B. Anne Gehman

Early life and education

Born in Petoskey, Michigan, to Beatrice Elizabeth Reigle Gehman and John (Johannes) Gehman, she was the youngest of eight children in a financially struggling Amish Mennonite family. Confirmed in the Mennonite faith at age 12, she grew up close to Indian friends from the Chippewa and Ottawa peoples and had a female Indian spirit guide. As a child she experienced rapping, tapping, and making a table levitate, later telling a Michigan reporter she thought everybody experienced these things.

She left home at 14 for DeLand, Florida, where she held three part-time jobs and rented a room for $5 a week. She enrolled herself in Umatilla High School, becoming a majorette and cheerleader, then transferred to DeLand High School for her senior year. She bought a cheap Studebaker that she drove under age. Winning a full scholarship to St. Luke's School of Nursing, she worked as a physician's assistant in DeLand and later as a dental assistant.

At 17, struggling with loneliness and depression, she attempted suicide, followed by what she described as both a near-death experience and an out-of-body experience, leading to a spiritual healing and her decision to return to her body.

Work as a psychic medium

Gehman met medium Wilbur F. Hull when her old Studebaker repeatedly stalled outside his home in Cassadaga, Florida. She bought a house there and opened the Spiritual Research Society in Orlando, moving into spiritual work full-time. Hull taught her psychometry—reading objects like rings, watches, and glasses for psychic information—and introduced her to Spiritualism through books such as J. Arthur Findlay's The Rock of Truth. At age 17, he unexpectedly brought her to the speaker's platform at the Wonewoc Spiritualist Camp in Wonewoc, Wisconsin, where she gave her first talk spontaneously, marking the start of her public work.

The library at the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp is now named for her. In 1960 she became the youngest psychic to receive accreditation from the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, holding National Spiritualist Teacher, Certified Medium, and Commissioned Healer credentials, and acting as an Appointed Missionary. Using dowsing, she consulted for Philips Petroleum Company to locate drill sites for gas and oil, work she later distanced herself from as damaging the earth.

She advised local and state police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the FBI on missing persons cases, including Ted Bundy's final crime. In 1973 she described where to find the body of a missing Alexandria, Virginia man to his family after touching his clothing (psychometry) and viewing photographs. She led a regular meditation group at the Pentagon and practiced spoon bending.

Beliefs

Gehman believed that 'everyone is psychic.' However, she specified that she did not believe in reincarnation, palm reading, or astrology, claiming it was often 'a lot of bunk.' She told an audience in Michigan in 1989, 'I think New Agers need to be real careful of not being involved in things that are flaky and have no basis... I think there's a lot of hokum pokum, and we have to be careful of that. I think someone who is truly gifted is someone who doesn't have to advertise. You don't have to burn candles. You don't have to have crystals.' She felt it was healthy to be wary but to remain 'an open-minded skeptic.' She accepted the life and work of Jesus Christ, believed he was 'the ideal man,' and encouraged her husband Wayne Knoll to remain a Catholic in his faith, although he was also a Spiritualist and maintained that there was no conflict.

Personal life

On September 20, 1995, she married Wayne Knoll, an English professor at Georgetown University and a former Jesuit priest who had left the Society of Jesus 25 years earlier and had been married once before. Their story is told in the 2009 book by Suzanne Giesemann, The Priest and the Medium. She had been married and divorced twice before, and she had a grown daughter, Rhonda Anne (b. 1971), from her first marriage. The Knolls lived in Northern Virginia near his job in Washington, DC, and they often visited her longtime second home in Lily Dale, New York. They kept additional retreat property that Wayne Knoll had bought years earlier on the western slope of Old Rag Mountain, near the Shenandoah National Park. Wayne Knoll died in 2013 at the age of 80. The Church of the Living Spirit in Lily Dale, New York, where Gehman was a pastor, reported her death in early 2024.