What happened
Watseka is the seat of Iroquois County, Illinois, on the Iroquois River about 85 miles south of Chicago. In the 1870s it was a railroad town of some 1,500 people. Two families in the story lived there: Thomas and Lurinda Vennum, whose daughter Mary Lurancy had been born on April 16, 1864, and Asa B. Roff, a long-established businessman, and his wife Ann, who had lost a daughter, Mary, in 1865 and had become convinced Spiritualists.
On the afternoon of July 11, 1877 Lurancy, then 13, was sewing with her mother when she said she felt ill and collapsed, lying unconscious for five hours. The next day it happened again, and this time she talked, saying she was in heaven and could see a brother and sister who had died in infancy. Through the autumn and winter she had trances three to twelve times a day, lasting up to eight hours, during which she sometimes spoke as other people. The town’s physicians could do nothing, relatives decided she was insane, and the Methodist minister wrote to the state asylum to ask whether she could be admitted.
The Roffs intervened. Asa Roff persuaded Thomas Vennum to let him bring Dr E. Winchester Stevens, a Spiritualist physician from Janesville, Wisconsin, to see the girl. On the afternoon of January 31, 1878 Stevens found Lurancy crouched by the stove, calling herself Katrina Hogan, an old woman, and then Willie Canning, a young man. Stevens told her that if she was troubled by low spirits she should ask for a better one, and on February 1 she announced that she was Mary Roff. Mary had been born in October 1846, had suffered fits from childhood, had cut her arm with a knife in 1864 and spent time at a water-cure in Peoria, and had died in a seizure on July 5, 1865, aged 18, while her parents were away. Lurancy had been a baby of one at the time and the families barely knew each other.
On February 11 the Vennums sent her to the Roff house, where she greeted the family as her own, called Mrs Roff ‘ma’, recognized relatives and former neighbors, and over the following weeks talked about events in the Roff family between 1852 and 1865 that Stevens said she could not have known. On May 21, 1878, after three months and ten days, ‘Mary’ took her leave, Lurancy came to herself and went home, and the trances stopped. In July her mother wrote that the girl was entirely well, and both sets of parents signed a statement that Stevens’s narrative was true.
The investigation
Stevens’s account appeared in the Religio-Philosophical Journal, Chicago’s leading Spiritualist paper, on 3 and August 10, 1878, and was reissued as a pamphlet that September; the Cincinnati Enquirer had already run a piece on the case in June. Skeptical readers suggested the whole thing was invented; Asa Roff replied with a list of Watseka men who would vouch for him, and the journal’s editor declared his full confidence in the witnesses.
Twelve years later Richard Hodgson, the Society for Psychical Research’s most relentless exposer of fraudulent mediums, went to Watseka in April 1890 while in America to study the medium Leonora Piper. Stevens was dead and Lurancy had married and moved to Kansas, but Hodgson questioned the Roffs, Mary’s sister Mrs Alter and several neighbors, who confirmed Stevens’s story and added that ‘Mary’ had occasionally returned in the first years afterward, until Lurancy’s marriage to a man with no interest in Spiritualism. Hodgson concluded that the spirit hypothesis fitted the evidence better than any alternative, and William James gave the case a paragraph in The Principles of Psychology in 1890 as an extreme instance of what the modern world calls possession.
The explanations
The first full skeptical reading came from the psychologist Frank Sargent Hoffman in 1903, who called it hysterical impersonation, and from the journalist H. Addington Bruce in 1908, who had read everything Stevens and Hodgson left. Bruce’s points still stand. Lurancy was a suggestible adolescent with a dissociative illness who was told, by the only adults offering her a way out of the asylum, that a good spirit could take her over, and was then asked by that spirit’s grieving parents to be their daughter. Everything ‘Mary’ knew about the Roffs was known in the Roff house, where Lurancy lived for the whole episode. The Mary personality surfaced afterward only when the Roffs were present. And the sole witness with any medical standing was a committed Spiritualist who wrote his narrative for a Spiritualist readership.
What remains unexplained is the cure. The girl who had been in daily trances for seven months recovered completely and stayed well for the rest of her life. Modern readers see a dissociative disorder resolving in a supportive household; Stevens and the Roffs saw an angel.
Where it stands
The Watseka Wonder became the standard American possession case, retold on radio, stage, television and in a 2009 feature film. The Vennum house still stands in Watseka and offers tours. As evidence of survival after death it has never been more than the word of two families and one doctor, all of whom believed before it began; as a documented episode of a sick child being made well, it is one of the stranger things in the Illinois record.