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Roff adding her entreaties, it was finally resolved as a last resort to call in a physician from Janesville, Wisconsin, who was himself a spiritist and would, the Roffs felt sure, be able to treat the case with great success. This physician, Dr. E. Winchester Stevens, paid his first visit to Lurancy in Mr. Roff's company on the afternoon of January 31.
To refresh the reader'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.
It also developed that while Lurancy had grown to be a strong, healthy woman, she had had occasional returns of Mary's spirit in the years immediately following the chief visitation; but that these had ceased with her marriage to a man who, Roff regretfully observed, had never made himself acquainted with spiritism and therefore "furnished poor conditions for further development in that direction."
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.
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.
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.
This was done, and the recognition was instant. With a smile of delight Lurancy picked up the hat, mentioned an incident connected with it, and asked, "Have you my box of letters also?" The box was found, and rummaging through it the child presently cried, "Oh, ma, here is a collar I tatted! Ma, why did you not show me my letters and things before?"
Roff and her surviving daughter Minerva, who since Mary's death had married a Mr. Alter, promptly went to see Lurancy. From a seat at the window she beheld them approaching down the street, and with an exultant cry exclaimed, "Here comes my ma, and 'Nervie'!" the name by which Mary Roff had been accustomed to call her sister in girlhood.
Happy and contented she proved herself and, which was remarked by all who saw her, entirely free from the maladies that had so sorely beset both the living Lurancy and the dead Mary. For her life as Lurancy she appeared to have no remembrance; but she readily and unfailingly recollected everything connected with the career of Mary.
The Vennums and the Roffs lived at opposite ends of Watseka; but the latter family, at the time of Mary's death in 1865, had been occupying a dwelling in a central section of the town. Arrived at this house, Lurancy unhesitatingly turned to enter it, and seemed much astonished when told that her home was elsewhere. "Why," said she, in a positive tone, "I know that I live here."
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