Montgomery, Ruth (Schick)

Award-winning journalist with special interest in psychic healing, channeling, and extrasensory perception. She was born in Sumner, Illinois, educated at Baylor University (1930-35) and Purdue University (1934). She married Robert H. Montgomery on December 26, 1935. She began a career in journalism as women's editor for the Louisville Herald-Post, Kentucky. She later worked as a feature writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Indianapolis Star and as a reporter with the Detroit News, Detroit Times, Waco News-Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News. She moved to Washington, D.C., in 1944 and served as a correspondent for the International News Service through the 1950s, frequently traveling around the world as a foreign correspondent. She won the Pall Mall Journalism Award (1947), the Front Page Award from the Indianapolis Press Club (1957), and the George R. Holmes Journalism Award (1958).

In 1958, she became interested in psychic phenomena after writing a series of articles on the occult. Although at first skeptical, she continued her research. She met medium Arthur Ford, who told her that she had the ability to do automatic writing, and has since been influenced by what she calls "my guides," discarnate spirits that have assisted her writings on such subjects as psychic healing, reincarnation, and psychic faculties. She broke into the spotlight with her biographical presentation of Washington psychic Jeane Dixon in A Gift of Prophecy (1965), which the following year won the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award from Indiana University.

Following the death of Arthur Ford in 1971, Montgomery came forward with a volume of communications, A World Beyond, which she claimed originated in her contact with his spirit. She built a following in the emerging New Age movement and in her 1979 volume Strangers Among Us presented the idea of walk-ins, people who had died but whose bodies had been immediately taken over and life continued by returning spirits. People claiming to be such walk-ins have now emerged as leaders of various New Age groups. In the 1980s she became a popular spokesperson within the New Age movement and an advocate of a more apocalyptic understanding of society's moving into the New Age through a cataclysmic event, accompanying a pole shift, at the end of the 1990s. In 1986 she released her autobiography, Ruth Montgomery: Herald of the New Age.

Sources:

Melton, J. Gordon, Jerome Clark, and Aidan Kelly. New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990.

Montgomery, Ruth. Born to Heal. New York: Coward, McCann & Geochegan, 1973.

——. Companions Along the Way. New York: Coward, McCann & Geochegan, 1974.

——. A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon. New York: William Morrow, 1965.

——. Here and Hereafter. New York: Coward, McCann & Geochegan, 1966.

——. A Search for the Truth. New York: William Morrow, 1967.

——. Strangers Among Us. New York: Coward, McCann & Geochegan, 1979.

——. The World Before. New York: Coward, McCann & Geochegan, 1976.

——. A World Beyond. New York: Coward, McCann & Geochegan, 1971.

——. The World to Come: The Guide Long-Awaited Predictions for a Dawning Age. New York: Harmony Books, 1999.