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The Watseka
Wonder
The town of Watseka around
1878
The small town of
Watseka was just like any other Midwestern farm town
in the late 1800s. Little out of the ordinary
occurred here --- until July 1877, when word of the
"Watseka Wonder" gained attention all over the
world.
It was at this
time that a 13 year-old girl name Lurancy Vennum
first began to fall into mysterious, catatonic
trances during which she claimed that she was able
to speak to angels and the spirits of the dead. The
strange spells would often occur many times each day
and some of them would last for hours. Word quickly
spread around town that odd things were happening at
the home of Thomas and Lurinda Vennum and soon the
news began to spread.
The stories of the
girl's weird trances gained so much attention due to
the fact that the Spiritualist movement was in the
height of its popularity at this time. Spiritualism
is a movement that is based on the idea that the
dead can, and do, communicate with the living. Those
who are able to make contact with the dead were
referred to as "mediums" and it was believed that
Lurancy Vennum was manifesting mediumistic abilities
during her trances. For this reason, Spiritualists
from all over Illinois, and from around the country,
came to Watseka to see if the stories they heard
were true.
The Vennum family was
not interested in mediums and Spiritualists however.
They were only concerned with the health and welfare of
their daughter and they took her to one physician after
another in hopes that someone would be able to help her.
The doctors could find nothing physically wrong with
Lurancy and they eventually diagnosed her as being
mentally ill. It was recommended that she be sent to the
State Insane Asylum. Heartbroken, the Vennums felt they
had no other choice and after the holiday season of
1877, they began to make arrangements to have their
daughter committed. They knew there was little chance
that Lurancy would ever come home again.
But before Lurancy
could be sent away, in January 1878, a man named Asa
Roff, who also resided in Watseka, arrived at the home
of the Vennum family. He explained to them that his own
daughter, Mary, had been afflicted with the same
condition that Lurancy was suffering from. He begged the
Vennums not to send Lurancy to the asylum. He had
mistakenly sent his own daughter there years before and
she had died in confinement. Despite her death, though,
he was convinced that his daughter's spirit still
existed. And little did he know but it would soon become
apparent to many that his daughter's spirit was now
inside of the body of Lurancy Vennum.
This was the beginning
of a series of strange and fantastic events that rocked
the town of Watseka and created a mystery that remains
unsolved to this day.
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Mary Roff
Lurancy Vennum |
Asa Roff's
daughter, Mary, was born in Indiana in
October 1846. Starting at the age of six
months, Mary began to suffer from strange
fits and seizures, which over the course of
the next 19 years gradually increased in
violence. Her life finally ended on the
afternoon of July 5, 1865 while hospitalized
at the State Mental Asylum. Her father had
been forced to have her committed after a
bizarre incident when she began slashing her
arms with a straight razor. It was the final
tragedy that brought an end to Mary's
descent into madness and insanity.
Mary's
childhood had never been normal. Her
seizures began when she was an infant and as
a young child, began to complain of
mysterious voices that she heard in her
head. As she grew older, she began to
experience long periods when she stayed in a
trance-like state. Then came her moments of
awakening, when she spoke in other voices
and seemed to be possessed by the spirits of
other people. Mary developed an obsession
with blood and became convinced that she
needed to remove the blood from her body,
using pins, leeches and at last, a sharpened
razor. |
After that final
incident, her parents discovered her on the floor of her
room, unconscious and lying in a pool of her own blood.
They had no choice but to commit her to the state asylum
and there, Mary showed no improvement and she soon died.
At the time of Mary Roff's death, Lurancy Vennum was a
little more than one year old. In just over a decade,
though, the two girls' lives would be forever connected
in a case that still remains one of the strangest, and
most authentic, cases of possession ever recorded.
Lurancy Vennum was born on April 16, 1864 and she and
her family moved to Watseka when she was seven
years-old, long after Mary Roff's brief moments of
notoriety in town and her tragic death. The Vennum
family knew nothing of the girl, her strange illness or
anything about the Roff family at all. But on July 11,
1877, the strange events began.
On that otherwise
ordinary morning, Lurancy got out of bed feeling very
dizzy and nauseated. She complained to her mother about
feeling sick and then suddenly collapsed onto the floor,
passed out cold. She stayed in a deep, catatonic sleep
for the next five hours but when she woke up, she said
that she felt fine. But this was just the beginning. The
following day, Lurancy again slipped into a trance-like
sleep but this time was different. This time, as she lay
perfectly still, she began to speak out loud, talking of
visions and spirits and carrying on conversations with
people that no one else could see. She told her family
that she was in heaven and that she could see and hear
spirits, including the spirit of her brother, who had
died in 1874.
After that day, the
trances that Lurancy suffered came more and more
frequently and sometimes they lasted for more than eight
hours at a time. The attacks occurred as many as a dozen
times each day. When she awoke each time, she would
remember nothing of what happened during the trance and
was ignorant of her strange ramblings.
Stories and rumors about Lurancy and her visions began
to circulate in Watseka. People were talking about the
weird happenings and the local newspaper printed stories
about her . No one followed the case more closely than
Asa Roff did. In the early stages of his own daughter's
illness, she had also claimed to communicate with
spirits and she often fell into long, sometimes violent,
trances. He became convinced that Lurancy Vennum was
suffering with the same affliction that Mary had and
became determined to try and help.
Asa Roff called on the Vennum family on January 31,
1878. They were naturally skeptical of his story but he
did persuade them to let him bring a Dr. E. Winchester
Stevens to the house to examine Lurancy. Stevens, like
Roff, was a dedicated Spiritualist and the two men
became convinced that Lurancy was not insane. They
believed that the girl was a vessel through which the
dead were communicating. The Vennums reluctantly agreed
to let Dr. Stevens "mesmerize" the girl. Within moments,
Lurancy began speaking in another voice, which allegedly
came from a spirit named Katrina Hogan. A few moments
later, the spirit changed and now claimed to be that of
Willie Canning, a young man who had committed suicide.
She spoke with Willie's voice for over an hour and then
suddenly, she threw her arms into the air and collapsed.
Dr. Stevens took her hands and soon, Lurancy calmed down
and gained control over her body again. She was now in
heaven, she said, and would allow a gentler spirit to
control her.
She said that the spirit's name was Mary Roff.
The trance continued for the rest of the evening and
into the next day. During this time, Lurancy claimed to
be Mary Roff. She claimed that she had no idea where she
was, unable to recognize the Vennum house, which was a
place that "Mary Roff" had never been. She wanted to go
home, she said, back to the Roff house. The news of this
new development quickly spread and when Mrs. Roff heard
what had happened, she hurried to the Vennum house in
the company of her married daughter, Minerva Alter. The
two women hurried up the sidewalk of the Vennum house
and saw Lurancy sitting by the window. "Here comes Ma
and Nervie", she reportedly said and ran up to hug the
two surprised women. No one had called Minerva by the
nickname "Nervie" since Mary's death in 1865.
It seemed entirely possible to everyone involved that
Mary Roff had taken control of Lurancy. Even though the
girl still looked like Lurancy Vennum, she knew
everything about the Roff family and she treated them as
her loved ones. The Vennums, on the other hand, were
treated very courteously but she was distantly polite
with them, as though living and speaking with strangers.
The Vennums were understandably shocked and unnerved by
the turn of events. Their daughter had become someone
completely unknown to them.
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The
Roff House, where Lurancy stayed as "Mary"
during the weeks of the possession, as it
looks today. |
On
February 11, Lurancy --- or rather "Mary"
--- was allowed to go to the Roff home. Tom
and Lurinda agreed that this arrangement
would be for the best for now, although they
desperately hoped that Lurancy would regain
her true identity. The Roff's, however, saw
the "possession" as a miracle, as though
Mary had returned from the grave.
For the
next several months, Lurancy lived as Mary
and seemed to have forgotten her former
life. |
As the days passed,
Lurancy continued to show that she knew more about the
Roff family, their possessions and their habits than she
could have possibly known if she had been merely faking
the whole thing. Many of the incidents and stories that
she referred to had taken place years before Lurancy had
even been born. Her physical condition began to improve
while staying with the Roff's and she no longer suffered
from the fits that had plagued her.
She was happy and quite contented while living in the
Roff home and she recognized and called by name many of
the neighbors and family friends known to Mary during
her lifetime. In contrast, she claimed not to recognize
any family members, friends or associates of the
Vennums. Hundreds of people witnessed these strange
events and attested to the fact that Lurancy Vennum was
now living as Mary Roff.
Finally, in early May 1978, Lurancy told the Roff family
that it was nearly time for her to leave. She became
very sad and despondent but knew that her time was over
and Lurancy had to return. A few days later, Mary was
gone.
On May 21, Lurancy returned home to the Vennum house.
She displayed none of the strange symptoms of her
earlier illness and her parents were convinced that she
had somehow been cured, thanks to the intervention of
the spirit of Mary Roff. She soon became a healthy and
happy young woman, suffering no ill effects from her
strange experience.
What really happened in Watseka? Did the spirit of Mary
Roff really possess the body of Lurancy Vennum? The
families of both young women, as well as hundreds of
friends and supporters, certainly thought so. What other
explanation exists for what happened? And what happened
in the years that followed?
Those are
questions that you may be able to answer for yourself
after experiencing the house where the mysterious and
unexplained events actually took place --
Make your reservations now!
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