Haunted Heartland

by Michael Norman

  A female patient like Mary Roff also received a cold-water douche administered with a hose. Although victims were nearly senseless from this “cure,” the horror continued with water-soaked sheets tightly bound around the body as to literally squeeze shut blood vessels. Finally, if the patient had so far survived, her skin was vigorously rubbed to “improve” the circulation.

  The treatments were repeated several times a week, despite their noticeable lack of success in bringing anyone back to a healthy mental state. It is little wonder that after Mary Roff died in the asylum, her father, Asa B. Roff, declared that his daughter was “in a condition terrible to behold, among maniacs, ruled and cared for by ignorant and bigoted strangers.”

  Lurancy Vennum was not yet fourteen months old when Mary Roff died mad and alone. But their lives became forever intertwined twelve years later in one of the strangest cases of possession ever recorded in the United States.

  Lurancy was, from all accounts, a normal, healthy child raised in a loving and religious home. Born on April 16, 1864, she and her family moved to Watseka in 1871, when she was seven. Although Asa Roff, his wife, and several children also lived in Watseka at the time and still grieved for their dead daughter, the Vennums apparently did not know the Roff family beyond the casual acquaintanceship not atypical in small towns.

  Yet on July 11, 1877, shortly after the twelfth anniversary of Mary Roff’s death, a series of events began that would plunge Lurancy into the netherworld of the supernatural.

  On that morning, when sewing with her mother, thirteen-year-old Lurancy complained of feeling ill. Before her mother could react, the child fell to the floor, unconscious. For the next five hours, Lurancy was caught in a deep, almost catatonic sleep, oblivious to her surroundings. She recovered later that day without any visible adverse effects.

  The next day, however, Lurancy again fell into the same deep faint. This time, while apparently still unconscious, she began talking. She was in heaven, the child told her bewildered parents, and could see and speak with spirits, including her brother, who had died several years before.

  After that, Lurancy’s lapses into unconsciousness become more and more frequent. When she was lucid, her visions took on a nightmarish tinge. She would sometimes shout at her parents, calling her father “Old Black Dick” and her mother “Old Granny.” After one particularly long siege, she told her mother that “persons are in my room calling ‘Raney! Raney!’ and I can feel their breath upon my face.” Raney was her nickname.

  Continuing attacks lasted for periods of up to eight hours and occurred three to twelve times per day. While Lurancy could speak, her words seemed to be directed by someone, or something, the Vennums could not understand. Once her spells had passed, Lurancy remembered nothing of her strange jabbering.

  The story of Lurancy Vennum’s peculiar visions spread quickly through Watseka. The local newspaper published articles about the child and her dialogue with the spirit world. Among the townsfolk who closely followed the case was Asa Roff, Mary Roff’s father. His interest was more than casual. In the early stages of Mary’s sickness, she too had said she could communicate with spirits. From what he read in the newspaper or heard from others, Lurancy’s symptoms sounded disturbingly similar. Now her father was determined not to let another young girl die at the hands of “ignorant and bigoted strangers” whose ideas of medicine and mental health were more akin to medieval torture. He said nothing, however, until Lurancy’s family had exhausted every known treatment for their daughter’s illness without success; doctors and their minister were advising them to commit the girl to the Peoria state hospital.

  That was too much for Roff. On January 31, 1878, he intervened, persuading the skeptical Vennum family to let him bring Dr. E. Winchester Stevens, a dedicated spiritualist like himself, into the case. Both men were convinced that Lurancy was not insane or catatonic, but rather the vessel through which the souls of the dead were communicating with the living.

  Lurancy was sitting near a parlor stove when Asa Roff and Dr. Stevens first visited the Vennum home. Her unblinking gaze seemed riveted on the wall, her legs pulled up under her on the chair. She rested her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped under her chin. Roff said later she looked every inch a mean old woman not to be trifled with. Even her voice had the raspy sound of age.

  Lurancy growled that she did not want to talk to anyone.

  After a few minutes, however, her mood changed. She said that since Dr. Stevens was a spiritualist she would answer any question he might pose.

  Dr. Stevens quizzed the strange girl: “What is your name?”

  “Katrina Hogan.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Sixty-three years.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Germany.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Three days.”

  “How did you come?”

  “Through the air.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  “Three weeks.”

  Lurancy’s mood suddenly shifted.

  She had been lying, she admitted. She was actually Willie Canning, a young man now in the spirit world but who had shown up “because I want to be here.” He had led a wild life and implied that he may have committed suicide.

  For over an hour, Lurancy spoke to Dr. Stevens in the guise of Willie. She then suddenly flung up her arms and fell backward onto the floor.

  The doctor said she appeared to be rigid as a plank. He grasped her hands in his own, talking quietly but firmly in an attempt to “magnetize” her, as he later wrote but did not explain. Gradually, she regained the use of her body.

  Now she had entered heaven, she said, with spirits of a far gentler persuasion than Katrina or Willie.

  Would she not like to be controlled by a happier, more pleasant spirit than Willie? Dr. Stevens asked.

  Lurancy agreed that would be nice. In fact there was a nice spirit nearby, Lurancy said. The spirit of a girl named Mary Roff.

  Asa Roff had been silently taking in the proceedings but now sat bolt upright.

  “That’s my daughter! Mary Roff is my girl!” Asa Roff said. “She has been in heaven these twelve years. Yes, let her come. We’ll be glad to have her here.”

  The trance continued into the next day, February 1. Lurancy Vennum had now taken on the persona of Mary Roff. All she wanted was to leave the Vennum house and go home with the Roffs.

  When Mrs. Roff heard of the supposed reincarnation of her beloved child, she hurried to the Vennum home with her married daughter, Minerva Alter. As the two women turned up the walk, they saw Lurancy sitting by the window.

  “Here comes Ma and Nervie,” Lurancy/Mary cried out.

  She rushed to the door and showered the startled women with embraces. No one had called Minerva “Nervie” since Mary died. That had been Mary’s pet name for her.

  Those watching the scene believed the spirit of Mary Roff had taken complete control of the mind and body of Lurancy Vennum.

  She seemed to know everything about the Roff family, treating them as her own. To the Vennums, her real parents, she remained polite and courteous as a child might with adults present. Dr. Stevens later wrote: “From the wild, angry, ungovernable girl, to be kept only by lock and key, or the more distressing watch-care of almost frantic parents; or the rigid, corpse like cataleptic . . . the girl has now become mild . . . and timid . . . knowing none of the Vennum family, but constantly pleading to go ‘home.’”

  She went home with the Roffs ten days later.

  Lurancy’s family, with the happy acquiescence of the Roffs, agreed that it was best at least for the time being. They hoped that in time Lurancy would regain her true identity. Having lived through hell during the past seven months, they viewed this new persona only as another phase of the insanity, but they were willing to go along with almost anything to keep their lovely daughter from being locked up in an asylum.

  For the Roffs, on the other hand, it seem
ed a miracle. Their Mary had returned from the grave, though she looked nothing like her old self but rather as a girl they barely knew.

  An incident on the way home that day strengthened their belief in what they were choosing to call Mary’s reincarnation.

  In 1865, the year Mary died, the family had been living in a house near the center of Watseka. That was the home Mary knew. As Lurancy, with her new family, passed the old place, she asked why they did not turn into the drive. When Mr. Roff told her that their home was now elsewhere, Lurancy insisted that was not correct. Only after strong persuasion did the girl agree to accompany them further.

  For a time, Lurancy Vennum was content living as Mary Roff. Although Mary’s personality occasionally vanished for short periods, Lurancy seemed to have completely forgotten her pre–Mary Roff life. Yet she seemed to sense impermanence in the arrangement.

  “How long can you stay with us?” Mrs. Roff asked.

  “The angels will let me stay until sometime in May,” Lurancy/Mary said.

  As the days and weeks passed, Lurancy continued to display remarkable knowledge about Roff family matters. She recognized most of the family possessions that had been part of Mary’s world; she welcomed “old friends” when they visited; on one occasion she recited the entire itinerary of a long trip the Roffs had made to Texas in 1857. Of course, the Roffs were ecstatic.

  “Truly our daughter has been restored to us,” Asa Roff said.

  Likewise, Mary’s sister, Minerva Alter, with whom Lurancy lived for several weeks during the spring of 1878, was convinced that Mary had indeed returned from the dead. She told interviewers that on at least two occasions, Lurancy had shocked her with specific remembrances. One time she pointed to a spot beneath a currant bush and accurately described how her little cousin Allie had “greased the chicken’s eye.” On another occasion, Lurancy/Mary correctly identified an area in her yard where they had buried a pet dog. Both incidents occurred several years before Lurancy was born.

  Later, as an experiment, Asa Roff asked his wife to place a velvet bonnet Mary had often worn on a hat stand in the parlor. Lurancy ran to it, mentioned the store where it had been purchased, and reminisced about some of the things that had happened those times when she was wearing it. She wondered if the Roffs kept her box of letters from friends and relatives. They produced her old box of letters and some sewing materials.

  “Oh, Ma!” she said, “and here is the collar I tatted! Why didn’t you show me my letters and things before?”

  Not everyone in Watseka believed that Mary Roff had taken possession of Lurancy Vennum.

  Several of the doctors who had treated Lurancy before the arrival of Dr. Stevens ridiculed his diagnosis of “spirit possession.”

  One woman who knew the Vennum family well echoed the sentiment of many when she lashed out at the role spiritualism appeared to be playing in Lurancy’s treatment.

  “I would sooner follow a girl of mine to the grave than have her go to the Roffs and be made a spiritualist!” she said.

  A local minister—who had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Vennums to have Lurancy committed—told Mrs. Vennum, “I think you will see the time when you will wish you had sent her to the asylum.”

  Meanwhile, Lurancy Vennum’s life as Mary Roff continued. Any new test designed by Dr. Stevens to gauge her ability to recall distant events in that other life purportedly met with complete success.

  Still, the girl did know that she was not actually Mary Roff.

  Dr. Stevens asked her if she remembered a cut she had received as a child.

  “Yes, indeed, I can show you the scar.”

  She rolled up her sleeve, pointing to the place on her arm where the real Mary had scarred herself in a childhood accident.

  “Oh, this isn’t the mark. That arm is in the ground,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Lurancy-as-Mary also seemed to have had some power of clairvoyance.

  Early one day, she told the Roffs that her “brother” Frank would become sick that night. He did.

  The girl then instructed her parents to take Frank to Dr. Stevens’s home. Mr. Roff protested that Dr. Stevens was out of the city and not expected home. An insistent Lurancy disagreed. They did, indeed, find Dr. Stevens at home and he treated the boy for “spasms and congestive chill” from which he soon recovered.

  In early May, Lurancy took Asa Roff aside and said it was nearly time for her to go. She choked back sobs at the thought of forcing the Roffs again to say good-bye to their daughter. Over the next few days, Lurancy’s true personality steadily returned, not understanding where she was or what had happened. Lurancy would hold sway one moment, Mary the next. On May 21, Lurancy announced it was now time to return to her real home. Then, Mary took control, addressing Asa Roff as “sir.” She wept bitterly at the thought of leaving.

  But leave she did. Once back with the Vennums, Lurancy displayed none of the alarming symptoms of the past year. Her parents were convinced that their daughter had been cured by the intervention of the spirit of Mary Roff.

  Lurancy remained in touch with the Roffs.

  As did the spirit of Mary Roff.

  Lurancy sometimes allowed Mary to take control so the Roffs could communicate with their late daughter. Mary never wanted to stay long and allowed Lurancy to regain her identity whenever she wished.

  Can this case of spirit possession be explained?

  Perhaps Lurancy Vennum suffered from a genuine mental illness. Based on reports of that period, she appeared to have the memories, emotions, recognitions, physical nuances, and personality of a person dead twelve years. In most cases of multiple personality, however, the individual does not have this knowledge of the early life of another, sometimes fictitious, personality.

  Or perhaps Lurancy was merely an actress putting on a very convincing performance. Shortly after the possession became common knowledge, rumors spread that she had a crush on one of the Roff sons and for that reason wanted to be close to the family. The allegation was never substantiated, and it seems unlikely that Lurancy had somehow acquired her knowledge of the Roff family and applied it so expertly.

  Whatever the case, after she left the Roff house, Lurancy became a happy, healthy fourteen-year-old girl, having survived with few ill effects one of the most bizarre experiences anyone could ever imagine.

  Eight years after the extraordinary chain of events, in 1896, Lurancy Vennum married a farmer and devout nonbeliever in anything to do with spiritualism or religion itself. She moved with him to Rollins County, Kansas, where they lived out their lives. Lurancy died an old woman, never again to be possessed by the spirit of Mary Roff.

  Lincoln and the Supernatural

  Springfield

  President Abraham Lincoln did not stray far from the telegraph key in the U.S. War Department offices in Washington, DC, on June 7, 1864. As the day wore on he awaited word from General Ulysses S. Grant, who was nearing Richmond. Oblivious to everything but the Civil War, he paid scant attention that day to the opening sessions of the Republican Party Convention in Baltimore. He left the office only to eat a hasty lunch in the White House.

  It was not that the president did not care about his own renomination taking place forty miles away. No, he did not give it a thought, because he knew he would be nominated and elected to a second presidential term.

  And he knew that he would not survive.

  Shortly after his election in 1860, on a day when the news of his victory over Stephen A. Douglas was still being transmitted to his private offices in Springfield, Lincoln retreated to his quarters to rest. He caught nearly his full-length reflection in a mirror atop a chest of drawers.

  Hardly odd, except for what Lincoln said he saw in his own reflection. He later confided to a friend:

  My face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass. The vision vanished.
On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer . . . than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler . . . than the other. I got up and the thing melted away. [In] the excitement of the hour I forgot all about it, nearly, but not quite, for the thing once in a while came up and gave me a little pang, as if something had happened. When I went home that night, I told my wife about it, and a few days afterward, I made the experiment again, when sure enough the thing came again.

  Each time Lincoln tried to reproduce the image in his Springfield home he succeeded. His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, never saw it but was deeply troubled by her husband’s unhappiness after seeing the image. Claiming to have the gift of prophecy, she said the healthy, vigorous face was her husband’s “real” face, and indicated that the president would serve out his first term. The paler, ghostlike image, however, was a sign that he would be renominated for a second term, but he would not live to see its conclusion.

  Lincoln apparently dismissed it all as an optical illusion caused by an imperfection in the glass or his own nervousness about the election.

  Even so, he seemed preoccupied on that day of the 1864 Republican Convention, oblivious to the political events swirling around him.

  One of Lincoln’s aides later wrote an account of the day. The president returned to the War Department after lunch in the White House. As he strode toward the telegraph offices, he was handed a telegram from Baltimore. It said that Andrew Johnson of Tennessee had been nominated as vice president. Johnson was Lincoln’s military governor in occupied Tennessee.

  Lincoln looked perplexed. “This is strange. I thought it was usual to nominate the candidate for president first.”

  “But Mr. President,” his aide replied, “have you not heard of your own nomination? It was telegraphed to you at the White House two hours ago.”

  The president shook his head and said he had not paused in his private office to receive the information. Later he attached great meaning to that inattentiveness and recalled his strange encounter with the mirror four years earlier. Surely, he thought, a hand was guiding him toward a destiny over which he had no control.