s. In their stead reigned Mary, no less
spurious in point of fact, but so cunningly counterfeiting the true
Mary that the deception was not once detected.

Mark too how suggestion sufficed not only to create the Mary personality
but to expel it and restore the hapless Lurancy to perfect health. If
the responsibility for the creation rests on Dr. Stevens and the Roffs,
to them likewise belongs the credit for the cure. Their insistence on
the fact that Mary's spirit could and would be of assistance, was itself
as powerful a suggestion as could be hit upon by the most expert of
modern practitioners of psychotherapeutics; and in unconsciously
persuading the spirit to set a limit to its time of "possession" they
made another suggestion of rare curative value. To the suggestionally
inspired fixed idea that she was not Lurancy Vennum but Mary Roff was
thus added the fixed idea, derived from the same source, that in May she
would become Lurancy Vennum again, and a perfectly well Lurancy. It was
as though the Roffs had actually hypnotized her and given her commands
that were to be obeyed with the fidelity characteristic of the obedience
hypnotized subjects render to the operator.

When the time came the transformation was duly effected, though, as has
been seen, not without a struggle, a period of alternating personality,
with Mary at one moment supreme and Lurancy at another. But this is a
phenomenon that need give us no concern. Exactly the same thing happened
in the last stages of the Hanna case. Nor do the fugitive recurrences of
the Mary personality signify aught than that Lurancy was still unduly
suggestionable. Note that these recurrences, according to the available
evidence, developed only when the Roffs paid her visits; and that they
ceased entirely upon her marriage to a man not interested in spiritism,
and her removal to a distant part of the country.[Q]

FOOTNOTES:

[P] In his "Multiple Personality."

[Q] It is proper to add that since the recent publication of this paper
as a contribution to _The Associated Sunday Magazine_, the charge of
fraud has been revived in connection with the "Watseka Wonder." It is
asserted by a resident of Watseka that although Lurancy Vennum
unquestionably was a sufferer from "nervous trouble," she consciously
impersonated the "spirit" of Mary Roff, her motive being a desire to be
near one of the Roff boys, with whom she imagined herself in love.

X

A MEDIEVAL GHOST HUNTE