Barbara Thompson had been one of those children for whom "normalcy" just hadn't seemed to be in the cards.  Julia Thompson, Barbara's mother, had been a self-styled "seer" or clairvoyant.  Dr. Charles Thompson, Barbara's father, had know of this "peculiarity" when he married Julia.  She had been, in fact, one of his patients.  Dr. Thompson was a psychiatrist.  He was 12 years older than Julia.  She had consulted him at her parents' insistence, they had fallen in love, and they had married.  Charles had thought that he could "cure" Julia of her "delusions".  Barbara came along in the second year of their marriage, an event which seemed to accentuate Julia's condition.  By the time Barbara was two years old, Julia Thompson had become deeply enmeshed in various occult organizations, or "cults" as Charles called them.  She had received ordination in a spiritualist church and was gadding about the country attending spiritualist seminars and "playing with witchcraft", as Dr. Thompson put it.  Upon returning from one such trip, she arrived home to find baby Barbara legally separated from "the mother's unwholesome influence", the doors of her own home barred to her entrance, and a process server waiting to hand her legal papers in a divorce action.

Julia Thompson immolated herself, by fire, four months later, on the sidewalk outside her former home.  Charles Thompson, shaken by grief and guilt, retired from psychiatric practice and took a job teaching at a nearby university.  It was here that he met Curt Wenssler.  Prompted and encouraged by Wenssler, Thompson took up the study of metaphysic and occultism in an attempt to understand the earlier conflicts between his dead wife and himself.  He became "a believer", and worked diligently beside Wenssler to increase "an understanding of the mysteries separating man and God."  Meanwhile, young Barbara had begun to have "psychic experiences."  At the age of five, she reported long nighttime conversations "with my mommy."  When she was six, she walked out on her first day at school because of "bad vibrations there".

Recognizing his daughter's unusual sensitivity, Charles Thompson provided her with a private tutor; she never again attended a public school until, at the age of sixteen, she was admitted to the university in which Thompson and Wenssler taught.  Her social life suffered, because she had so little in common with youngsters of, or even far beyond, her own age.  Even during the college years she habitually sought the company of the teachers and professors.  She was usually readily accepted in such circles.  Her senior year at the university was marred by an unhappy romance with a 40-year-old instructor and, later, by her father's death.  She took residence thereafter with the widowed Professor Curt Wenssler, accompanied him on a year's sabbatical to India, and had lived in his shadow ever since.