Possession

 

Are there any cases at all which even suggest a ‘true’ possession? A case which is often cited as being at any rate a contender is that of Lurancy Vennum, the ‘Watseka Wonder’. This case is described in a very rare pamphlet by E. W. Stevens (152), the doctor who was in charge of this young lady. The pamphlet was abridged and excerpted by F. W. H. Myers, who also added details obtained by Richard Hodgson from interviews with some of the principal participants (110a, I, pp. 360–370). I shall draw upon the abridgment in my account of the case.

Lurancy Vennum was born on 16 April 1864, at a place about seven miles from Watseka, Illinois. Her family moved to Watseka on 1 April 1871. They took a house about two hundred yards from that of a Mr A. B. Roff and his family. The two families developed only a formal and distant acquaintance. About the autumn of 1871, the Vennum family moved away from the vicinity of the Roffs, and never again lived nearer to them than the ‘extreme opposite limits of the city’.

In July 1877, Lurancy began to have fits or trances. It was generally thought that she had become insane. Mr Roff, whose deceased daughter Mary Roff, had had periods of insanity, persuaded Mr Vennum to let him bring Dr E. W. Stevens to see her. Dr Stevens and Mr Roff visited Lurancy on 31 January 1878.

It appears that various deceased persons now purported to control Lurancy and to speak through her. After being hypnotized by Dr Stevens, she stated that one Mary Roff wished to come. Mr Roff said, ‘Yes, let her come, we’ll be glad to have her come.’ Next morning the girl began to claim to be Mary Roff, who had died, aged eighteen, in July 1865, when Lurancy was just over a year old.

About a week later, Mrs A. B. Roff, and her daughter, Mrs Minerva Alter, Mary’s sister, hearing of the remarkable change, went to see the girl. As they came in sight … Mary [i.e. Lurancy ‘controlled’ by Mary Roff] looking out of the window, exclaimed exultingly, ‘There comes my ma and sister Nervie!’ – the name by which Mary used to call Mrs Alter in girlhood. As they came into the house she caught them around their necks, wept and cried for joy, and seemed so happy to meet them. From this time on she seemed more homesick than before. At times she seemed almost frantic to go home.

On the 11th day of February, 1878, they sent the girl to Mr Roff’s, where she met her ‘pa and ma’, and each member of the family, with the most gratifying expressions of love and affection … On being asked how long she would stay, she said, ‘The angels will let me stay till some time in May’; and she made it her home there till May 21st, three months and ten days, a happy, contented daughter and sister in a borrowed body.

The girl now in her new home seemed perfectly happy and content, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, … recognizing and calling by name those who were friends and neighbours of the family from 1852 to 1865 … calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the period of her sojourn at Mr Roff’s she had no knowledge of, and did not recognize, any of Mr Vennum’s family.

One evening, in the latter part of March, Mr Roff was sitting in the room waiting for tea, and reading the paper, ‘Mary’ being out in the yard. He asked Mrs Roff if she could find a certain velvet head-dress that Mary used to wear the last year before she died. If so to lay it on the stand and say nothing about it, to see if Mary would recognize it. Mrs Roff readily found and laid it on the stand. The girl soon came in, and immediately exclaimed as she approached the stand, ‘Oh, there is my head-dress I wore when my hair was short!’ She then asked, ‘Ma, where is my box of letters? Have you got them yet?’ Mrs Roff replied, ‘Yes, Mary, I have some of them.’ She at once got the box with many letters in it. As Mary began to examine them she said, ‘Oh, ma, here is a collar I tatted! Ma, why did you not show to me my letters and things before?’ The collar had been preserved among the relics of the lamented child as one of the beautiful things her fingers had wrought before Lurancy was born; and so Mary continually recognized every little thing and remembered every little incident of her girlhood.

… Mr Roff asked Mary if she remembered moving to Texas [in 1857] or anything about it. ‘Yes, pa, and I remember crossing Red River and of seeing a great many Indians, and I remember Mrs Reeder’s girls, who were in our company.’ And thus she from time to time made first mention of things that transpired thirteen to twenty-five years ago …

After a few brief reappearances, the Lurancy personality returned completely on 21 May 1878, and remained in control thereafter, apart from brief interventions from Mary when Lurancy visited the Roffs. Lurancy’s health remained good, and there was no return of the fits.

The simplest explanation of this very curious case is clearly that of impersonation, deliberate or hysterical. Lurancy, it might be suggested, though not living close to the Roffs, might have picked up gossip about them. After she went to live with them she would have had all sorts of opportunities of picking up trivial bits of information. We have no verbatim reports of her conversations with the Roffs, reports in which the hints, leading questions, etc., which probably helped her, could be detected, and from which the numerous mistakes which she probably made could be disinterred instead of left buried and forgotten. All this is very true, and perfectly arguable; yet I do not find it altogether convincing. When Hodgson visited Watseka in April 1890, he obtained from the witnesses (in this case Mary’s sister Minerva) such details as the following.

Lurancy, as Mary Roff, stayed at Mrs Alter’s home for some time, and almost every hour of the day some trifling incident of Mary Roffs life was recalled by Lurancy. One morning she said, ‘Right over there by the currant bushes is where cousin Allie greased the chicken’s eye.’ Allie was a cousin of Mary Roff, and lived in Peoria, 111. She visited the Roffs in the lifetime of Mary, with whom she played. This incident happened several years before the death of Mary Roff. Mrs Alter remembered it very well, and recalled their bringing the chicken into the house for treatment.

That does not sound the sort of fact likely to have been elicited by a leading question, or picked up in casual gossip, and it would take quite a lot of forgotten mistakes to counterbalance it.

If the case was not one of impersonation, how might we regard it (speaking still, and simply for the sake of argument, from a survivalistic viewpoint)? Was it an example of unusually sustained ‘overshadowing’, basically like other cases of mediumship or obsession, or was it a true case of ‘possession’? It is quite unlike most cases of mediumship in the length of time for which the apparent control lasted, in the completeness of the control over all aspects of mental and physical functioning, and in the sustained manifestation of what was apparently a whole and recognized personality. Yet there are indications – initial trances, and ostensible control by other deceased persons – that Lurancy was basically of the mediumistic type. Perhaps she had also tendencies towards secondary personality (if that is indeed a different thing). Some combination of these two ideas might suffice to explain the case without resort to the further hypothesis of possession.

Of course if one turns to the super-ESP hypothesis the usual obvious difficulties arise – the extent of the ESP involved and the rapidity with which it must be supposed to operate, together with the length of time for which it would have had to have been almost continuously sustained, and the motive for the charade. But before one rejects this hypothesis as altogether outrunning anything that we know about ESP one must recollect the obvious point that I have in effect made several times before, namely that the ‘overshadowing’ hypothesis itself postulates a form of telepathy – that between overshadower and overshadowed – which would appear to have some of these debatable characteristics.

Some people might be tempted to say that the case of Lurancy Vennum was all a long time ago; and perhaps it didn’t happen, and maybe it would be as well if that were so. There is however a very much more recent, and even more remarkable, case which presents certain analogous features, and which has been studied by persons who fully appreciate the standards of evidence which must be applied in investigating such cases. I refer to the case of Uttara Huddar, reported by Stevenson and Pasricha in the Journal of the ASPR for July 1980 (154b; cf. 154a). Uttara is an unmarried lady, born in 1941, and living in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. She is a part-time lecturer in the Postgraduate Department of Public Administration at Nagpur University. Early in 1974, Uttara’s normal personality was quite suddenly replaced by a markedly different one, who called herself Sharada. Sharada remained in control for several weeks, and has reappeared since at least thirty times, for periods ranging from one day to seven weeks.

Sharada appeared ignorant not just of Uttara’s family and surroundings, but of all features of modern life post-dating the Industrial Revolution. She dressed, acted and spoke like a married Bengali woman, and spent much of her time in religious exercises. She claimed to be the daughter of a certain Brajanath Chattopadhaya, gave many names and other details of her relatives, and showed a knowledge of various obscure villages and temples in Bengal. Uttara states, and her relatives confirm, that she has never visited Bengal.

Most of the places mentioned by Sharada are in what is now West Bengal, some 500 miles from Nagpur. A town called Bansberia (north of Calcutta) figured prominently in Sharada’s statements. It transpired that a family named Chattopadhaya still lives there. The head of this family possesses a genealogy for the period 1810–30 when it seems from other clues that Sharada lived. This genealogy lists five of the men named by Sharada, in relationships to her corresponding to those which, as a daughter of Brajanath Chattopadhaya, she would have had to them. Unfortunately it lists only men, so it cannot directly confirm, or disconfirm Sharada’s existence. The relevant part of the genealogy was published in 1907 in a Bengali magazine circulating in the area of Bansberia.

Sharada claims to have ‘fainted’ after being bitten by a snake at the age of 22, and to have known nothing since then until she ‘awoke’ to her present intermittent existence.

The oddest aspect of the case remains to be mentioned. Sharada at first showed no knowledge of Marathi, which is Uttara’s native language (she has since learned a few phrases), but spoke fluent Bengali, a language with which Uttara denies all acquaintance. There is absolutely no question of Sharada’s competence in Bengali. Six different well-educated native speakers of Bengali who have conversed with her, sometimes for long periods, testify on this point. Pasricha has made a tape-recording of Sharada, and the authors also possess another tape-recording with partial transcript.

I have already commented on the importance of cases of responsive xenoglossy and on the difficulties which they present for the super-ESP hypothesis. It is accordingly of the first importance to inquire how far Uttara’s claim to have no previous acquaintance with Bengali can be substantiated. While still at school she had had a few lessons in reading the scripts of languages other than Marathi, and these included Bengali. But she was taught to pronounce the letters of the scripts with Marathi sounds rather than Bengali ones. Her father had a few friends from the Bengali community in Nagpur, but none of them ever spoke Bengali with him because he had no knowledge of it himself. Uttara’s parents and two of her sisters denied that she had ever had any opportunity to learn Bengali. A brother who had lived in Orissa, and had picked up some Bengali, stated that he had never used it in her presence.

Stevenson and Pasricha spent much time inquiring about and interviewing Bengali-speaking persons who might have communicated a knowledge of Bengali to Uttara. They were not successful.

By way of conclusion I can do no better than quote Stevenson and Pasricha’s own conclusions:

The marked alterations of personality in this case have some resemblance to mediumistic trances, but the differences are greater than the similarities. Mediumistic trances are almost always induced voluntarily, whereas [Uttara’s] personality changes occured quite involuntarily. Mediumistic trances usually last an hour or two at the most; Sharada remained ‘in control’ for days, sometimes for weeks.

The case also has some resemblance to cases of secondary personality, but the usual secondary personality claims to be more or less contemporary and collocal with the primary personality, whereas Sharada described a life in another part of her country and about 150 years earlier. Furthermore, the usual secondary personality has no paranormal powers, although there have been rare exceptions. Sharada’s ability to speak fluent Bengali constitutes, in our opinion, a paranormally acquired skill.

The case also resembles in some respects cases suggestive of reincarnation, but in such cases the subject usually begins to speak about the previous life he or she claims to remember between the ages of 2 and 5. Moreover, such a child’s ordinary personality is rarely suppressed completely (as was [Uttara’s]) during the narration of his or her claimed memories. (154a, p. 1592)

To this I can only add the following. If it is indeed true (as proposed in Chapter Seven) that the linguistic skills required for fluent responsive xenoglossy cannot be transmitted by telepathy, this case (that is, of course, if we accept the paranormal aspects of it) would appear to leave us with a choice only between ‘true’ possession and reincarnation; for both the super-ESP theory and the theory of ‘overshadowing’ (which also involves telepathy) would be ruled out.

From: Mediumship and Survival

A Century of Investigations

Alan Gauld