Lore - Episode 50: Mary, Mary

Episode Date: December 23, 2016

The Spiritualist movement placed a large focus on reaching beyond the veil, which made us the outsiders pressing into a foreign realm. In the late 1800’s, however, that realm pressed back, and what a wonder it turned out to be. * * * Official Lore Merchandise: www.lorepodcast.com/shop Member-only Episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

It goes without saying, planes aren't supposed to collide with each other. Just taking statistics into account, you're a lot more likely to hear about automobile collisions than airplanes because of the simple fact that there are more cars on the road today than planes in the air. Still, as unusual as it might sound, it does happen. In the late 1950s, two military planes were flying off the coast of Georgia, above the waters of the Atlantic that feed into Savannah's Tybee roads. It's a busy shipping lane on the surface of the water, but on February 5th of 1958,

the sky above was busy as well. At 2 am that morning, a B-47 bomber was running a simulated mission along the coast, heading up from Florida. At the same time, an F-86 fighter plane was patrolling from the north, but when they collided, it wasn't disastrous like you might see in a movie. Neither plane exploded, but they were both badly damaged. The pilot of the fighter plane had to eject and let the plane drop into the sea. The bomber, though, managed to stay in the air.

It lost a little altitude, though, and it was clear that they were going to need an emergency landing, and fast. To help, they requested permission to jettison some extra weight, which they did. They only dropped one thing, though. On board was a bomb that weighed nearly 8,000 pounds, a nuclear bomb, and they released it off the coast of Tybee Island, where it plummeted into the sea below. And although the military tried to recover it later that year, that mission was a failure. It's still there to this day.

That's the trouble with the world as big as ours. Things, even big things, are easy to hide. It adds a layer of mystery to our experience, an element of unknown risk. The hidden things of our world aren't limited to objects. You see, even people, the ones who live and breathe and move around us all the time, can act a lot like the cold, dark waters of the sea. At the end of the day, you never know what lies hidden just beneath the surface. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Mary was born in 1847, and she was just six months old when she had her first seizure. Her muscles twitched uncontrollably, and the pupils of her eyes dilated. Her parents, Asa and Anne Roth, were, of course, sick with worry. The seizure, which seemed to be epileptic, left Mary unconscious for several days in a row, and for a while, they assumed the worst. Still, she recovered, and life moved on. But as it did, the seizures followed them. In an effort to find some relief for their daughter, the family moved from Indiana down

to Texas when she was about ten. A year later, they followed the newly built Peorio Railroad back north, and settled in the brand new town of South Middleport, Illinois. They built one of the first houses there, started a new life, and hoped for the best. But Mary's seizures continued. By the time they moved up to Illinois, she was having them at least once a day. This was before even the earliest anti-epileptic drugs such as potassium bromide, and that lack of options left Mary and her parents feeling depressed and hopeless.

Add to this the intense physical drain that regular seizures had on her health. Then it's easy to see just how dark those days must have been for her. One of the methods they tried for a while was bloodletting. It's a practice that dates back thousands of years, and it's appeared in many forms, from knives and needles, to spring-loaded cutting devices. One of the professions that historically delivered bloodletting services was, of all people, the barber. Even today, you can find barber shops that still use the red and white candy-stripe

pole outside. It's a carryover from another era, designed to represent blood and white bandages. Mary's preferred method of choice, though, was actually leeches, and because she complained constantly of headaches, she would place them on her temples, believing that they helped relieve the pain. She used them so often that she even began to view them as pets, and like a child with a kitten, time spent with her leeches would often put a smile on Mary's face. If your kid asks for a cat for Christmas, I can't help but feel like they're missing

out on a great pet option here. Leeches are really cheap to feed, and you don't have to take them for a walk. Just putting it out there. Mary's condition went on like this for about three years, with the use of leeches escalating slowly. And all the while, she was a sad young woman, and rightly so, but she was also bright, excelling in her studies and even becoming an accomplished pianist. Her music choices, though, reflected her mood, leaning more toward the dark and the melancholy.

In 1864, at the age of 18, she took the bloodletting to a new level, cutting herself on the arm with a knife. The loss of blood was so heavy that it caused her to pass out. When she did regain consciousness, something seemed off. She spent days screaming and thrashing around on her bed. There were periods of several hours at a time when multiple adults had to hold her down to prevent her from hurting herself. And then, like a tropical storm that's passed through a city, everything went calm.

Instead of uprooted trees and leveled buildings, though, Mary was left awake, but unresponsive. It was as if something inside of her had broken. People would walk into the room and speak to her, but she didn't seem to notice them. No eye contact, no replies. If she could see and hear them, she certainly wasn't acknowledging it. But in exchange for those new flaws, Mary could do things. It started with mundane tasks, like dressing herself or putting her hair up with pins, but her parents started to notice something odd about it all.

When Mary did those things, her eyes were open, but she didn't seem to be using them. She was completing tasks that required sight, but her eyes never moved, never shifted or focused on the task at hand. It was as if she wasn't really seeing anything at all. So they decided to test it out. They put a blindfold on her and then asked her to repeat the same tasks. Mary complied, and successfully, too. Even with a dark blindfold on, she could dress herself completely, even picking up pins off

the dressing table and using them to do her hair. Now of course, all of that could have been muscle memory, but there were other, less explainable things that she could do. Still blindfolded, her parents placed an encyclopedia in front of her. Even though she couldn't see the pages, she opened up the book to the word blood and then proceeded to read the entry word for word out loud. And this made a lot of people in town curious. She was doing something that no one should be able to do, and they wanted answers, so

they began to come to the house to test her. One person suggested that she might have memorized the encyclopedia entry. She'd been obsessed with blood for years, of course. So they asked for a deeper test. It took a few of Mary's personal letters, written in her own hand, and then shuffled them into a larger stack of papers. Still blindfolded, Mary was able to pull out her own letters and then read them aloud to the people in the room.

A local newspaper editor even stopped by to do his own experiment, and his was the most astounding of them all. He arrived with an envelope in his coat pocket. It was still sealed, and inside it, he told everyone, was a letter from a friend who lived far away. He handed the envelope to a blindfolded Mary, who turned it over and over, but never opened it. And then, without hesitation, she announced the name of the person whose signature was

on the letter. The editor opened it up and checked. Mary had been correct. But it wasn't all magic shows and wonder. No, Mary was still having seizures on a daily basis, and as a result, her depression was deepening. And that led to more cutting. It's tragic, really.

Mental health care was practically medieval in the middle of the 19th century, and that meant that Mary was left to suffer largely without help, outside of her own family, of course. And then, on July 5th of 1865, Mary's parents left her home alone while they took a short trip away. Mary got up that day, she made herself breakfast, and then went back up to her bedroom. It was there that she had a powerful seizure, and died as a result. She'd only been 19 years old.

A year before the tragic death of Mary Roth, Thomas and Lucinda Venom welcomed a daughter into their family. Mary Venom was born in April of 1864, and almost immediately, the family took to calling her by her middle name, LaRancy. In 1871, when LaRancy was just seven, her family moved up from Milford County to South Middleport. But in the years between Mary Roth's death and the Venom's move, the township had incorporated. The newly formed city was called Watsika, in honor of a well-known Native American woman

who'd been born in the area. For a while, LaRancy's childhood was nondescript. She was healthy and happy, and that continued to be true for a number of years. But then, in early July of 1877, at the age of 13, LaRancy started to complain that she'd been hearing voices in her bedroom. She claimed they were calling out to her, saying her name over and over again. Her parents, chalking it up to the overactive imagination of a child, largely ignored her. And then, on the night of July 5th, LaRancy had a small seizure that left her in an odd

state. She was still conscious, but stayed mysteriously rigid for nearly five hours. When she finally did snap out of whatever trance she seemed to have been in, she told her parents that she felt rather strange. Of course, she did, they said. She'd had a seizure, after all. The following day, LaRancy had a second seizure and entered into that awake yet stiff state once more.

This time, though, she spoke. Her parents sat beside her bed and listened as she told them what she could see. But even though her eyes were open, she didn't describe the bedroom to them. She described heaven. Specifically, she described seeing her two siblings, her sister Laura and her brother Birdie, both of whom had passed away young. In fact, LaRancy had only been three when her brother had died and the family rarely talked about those obviously painful memories, which made her description even more unusual.

All through the summer and well into November, LaRancy continued to have these trances. Each time, she would describe another world, the world beyond the veil of reality. Beyond the curtain that separated life and death, there were angels, spirits, heaven, and all of the details she attached to it. It seemed surreal. And then, on November 27th, things, well, they took a turn at weird and cruised down crazy street, if you know what I mean. The seizure she had that night was extremely violent.

She laid before her parents on the bed and would violently arch her back with each new episode. One report claims that she bent so sharply at the waist that her feet touched her head, though I'm honestly not sure how that's physically possible. If it happened, I can't imagine a more creepy scene than watching a young woman bend in half backwards while screaming in pain. This wasn't a one-time thing either. These new seizures went on for weeks, leaving the family distraught and LaRancy exhausted

and in pain, and this pattern, first seizures and then visions, repeated itself regularly for nearly three months. Outside family members were beginning to think that the young woman had lost her mind. They begged her parents to send her to nearby Peoria, where there was an asylum well-equipped to help them with her illness. Instead, the Venoms pushed on alone. Their doctor didn't know how to help, and while the seizures were something that he could at least put a medical name to, it was her visions of the afterlife, full of spirits

and angels and the like, that defied his expertise. One person who did arrive and offer them answers was a man named Dr. E. Winchester Stevens. He was a friendly man in his mid-fifties from Janesville, Wisconsin, and he worked as a spiritualist doctor, offering a mixture of medicinal cures and other worldly solutions to people just like the Venoms. He'd heard of LaRancy's story through the Venom's neighbor, an older couple, with an interest in spiritualism and the afterlife, but when Dr. Stevens entered her room for the first time on the 31st of January, he didn't meet LaRancy.

Instead, the voice that came out of the young woman claimed to be that of an elderly German woman named Katrina Hogan. She'd been 63 years old when she passed away years before, and now she was in possession of LaRancy's body. And she wasn't nice, apparently. This elderly spirit, speaking through the young woman's mouth, insulted and verbally abused Thomas and Lucinda Venom. This went on for a few moments before shifting to another spirit entirely.

This one claimed to be that of a young man named Willie Canning, who'd died after running away from his family, but he, too, vanished after just a few minutes. Dr. Stevens, who'd simply been an observer up until this point, finally stepped in to help. According to the historical account of the events of that day, Stevens used mesmerism, what we would call hypnosis, today, in an attempt to help LaRancy calm down. And the seizures stopped. The young woman managed to tell all the adults in the room, her parents, Dr. Stevens, and

the neighbor who had brought the spiritualist to the Venom home, that the evil spirits wanted to control her. She was afraid, and she wanted help. Dr. Stevens suggested that perhaps she could find a good spirit instead. LaRancy nodded, then closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she smiled. It was as if all the pain and trauma were gone, and LaRancy had become whole again. Except she hadn't.

Instead, she turned her gaze toward the neighbor standing in the corner of the room, with a look of intense recognition. Father, she said, it's me, Mary Roff. Mr. and Mrs. Roff were understandably full of mixed emotions. They'd spent the past 12 years getting over the loss of their daughter. Mr. Roff had even gone to see a medium more than once, hoping for answers or at least closure. In one instance, the medium handed him a note, claiming it had been communicated to her

by his dead daughter. There was a lot of guilt there, obviously. They'd left their daughter alone for three whole days after all, and when they'd returned from their trip, she was dead. They'd spent years getting over all of that. Mary had been a joy and a challenge and a blessing all at the same time, but for over a decade, she'd been gone from their life, until now. Mr. Roff went home that afternoon and told his wife what had happened.

At the same time, Dr. Stevens continued to ask LaRancy questions to get to the root of her morbid role-playing game, but every answer just confused the spiritualist more. This woman was no longer LaRancy Venom. She was Mary Roff. Mary, it seems, wanted to go home. She didn't recognize anyone in the Venom household at all. They were strangers to her, so she asked them if she could go live with her parents at their house.

She wanted to return to the home she knew and loved, and she asked continuously about this for days. Finally, nearly a week after Mary's arrival, the Venoms relented and escorted their daughter out of the house, down the street, and up to the front door of their neighbors, the Roff's. There, she immediately fell into comfortable routine. She used nicknames for her parents and siblings that no one but Mary Roff would have known. She recognized family friends, and she would mention others from out of town that the Roff's knew, people who had never visited Watsika in all the years the Venoms had lived there.

There was simply no way for anyone other than Mary Roff to know these things. When she did see them, she treated the Venoms as if they were just some nice family she'd only recently met. She was polite to them, for sure, but it never evolved into anything more, but Mary knew of LaRancy. In fact, she claimed to understand better than anyone else what was really going on with her. It was just a really difficult story to believe.

Mary said that LaRancy was sick. Her seizures were a symptom of that illness, but Mary had gone through all of that in her own lifetime, and she knew how to help. So LaRancy, at least according to Mary, was in heaven getting better, and when she'd recovered, Mary would leave and allow the young woman back into her own body. Look, I get the skepticism. I'm right there with you. This is pretty bizarre stuff, no doubt about it.

And these people were obviously primed for this story, too. Spiritualism was hot in 1878. The Amazing Fox Sisters were three decades deep into their career as world-famous mediums, traveling around, performing seances for sell-out crowds. It wouldn't be another 10 years before their act was exposed as a fraud. To the Venoms and the Roff's, and especially to Dr. Stevens, these things were real and possible and undeniable. To our modern minds, though, there's a lot to question.

LaRancy had to have known her neighbors prior to that day. She'd most likely heard the tragic story of Mary Roff, if not from their own mouths, then from others in town. Surely, at some point in her childhood, someone looked at her and said, oh, you live next door to the Roff's. It's not a story that you easily forget. But there were things that were harder to dismiss. Being able to name out-of-town friends was one of them, but the woman claiming to be

Mary Roff could do a lot more than that. She had dozens of conversations with old friends, people who had known Mary well before her death. And in each of those chats, she mentioned details or events that no one other than Mary could have known. One day, Mary walked into the Roff's sitting room and pointed to the velvet headdress sitting on the table. Mrs. Roff had pulled it out of Mary's things and left it out for the young woman to discover.

When Mary saw it, she lit up and described how she'd worn it when her hair was short. All Mrs. Roff could do was nod in disbelief. Another time, Mary approached Mr. Roff and told him that she had sent him a note once through a medium that he'd gone to see. She told him the date and he confirmed it with others. How she knew it, though, was a mystery, unless, of course, she really was Mary, back from the dead. All of this went on for over 15 weeks.

There were periods here and there when Mary seemed to disappear and Larancy would return to her body. But these were brief moments and Larancy never seemed to be fully there. She was confused, especially by her surroundings there in the Roff house. She asked to be taken home, but before anything could be done, Mary would return. On May 7th, Mary announced to the Roffs that Larancy was ready to return for good. There were more brief switches between the two spirits for another two weeks, and then it was over.

On May 21st, Mary stood in the parlor of the Roff home and said a tearful goodbye to her family. Then, one of the Roff daughters took her by the arm and escorted her down the sidewalk back to the Venoms. They chatted as they did, with Mary discussing family matters and giving life advice to her sister. And then they arrived. Mary mounted the steps alone and knocked on the front door.

When the Venoms opened it, Mary had vanished. Larancy was in full control of her body again, awake and aware. She said she felt as if she had been dreaming, and then embraced her parents. For as long as she lived, Larancy never had another seizure. This is one of those events that's difficult to accept. I fully admit that. Many people believe that Larancy Venom made the whole thing up. It was a cry for attention, or a youthful prank, or maybe even a stunt put on by both

families. Others, though, think it's possible that she suffered from some form of psychosis, which ultimately manifested itself as schizophrenia. They believe that, had the Roths not taken her in and given the girl time to recover, the Venoms might have sent her to a mental asylum, which, in the 1870s, was a one-way ticket to suffering and possible death. According to those who subscribed to this theory, it was the generosity and open-mindedness of her neighbors that ultimately saved her life.

But too many questions are left on the table for us to sort through. How did symptoms as dramatic and serious as powerful seizures simply vanish after just 15 weeks? How did she know things about the Roths that no one else could have known? There was even a moment during the ordeal when Larancy, claiming to be Mary, told Dr. Stevens that she'd seen his deceased daughter in heaven. Mary described a cross-shaped scar on his daughter's cheek. Dr. Stevens, amazed, confirmed that the scar was from surgery she'd undergone to stop

an infection. Whatever we end up believing, here and now, today, it was Larancy's parents who were convinced. They said that their daughter had returned to their home and, I quote, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more polite than before. She'd grown up somehow, and she was physically restored, no more seizures, no more random trances. It was all gone.

For a couple of years, though, Larancy tried her hand at being a medium. Maybe the Roths talked her into it, or maybe she wanted to see if she could still do the thing she'd become famous for. Four years later, she married a farmer named George Benning. George, it seems, had no interest in spiritualism, and shortly after, her efforts to work as a medium sort of ground to a halt. Two years later, they left town, moving to a farm in Kansas. Together, they raised 13 kids, and naturally, life got pretty busy.

But she stayed in touch with the folks back home as best as she could. One of the people who wrote her often was Mr. Roth. It's understandable, really. For a little while, his daughter, Mary, had come back to him, and he was attached to Larancy because of it. And on the rare occasions when she returned to Watzika to visit her parents, she would always make it a point to walk next door and visit the Roths. She would knock, of course.

It wasn't really her home, after all, but they would always welcome her in. I imagine they'd make her a cup of tea and gather together in the sitting room. I have to wonder if Mary's velvet headdress was still sitting out on the table, and if Larancy ever felt like it looked familiar somehow. What we do know is that each time she visited the Roths, she would do them a favor. After a bit of polite conversation, she would sit back in her chair and close her eyes. The clock on the mantel would tick loudly, almost like footsteps approaching from another room.

And then her eyes would open again, but it wouldn't be Larancy. Hello, mother, she would say to them. Hello, father. How are you? It's so good to be home. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marseille Crockett. Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central

place. The World of Lore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.