The Watseka Wonder: Lurancy Vennum and the Return of Mary Roff

Watseka, Illinois. A small town in Iroquois County, on the Iroquois river. In the 1870s two of its families became bound together by one strange spring.

Mary Roff was born on October 8, 1846. She suffered fits from about six months old. On July 5, 1865, she "went to sleep" and "in a few moments…expired." Her father, Asa B. Roff, was a lawyer and a Spiritualist.

July 11, 1877. A teenage girl named Mary Lurancy Vennum turned to her mother. "Ma, I feel bad; I feel so queer." She lay rigid for five hours.

The fits kept coming, "from three to eight and sometimes as many as twelve times a day, lasting from one to eight hours." She "would double herself back until her head and feet actually touched." Lying as if dead, she described "Heaven and the spirits, or the angels as she called them," and named the dead, among them her own younger brother and sister. Doctors and the Methodist minister, Rev. B. M. Baker, recommended an asylum.

January 31, 1878. Asa B. Roff had persuaded the Vennums to consult Dr. E. Winchester Stevens, a Spiritualist physician from Wisconsin. Lurancy sat near the stove "like an 'old hag'," feet curled up. She called herself Katrina Hogan, 63, from Germany, arrived "through the air." Then she became Willie Canning, a young man who "ran away from home." Stevens suggested a "higher, purer, more intelligent" spirit. Lurancy named Mary Roff.

The next day Mary took control. When Ann Roff and Minerva Alter arrived, the girl cried out: "There comes my ma and sister Nervie!" On February 11 she moved into the Roff home. She found "a collar I tatted." She remembered crossing Red River on the family's 1857 move to Texas. Asa Roff wrote: "She knows nobody nor anything whatever that is known to Lurancy." At mealtimes she would say, "I'll go to heaven for my tea."

On May 7 she told Ann Roff that "Lurancy Vennum is coming back." May 21, 1878. About 11 a.m. Lurancy spoke to Asa Roff "as if a stranger" and asked to go home. There, "Mother and daughter embraced and kissed each other, and wept until all present shed tears of sympathy; it seemed the very gate of Heaven." On July 18 both sets of parents signed a declaration calling Stevens's narrative "entirely true and correct in every respect."

Stevens published his account in 1878, through a Spiritualist press. The Iroquois County Times wrote: "It was hard for even the most skeptical not to believe there was something supernatural about her." In 1890 Richard Hodgson came to Watseka and interviewed witnesses. "I have no doubt that the incidents occurred substantially as described in the narrative by Dr. Stevens."

Critics read it differently. In 1903 Frank Sargent Hoffman called it "a typical case of hysterical impersonation," and argued that the grieving Roffs "did everything in their power" to encourage it. Henry Addington Bruce found Lurancy "unduly suggestible," and noted that Mary appeared "only when the Roffs paid her visits." Modern summaries point to epileptic fits and dissociation. And every key witness was a committed Spiritualist.

Lurancy married George Binning and moved to Kansas in 1884. She died in Los Angeles in 1952. The Roff house at 300 E. Sheridan Street was restored by John Whitman-Brito, who calls the case "a possession for healing, not a demonic possession."