What if the life you led before tugged on who you are now so much that you wished you could just go back?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I am someone who is in the throes of grappling with my beliefs when it comes to if there is a before and or an after, and if that includes soul recycling. Frankly, at 45 years old, I feel like I've had multiple lives just in this one lifetime. The thought of having done it before or having to do it again is exhausting.

Sometimes I think people who want to be reincarnated are the same people who enjoy going to high school reunions. Like, why on earth would you want to relive that experience? No thank you. I don't mean to yuck your yum, as the young people say. It's just not for me. I suppose if we do live multiple lives, it's a blessing that we typically don't remember them. Imagine living in squalor and learning you used to be a queen in a past life. It's like adding insult to injury.

And what if there was some kind of unfinished business from your past life that you couldn't do anything in this lifetime to resolve? For Dorothy Eadie, whatever business she had left unfinished must have been monumental because she spent her new life doing whatever she could to relive her past life. Dorothy Eadie was the only child of Reuben Ernest Eadie, a master tailor from Ireland, and Caroline Mary Frost Eadie.

She was born on January 16th, 1904 in London, England, and that's about where the conventional report of Dorothy's life ends. Things were different for Dorothy pretty early on. In 1907, at the age of three, Dorothy took a serious fall down a flight of stairs, following which she was thought to be dead.

The incident is described in The Search for Om Setti by Jonathan Cott this way, quote,

Rushing down after her, Mrs. Eadie lifted up her daughter, her only child, and saw she was unconscious. The frantic mother immediately sent for the doctor, who examined the girl with a stethoscope, held a mirror, then a feather up to her mouth, and pronounced her dead. End quote.

The book goes on to say, quote,

End quote.

Apparently, Dorothy's dad was pissed because the doctor swore up and down Dorothy had been D.E.D. dead by all medical standards, and couldn't explain why now she wasn't. And let me repeat, Dorothy's dad was pissed. His daughter, whom he thought was dead, was in fact very much alive and well. And he was pissed?

Turns out, he was annoyed he'd been called away from work. I mean, okay. Listen, even if she hadn't died, she fell down the stairs and was at the very least unconscious. And you're annoyed you were called away from work? Could you imagine the school nurse calling and being like, your kid is vomiting all over the place, and you're like, call me back when she's dead, I have papers to file. Yikes.

Anyway, not long after this miracle recovery, little Dorothy began asking her parents to be brought home. This, understandably, created some confusion for her family as Dorothy was already at home. But it was more than just confusion about her whereabouts.

Dorothy was somehow changed after her fall, and now the three-year-old believed she had another home, away from the small coastal town where she lived with her family. The little girl couldn't say exactly where she believed that home to be, but she continued to talk about this other home.

Then, in 1908, about a year after her fall, Dorothy's parents took her to visit the British Museum. While touring the ancient Egypt section of the museum, Dorothy saw a photo of a temple and exclaimed, "'There is my home, but where are the trees? Where are the gardens?'

She was so excited that she ran around the halls of the Egyptian rooms behaving as though she were among her people, which I can imagine the museum staff were not thrilled about. They really prefer you enjoy art in a somber, silent fashion. Enjoy the art, but, you know, not too much. ♪

A 2010 piece about Dorothy on historicmysteries.com tells us that, quote, As soon as Dorothy gazed upon the Egyptian artifacts, she began kissing the feet of the statues. She sat down at the foot of a mummy enclosed in a glass case and refused to separate from it. After her mother attempted to pick her up, Dorothy was quoted as saying, Leave me here. These are my people. End quote.

We've all been there, right? Like when you're at a party and everyone is talking about the Real Housewives and you meet that one person sitting off in a corner who's thrilled to discuss end-stage capitalism and the decline of democracy with you and you're like, this is my kind of people.

But the thing is, Dorothy didn't mean it metaphorically. No. Four-year-old Irish-English Dorothy was like, "'Y'all, these are literally my people. I need to be with them. Why am I here amongst the pasty Brits? Why am I, myself, a pasty Brit?' After the museum visit, this refrain of "'Take me home' continued to be a thing for Dorothy. She would cry and beg her parents to go home."

Her parents would do the only thing they could think of and would just reassure her that she was already home. But their daughter never stopped longing for this other place she saw in the photo at the British Museum. From a young age, it is said that Dorothy had vivid recurring dreams of ancient Egypt, in which, she said, she saw large columned buildings resembling pyramids surrounded by rich vegetation and other details that were specifically connected to images of ancient Egypt.

Who could blame her, though? Living as she did in smoggy old England, what with its Dickensian factories and wretched urchins swarming the streets looking for porridge and whatnot. Who wouldn't want to trade that for the lush green vistas of ancient Egypt?

It might be important to remind the listener here that Dorothy did not have access to a digital encyclopedia, or even a television. And I could be wrong, wouldn't be the first time, but somehow I doubt she had a bunch of analog information about ancient Egypt lying around the house. That's a pretty niche interest for a turn-of-the-20th-century working-class English family to have, and

And chances are, if someone did have that niche interest, it would show up in the biography somewhere. Something like, "Though Dorothy had never been to Egypt, her mother was fascinated by it and Dorothy spent many hours poring over her mother's collection of books." But that's not in there. Also, I'm not sure there was a wealth of information around back then about how different the climate would have been in ancient Egypt versus the climate there of the day.

By the turn of the 20th century, of course, the pyramids in Egypt were no longer surrounded by rich vegetation, but we know now they once were. Would a four-year-old English child have known that information? Somehow, I doubt it.

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If her obsession didn't set her apart from the other kids, it did, then her strange accent certainly did. It's one thing for little Timmy to be obsessed with dinosaurs. It's quite another for him to suddenly start communicating in a series of roars and clicks, or however dinosaurs communicated.

Dorothy suddenly developed a way of talking that baffled her family and doctors. This was likely the result of foreign accent syndrome, a rare medical condition in which patients develop speech patterns that are different from their native accent and make them sound as if they are speaking with a foreign accent.

Generally, it happens as a result of some kind of traumatic brain injury, and it's extremely rare. Since its discovery in 1907, there have been fewer than 100 identified cases. So it seems likely that Dorothy's fall down the stairs caused this aspect, and possibly many others, of the profound personality change her family saw in her at that early age.

And I suppose it's hard to know now if the accent she suddenly adopted was at all similar to an Egyptian accent, or if it was just sort of a generic foreign accent one might hear in old movies. Like, oh, just put a vague accent on it, no one will know the difference. Incidentally, if you've ever had the misfortune to see John Wayne in The Conqueror, you might know what I mean. If you haven't, don't. Unless you want to feel enraged.

If Dorothy's newfound accent was, indeed, accurate, where on earth had she heard enough of it to be able to ape it at such a young age? It's not like she had YouTube.

Dorothy was eccentric. And of course, these differences and strange behaviors caused conflict in Dorothy's early life. Not just at school, where the slightest thing can turn you into a pariah. In Sunday school, Dorothy told her teacher that, quote, Christianity was nothing but a pale imitation of the ancient Egyptian religion, end quote. Which is probably pretty true, but I can't help but think that kind of speech is pretty advanced for such a young child.

My kid is precocious, for sure, but if he started telling me one religion was a pale imitation of another, I'd probably try to get Mensa on the horn. But I guess that kind of thing was, and probably still is, really frowned upon in Sunday school. The Sunday school teacher requested that Dorothy's parents keep her away from class.

And speaking of Dorothy's upsetting heathen behaviors, she also refused to sing a hymn that called on God to, quote, "...curse the swart Egyptians," end quote. And so she was expelled for her convictions. But good for Dorothy, you know? I don't know if it was the curse being placed on the Egyptians in the song or their being called swart that Dorothy objected to, but either way, it doesn't sound like a very nice hymn.

Why is a church song calling on God to curse anyone? God is omnipotent. I'm pretty sure he's on top of who needs to be cursed. He doesn't need to take requests.

Eventually, the family's Roman Catholic Church asked Dorothy to stay home from church as well, and they sent a priest to interrogate, or interview, depending on your point of view, her and her parents. This time, her expulsion was because Dorothy reportedly said that she liked attending Catholic Mass because it reminded her of her old religion. Picky picky. Who cares what gets the butts in the seats, you know? At least she was there.

Basically, Dorothy was really out there for the small Christian community she was being raised in, and her curiosity and observations about Egypt were not appreciated. Between being ostracized by her social-slash-spiritual set and her affinity for all things Egyptian, Dorothy's visits to the British Museum became more frequent, and it was there that she met E.A. Wallace Budge.

Budge was a studied linguist who was the British Museum's assistant keeper of antiquities in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. Over the course of his career, he helped to obtain large collections of cuneiform tablets and other important contributions to the collection. He was also a prolific author on the subject of Egyptology and, perhaps most importantly for Dorothy, Budge was noted for his kindness and patience in teaching young visitors at the British Museum.

It was Budge who evidently encouraged Dorothy's studies in hieroglyphs. Dorothy quickly became proficient in the language, feeling that she had known it all before and was simply recalling past knowledge. When Dorothy was 12 years old, with the outbreak of World War I, she was sent to Sussex to stay with her grandmother for safety. She continued her studies there by riding a horse eight miles to the library in Eastbourne to read everything she could about Egypt.

One can only imagine how perplexed her grandmother was by Dorothy's odd obsession. You should see my parents trying to understand or feign interest in Pokemon when my kid tries to explain it to them. Can you imagine an English-born woman in the 1800s listening to this tween go on and on about ancient Egypt? I can only imagine she'd eventually be like, "'Girl, just eat your bangers and mash and play with paper dolls like a normal child.'"

By age 14, Dorothy was back in London and still very much on the whole Egypt thing. She doubled down, claiming that she was receiving nighttime visitations from the mummy of Seti I, with whom she claimed to have been lovers in her past life. This bit of mummified hanky-panky did not sit well with her family. ♪

Dorothy's unrelenting reports of her nighttime visitations and her other wild claims led her family to seek psychiatric solutions. According to an article on TBS News from March 2024, quote, End quote.

Despite whatever psychiatric interventions they threw at her, Dorothy kept right on with her late night hangouts with mummies and ghosts and continued to learn as much as she could about the ancient Egypt she felt so connected to. It was around this time that Dorothy also began to claim that she was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian priestess named Bentreshet.

Dorothy's parents were probably very worried. That is, if they were aware of the lurid details. Dorothy's journals were kept secret until after her death, but she evidently wrote about the late night visits and it is...concerning?

Encyclopedia.com says Dorothy wrote entries in her journal detailing, "...the numerous dream visitations by the spirit of her ancient lover, Pharaoh Seti I. She noted that at age 14 she had been ravished by a mummy. Seti, or at least his astral body, his akh, visited her at night with increasing frequency over the years."

So maybe it was a fantasy, or maybe it was the ghost of a pharaoh, or maybe there was a human involved? I don't know. I only know if it was my kid, I'd be concerned.

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According to author and historian Jonathan Cott in his 1989 book The Search for Om Seti, The True Story of Eternal Love and One Woman's Voyage Through the Ages, Dorothy described her other life as a priestess serving the 19th dynasty pharaoh Seti I, which would have been somewhere between 1290 and 1279 B.C.,

This story, she said, was dictated to her by the spirit of Seti I, Hor Ra, during his nocturnal visits, and was 70 pages long as Dorothy transcribed it, amazingly, in hieroglyphics. Kott writes, quote, "'Om Seti' described the demotic text as looking, to me, like nothing I could appreciate, as if a beautiful hieroglyph text had been run over by a lorry and totally distorted out of shape."

She had not studied Demotic, and it was only whilst in a trance-like state she was able to struggle in putting down what she reported as Hor-Ra's dictation." Her transcript was later reviewed by an Egyptologist who said it was indeed written in authentic Demotic hieroglyphs at a beginner level.

Dorothy said in her previous life as Bantreshit, her mother, a vegetable seller, passed away when she was three years old and her soldier father could not provide for her. So she was abandoned at the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, where she would be raised to serve as a priestess. By the age of 12, Bantreshit had taken the vows of a consecrated virgin, likely because she didn't understand the implications of the vow at her young age and because of her lack of options.

She reportedly became a high-ranking priestess in the temple, which was one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Egypt. The temple was dedicated to Osiris, the god of the afterlife, and was a center for worship and pilgrimage.

Priestesses in ancient Egypt were intermediaries between the gods and the people. They played a crucial role in temple rituals, which involved offerings to deities, maintaining temple spaces, and performing sacred rites. Which honestly just sounds to me a lot like cooking and cleaning. For the gods. Honestly, what is the point of being a priestess if you still have to do your own housework? But hey, supposedly they were highly respected.

Unfortunately, they were also held to strict codes of conduct. Bintra Sheth found herself in a romantic relationship with the pharaoh. Though considering how young she must have been and that her lover was the most powerful man in Egypt, one can hardly call it a consensual relationship.

This kind of relationship was highly unconventional and scandalous given the religious and social norms of the time. So, of course, the resulting pregnancy was, or would have been, a major scandal.

In ancient Egyptian society, a priestess losing her virginity was considered a severe breach of religious protocol and would have exposed Ben-Treshet as having committed the capital offense of losing her virginity. Apparently, the pharaoh was immune even though he was the one who took her virginity and she was a child and essentially his slave.

Cool beans. So Ben Trashett decided instead to die by her own hand, to save her rich pharaoh lover Seti from embarrassment. Right, because I am sure he would have just died with embarrassment, and they couldn't have that. So instead, she actually died. Ugh, misogyny. Am I right? Anyway...

Back in the 19-teens in England, after the night visits began and after the various commitments to this or that sanatorium, Dorothy finally dropped out of regular school at 16 and moved on to be a part-time student at Plymouth Art School. She began to collect affordable Egyptian antiquities and even starred in a school play about the Egyptian goddess Isis. ♪

In her adult years, Dorothy's life took several significant turns as she continued to pursue her connection to ancient Egypt. In her late 20s, Dorothy worked for an Egyptian public relations magazine in London where she met her future husband, Iman Abdel Megwad. Megwad was an Egyptian student in London who later became an English teacher. The two married and moved to Cairo in 1931, closer to Dorothy's other home than she had ever been before.

The couple had a son named Seti, and Dorothy adopted the name Om Seti, meaning Mother of Seti, which is nice, I guess, except that it kind of implies that your entire personality is just some kid's mom. It's one thing for that to be your Instagram personality. It feels like another for it to become your actual identity. Like, sure, you lived a whole life, or in this case, at least two whole lives, before having a kid, but now you're just this kid's mom.

Listen, whatever gets you through the day. In Egypt, Dorothy worked as a draftswoman with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, where her knowledge and skills were highly valued. Following in the footsteps of her old mentor, Budge, she published articles and books contributing significantly to the understanding of ancient Egyptian culture and history.

Dorothy's mystical experiences also continued in Egypt. It is said that Dorothy frequently spent nights alone inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, where she conducted rituals and laid offerings at the feet of the Sphinx, as an ancient priestess might have done. Her practices were a source of fascination and sometimes controversy. Some were put off by her ancient rituals, while others admired her dedication and openness about her beliefs.

One of those who was put off was her husband, who was, according to Encyclopedia.com, quote, "...alarmed and alienated by her behavior," end quote. Megwood divorced Dorothy in 1936. Honestly, how could he have been alarmed and alienated? It sounds to me like Dorothy was nothing if not consistent. He must not have been paying attention.

Must have been one of those, yeah, but I thought she'd kind of calm down once we got married situations. Spoiler alert, don't marry someone hoping they'll be someone else eventually. They won't. Encyclopedia.com tells us that Dorothy slash Omseti, quote, took this development in stride and convinced that she was now living in her true home, never returned to England, end quote.

After the divorce, Dorothy stayed in Egypt and continued working. Though she was regarded as highly eccentric, her detractors and skeptics could not explain how she was able, quote, to intuit countless details of ancient Egyptian life, end quote. Encyclopedia.com continues, quote, On excavations, she would claim to remember a detail from her previous life and then give instructions like, Dig here, I remember the ancient garden was here.

They would dig and uncover remains of a long-vanished garden. Edie's contributions to her field were such that in time, her claims of memory of a past life and her worship of ancient gods like Osiris no longer bothered her colleagues.

End quote.

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We all enjoy a little mystery. Every other week, One Strange Thing presents forgotten stories from America's news archives. They all have something in common, a single element that can't quite be explained. One Strange Thing brings you stories that are very real and just a little otherworldly. Subscribe now wherever you listen.

Dorothy reported receiving messages and visions from the spirit of the priestess she claimed to be the reincarnation of. She also said the visits from SETI-1 included intimate conversations and instructions on ancient rituals, as well as detailed knowledge about temple layouts that she used to guide her work and research. So they weren't just astral booty calls, okay?

Dorothy's detailed accounts contributed to a broader understanding of ancient Egyptian religious practices. Her descriptions of logistical details about ancient Egypt and her stories about Bantreshet were influential in Egyptological research, and inspired various researchers and enthusiasts to explore the spiritual and ritualistic aspects of ancient Egyptian culture more deeply.

Bantreshit's story, as Dorothy told it, has become a symbol of the mystical and spiritual dimensions of ancient Egyptian religion.

The story highlights the deep connection between personal belief, historical narratives, and cultural heritage. In other words, it's a good story. People love a good story. A good story can capture the imagination of many. In this case, the telling of a good story probably contributed to a broader fascination with reincarnation, ancient Egypt, and the mystical elements of history, so that we are still talking about those things today.

In a piece about her on Knight's Templar.com, her legacy is described as follows, quote,

Her unique contributions continue to intrigue scholars and enthusiasts alike. Despite her unconventional background, Om Seti established herself as a respected figure in Egyptology. As the keeper of the Abydos temple of Seti I, she demonstrated exceptional skills in hieroglyphic translation, text indexing, and archaeological documentation.

End quote.

In her 50s, Dorothy finally moved the rest of the way home to Abydos, the site of the Temple of Seti I, where she always believed she had lived in her past life. Her work alongside archaeologists in Abydos was instrumental in uncovering new information about the ancient site. She amazed her colleagues with her detailed knowledge of the temple and its surroundings, often providing insights that guided successful excavations.

The chief inspector at Abydos once tested her knowledge by asking her to locate specific murals within the temple in complete darkness. Dorothy succeeded, identifying each mural accurately despite their unmarked positions. Dorothy's son Seti grew up and moved to Kuwait for work. He asked his mother to join him there, but Dorothy chose to stay in Abydos.

She remained deeply committed to her work there and was driven by a continued connection to the site. She stayed there until her death on April 21, 1981, when her body was interred in a tomb in her garden there.

Dorothy Eadie is still celebrated for her significant contributions to Egyptology. Her extensive knowledge of ancient Egyptian culture, her claims of past life memories, and her steadfast dedication to Abydos have left a lasting impact on researchers and Egypt enthusiasts, and to this day, no one can explain Dorothy's preternatural knowledge of the sites she studied, or her abiding spiritual link to ancient Egypt.

It's hard to write this story off as one of some kind of traumatic brain injury. Sure, there are stories of people acquiring remarkable skills or even other languages or accents after a brain injury, but how could such a young girl have gathered enough information by three years old to have it jogged out of her by a bump to the brain?

It seems to me, and I'm no neurosurgeon or whatever, that one needs to have acquired the knowledge from somewhere in order for it to show up in one's brain. And if what her brain conjured after her near-death fall was just her imagination and not memories or knowledge from a past life, it was certainly coincidentally accurate. And either way, we would have to file it under strange and unexplained.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained. For the Christmas week, rather than give you a rerun, I'm giving you another bonus interview. Join me for an interview with Jessica Buttafuoco. If the name sounds familiar, you know who I'm talking about. Jessica is a true crime survivor who turned her experience being inside one of the most sensationalized stories of the 1990s into her superpower.

On her way to getting her PhD, Jessica has become a fierce advocate for true crime survivors and has lots to say about how the true crime entertainment machine works. Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written by Eve Kerrigan and me, Daisy Egan, with research by Becky Berger. Sound engineering by Jeff Devine.

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