eader's memory with regard to the facts in the case, it
will be recalled that Lurancy Vennum was a young girl, between thirteen
and fourteen years old, the daughter of respectable parents living at
Watseka, Illinois, a town about eighty-five miles south of Chicago and
boasting at the time a population of perhaps fifteen hundred. On the
afternoon of July 11, 1877, while sitting sewing with her mother, she
suddenly complained of feeling ill, and immediately afterward fell to
the floor unconscious, in which state she remained for five hours. The
next day the same thing happened; but now, while still apparently
insensible to all about her, she began to talk, affirming that she was
in heaven and in the company of numerous spirits, whom she described,
naming among others the spirit of her brother who had died when she was
only three years old. Her parents, deeply religious people of an
orthodox denomination, feared that she had become insane, and their
fears were increased when, with the passage of time, her "fits," as they
called her trances, became more frequent and of longer duration, lasting
from one to eight hours and occurring from three to twelve times a day.
Physicians could do nothing for her, and by January, 1878, it was
decided that she was beyond all hope of cure and that the proper place
for her was an insane asylum.

At this juncture her father was visited by Mr. Asa B. Roff, also a
resident of Watseka, but having no more than a casual acquaintanceship
with the Vennums. He had become interested in the case, he explained,
through hearing reports of the intercourse Lurancy claimed to have with
the world of the dead, the possibility of which, being a devout
spiritist, he did not in the slightest doubt. Moreover, he himself had
had a daughter, Mary, long dead, who had been subject to conditions
exactly like Lurancy's and had given incontrovertible evidence of
possessing supernatural powers of a clairvoyant nature. In her time she
too had been deemed insane, but Mr. Roff was confident that she had
really been of entirely sound mind, and equally confident that the
present victim of "spirit infestation," to use the singular term
employed by a later spiritistic eulogist of Lurancy, was also of sound
mind. He therefore begged Mr. Vennum not to immure his daughter in an
asylum; and Mrs. Roff adding her entreaties, it was finally resolved as
a last resort to call in a physician from Janesville, Wisconsin, who was
himself a