Hildegard and the History of Spiritualism

This episode of Lore was made possible by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. Hey folks, Aaron here. We're quickly slipping into the summer months here in New England. Honestly, it feels like the autumn colors were just yesterday and spring came and went in a flash. Basically, life has been busy, and I'm sure that you can relate. With that in mind, I'm giving the team a well-deserved break this week. So rather than the typical new episode of lore, I want to offer you a classic from deep in the past. No, reruns have not been a normal thing around lore HQ, but making 52 episodes each year can be exhausting, and I think we can sacrifice one every six months to give the team some rest. And thankfully, there are a ton of fantastic oldies in our back catalog, and the one that I've picked out for you today is one of my absolute favorites. Maybe you're new to lore and are working your way backwards, or it's been many, many years since you've heard some of the earlier episodes. Either way, you are going to love this trip into the past. Today we'll be listening to one of my all-time favorite stories on lore, episode 50 Mary Mary. This classic has a powerful mixture of community life, unusual beliefs, and some very unexplainable circumstances. And almost a decade after first recording it, I can still remember the chill I got in the recording booth from narrating that very last line of the main story. I think you are going to love it. And with that, on with the show . Planes aren't supposed to collide with each other . And 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 a lot more cars on the road today than planes in the air. Still, as unusual as it sounds, it happens. In the late fifties, 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, 1958, the sky above was busy as well. At 2 a.m. 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. 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 his plane drop into the sea. The bomber, though, managed to stay in the air. It lost a lot of altitude, though, and it was clear that they were going to need to make 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 a 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. But 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 Manke y, and this is Lore . Mary was born in eighteen forty seven, 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, 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 to Texas when she was about 10. 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 homes there, started a new life, and hoped for the best . But Mary's seizures continued. By the time they moved 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, and it's easy to see 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. That's a carryover from another era, designed to represent blood and 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 would help. 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. As an aside, if your kid asked for a dog for Christmas, I can't help but feel like they're missing out on a fun pet option here. Leeches are really cheap to feed, and you don't have to walk them. Just putting it out there. Mary's condition went on like this for about three years, with the use of the leeches escalating slowly. 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. But her music choices reflected her mood, leaning more toward the dark and the melan choly. In eighteen sixty four, at the age of eighteen, 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 the 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 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. Of course, all of that could have been muscle memory, but there were other, less explainable things that she could do as well. Still blindfolded, her parents placed an encyclopedia in front of her. Even though she couldn't see the pages, she opened the book up to the word blood and then proceeded to read the entry word for word, 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 who visited suggested that she might have memorized the encyclopedia entry. She'd been obsessed with blood for years, of course, so they asked her for a deeper test. They 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 and then read them aloud to the people in the room. A local newspaper editor even stopped by to do an experiment of his own, 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 then 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 bas is, 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. And then, on July 5th, 1865, Mary's parents left her home alone while they took a short trip. Mary got up that day, made herself breakfast, and then went back up to her bedroom. And it was there that she had a powerful seizure and died as a result. She'd only been 19 years old at the time . A year before the tragic death of Mary R oth, Thomas and Lucinda Venom welcomed a daughter into their family. Mary Venom was born in April of eighteen sixty four, and almost immediately the family took to calling her by her middle name, Loren cy. In 1871, when La Rancy was just seven, her family moved up from Milford County to South Middleport. But in those years between Mary Roth's death and the Venom's move, the township had incorporated the, new ly formed city was called Watseca in honor of a well-known Native American woman who had been born in the area. For a while, Lorancy's childhood was nondescript, that she was healthy and happy, and that continued to be true for a number of years. But then in early July of eighteen seventy-seven, at the age of thirteen, Laurancey started to complain that she'd been hearing voices in her bedroom. She claimed that they were calling out to her, saying her name over and over. Her parents, chalking it up to the overactive imagination of a child, largely ignored her. Then, on the night of July 5th, Loren cy had a small seizure that left her in an odd st ate. 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, Loren cy 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 Lady In fact, Laurancey 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, La Rancy continued to have these trances. Each time she would describe another world, the world beyond the veil of reality, beyond that curtain that separates life and death , there were angels, spirits, heaven, and all of the details she attached to it. It seemed surreal. And then on november twenty seventh, 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 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 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. It wasn't a one-time thing either. These new seizures went on for weeks, leaving the family distraught and La Rancy exhausted and in pain. And this pattern, first seizures, 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 the Venoms to send her to Peoria, where there was an asylum well equipped to help her 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-50s from Janesville, Wisconsin, and he worked as a spiritualist doctor, offering a mixture of medical cures and other worldly solutions to people just like the Venoms. He had heard of Laurence's story through the Venom's neighbors, an older couple with an interest in spiritualism and the afterlife, about when Dr. Stevens entered her room for the first time on the 31st of January, he didn't meet La Rancy. Instead, the voice that came out of the young woman claimed to be that of an elderly German woman named Katrina Hogan. She had been sixty three years old when she passed away years before, and now she was in possession of Laurancy'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 into another spirit entirely. This one claimed to be that of a young man named Willie Canning, who had 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, stepped in to help. According to the historical count of the events, Stevens used mesmerism, what we would call hypnosis today, in an attempt to help the Rancy calm down. And the seizures stopped. The young woman managed to tell all the adults in the room, her parents, Dr. Stevens, and the neighbors who had brought the spiritualist to the Venom home, that 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. Lorency nodded and then closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she smiled. It was as if all the pain and trauma were gone, and Laurancy had been whole again. Except she hadn't. Instead, she turned her gaze toward the neighbor standing in the corner of the room who Father, she said, and then added, it's me, Mary Roth . Mr. and Mrs. Roth were understandably full of mixed emotions. They'd spent the last twelve years getting over the loss of their daughter. Mr. Roth 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 had left their daughter alone for three whole days after all, and when they returned from their trip, she was dead. They'd spent years getting over that. Mary had been a joy and a challenge and a blessing all at the same time, but for over a decade she had been gone from their life. Until now . Mr. Roth went home that afternoon and told his wife what had happened. At the same time, Dr. Stevens continued to ask Lorancy questions to get to the root of her morbid role-playing, but every answer just confused the spiritualist more. This young woman was no longer Longer Laurancy Venom. She was Mary Roth . And 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 that she knew and loved and asked continuously for days. Finally, nearly a week after Mary's arrival, the Venoms relented and they escorted their daughter out of the house , down the street, and up to the front door of their neighbors, the Roths. Once there, she immediately fell into a comfortable routine. She used nicknames for her parents and siblings that no one but Mary Roth would have known. She recognized family friends and would mention others from out of town that the Roths knew, people who had never visited Watsea in all the years the Venoms had lived there. There was simply no way for anyone other than Mary Roth to know these things . When she did see them, she treated the venoms as if they were just some nice family she had only recently met. She was polite to them for sure, but it never evolved into anything more. But Mary knew of Laurancy. 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 Lorancy 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 La Rancy, 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. And 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 audiences. It wouldn't be another 10 years before their act was exposed as a fraud. To the Venoms and the Roths, and especially to Dr. Stevens, these things were real and possible and undeniable. To our modern minds, though, there's a lot to question. La Rancy had to have known her neighbors prior to that day . She'd most likely heard the tragic story of Mary Roth, 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 Roths'. It's not a story that you forget. But there were things that are harder to dismiss. Being able to name out-of-town friends was one of them, but the woman claiming to be Mary Roth 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 and events that no one other than Mary could have known. One day during this time, Mary walked into the Roth 's sitting room and pointed to the velvet headdress sitting on a table. Mrs. Roth had pulled it out of Mary's things and left it for the young woman to discover. When Mary saw it, she lifted it up and described how she had worn it when her hair was short. Mrs. Roth nodded, in disbelief. Another time Mary approached Mr. Roth and told him that she had sent him a note once through a medium he had gone to see. She told him the dates 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 fifteen weeks. There were periods here and there when Mary seemed to disappear and, La Rancy would return to her body. But these were brief moments, and La Rancy never seemed to be fully there. She was confused, especially by her surroundings in the Roth house. She asked to be taken home, but before anything could be done, Mary would return . On May 7th, Mary announced to the Roths that Loren zi 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 Roth home and said tearful goodbyes to her family. Then, one of the Roth daughters took her by the arm and escorted her down the sidewalk to the venoms. They chatted as they did, with Mary discussing family matters and giving life advice to the other woman. And then they arrived. Mary mounted the steps alone and knocked on the front door. When the venoms opened it, Mary vanished. Laurancy was in full control of her own body again, awake and aware. She said she'd felt as if she'd been dreaming, and then embraced her parents. They wept for joy and welcomed her home. And for as long as she lived, she never had another seizure. This is one of those events that's difficult to accept. I fully admit that. Many people believe Lorancy 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 together. Others, though, think it's possible that she suffered from some sort of psychosis, which ultimately manifested as schizophrenia. They believed 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 subscribe to this theory, it was the generosity and open-mindedness of her neighbors that saved her. 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 fifteen 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 Loren cy, claiming to be Mary, told Dr. Stevens that she had 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 a surgery that she'd undergone to stop an infection. Whatever we end up believing here and now today, Loren zi's parents 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, Loren zi 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 all the things that she had become famous for. Four years after that, she married a farmer named George Binning. 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. They raised 13 kids, and naturally, life got busy, but she stayed in touch with folks back home as best 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, and he was attached to Laurancy because of it. And on the rare occasions that she returned to Watseika to visit her parents, she would always make it a point to walk next door and visit the Roth s. She would knock, of course, it wasn't really her home after all, but they would always welcome her in. I imagine that they would 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 Florancy 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 mantle would tick loudly, almost like footsteps approaching from another room , and then her eyes would open again, but it wouldn't be La Rancy . Hello, mother, she would say to them. Hello, father. How are you? It's so good to be h ome . There's something strange at the intersection of illness and spirituality. I hope our journey today made that more than clear. There seems to be something else just beyond the veil that separates life from death. Exactly what? We can only guess. But Mary and Loren cy aren't the only women to dance along this mystical borderline. 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That's Homeserve.com slash Laura Spiritualism was so rampant in the 19th century, you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who claimed to speak to the dead, or would fall into a trance and write as though the ghosts themselves were operating their hands. So many stories of spiritualism were eventually found out as nothing but magic tricks, illusions of light and sound to convince audiences that the other's side wasn't so far away. Nowadays, when something that amazing happens, we're skeptical. It's not that we don't want to believe. We do, but we're afraid to put our faith in it for fear of being let down. We're worried it's being done for fame or money. But what happens when someone who doesn't need the money or fame suddenly develops special gifts? Is it more believable then? And to answer that question, we need to talk about Hildegard. Hildegard was born in Bermensheim, Germany in 1098. She was the tenth child of wealthy noble parents, and was sent to live with a nun, Yuta Bon Spanheim, when she was eight years old. Yuta cared for the girl and taught her in a small cloister attached to the monastery there about 66 miles northwest of her hometown. When Hildegard was old enough, she chose to follow in her mentor's footsteps, joining the cloister to become a Benedictine nun. But that wasn't the start of her holy journey. No, that had begun years earlier when she was only