🎆 Special Edition: New Year’s Eve: When Midnight Feels Haunted

Possession: When the Living Borrow the Dead

For this final Halloween special, I wanted to look past devils and into something more intimate: not demonic horror, but the eerie reports of human spirits taking hold of the living. The stories are rarer, stranger, and—at least to me—more haunting, because they feel like unfinished conversations between the dead and the breathing.

What We Mean by “Ghostly Possession”

In the chronicles below, the possessing presence is described as a human soul—a deceased person who “steps into” a living body to speak, to ask for help, or to finish what life left undone. Whether you view these as psychology, suggestion, or something genuinely paranormal, the records exist: witness statements, court documents, period pamphlets, and investigations by early psychical researchers. I’ve gathered several of the most striking cases—some famous, some seldom retold.

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1) “The Watseka Wonder” (Illinois, 1877): Lurancy Vennum & Mary Roff

In Watseka, Illinois, a 13-year-old girl named Lurancy Vennum began falling into deep trances. During those trances, she spoke in voices, claimed to see spirits, and—most astonishingly—identified herself as Mary Roff, a local girl who had died twelve years earlier. The Roff family visited and reported that Lurancy, as “Mary,” recognized their house, recalled family details, and used private nicknames. Under supervision (and controversy), Lurancy even lived with the Roffs for a period, apparently as their returned daughter. A physician and Spiritualist writer, E. W. Stevens, documented the affair in a lengthy narrative soon after the events, preserving letters and testimony from townspeople and officials.¹ A second widely circulated pamphlet followed, framing it as a “psychological study” rather than a sensation.²

“She recognized the room, the pictures, the acquaintances…using the same familiar names by which Mary had called them.”³

Explanations multiplied: suggestion, somnambulism, community expectation—and, of course, the Spiritualist claim that a dead girl had stepped back into the world through a willing living vessel. Whatever the cause, the Watseka Wonder remains the best-documented American case of alleged human spirit possession.

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2) “Voice from the Grave” (Chicago, 1977): The Case of Teresita Basa

When Chicago police struggled to solve the murder of Teresita Basa, a striking development arrived from an unexpected source: a colleague’s wife, Remibias “Remy” Chua, who reportedly slipped into trance and—according to her husband and detectives—spoke as Teresita. In those episodes, “Teresita” named a co-worker, described stolen items, and urged police to look for specific pieces of jewelry. Detectives later reported recovering the jewelry from the suspect’s girlfriend; the man eventually confessed to the killing.⁴ The case still surfaces in journalism and true-crime retrospectives for its singular claim: that a human ghost possessed the living to identify her own murderer.⁵

Courts did not try “a ghost” as evidence; they tried a man supported by physical recovery of items and confession. Still, the route to those leads—if you accept the police recollections—traveled through a living woman’s voice that was not her own.

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3) Trance “Controls” in the Séance Room: Mrs. Leonora Piper & the Return of Persons

While most Victorian mediumship involved messages, some mediums entered deep trance in which full personalities—claiming to be deceased humans—“controlled” the body and spoke or wrote through it. The American medium Leonora Piper was investigated for decades by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and by psychologist William James. In long series of sittings, named “controls” emerged (most famously “Phinuit”), followed later by personalities claiming to be known deceased individuals, producing detailed private information and, at times, simultaneous voice and writing communications during possession-like trance.⁶⁷

Whether one views these as secondary personalities or genuine “borrowings” by the dead, the form is unmistakable: the human medium’s body and voice adopted by an identity that says, I was a person; I am speaking again.

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4) The Author Who Wasn’t Alive: Patience Worth & Pearl Curran (St. Louis, 1913–1930s)

In St. Louis, Pearl Curran—a self-described ordinary housewife—began producing prose and poetry she attributed to the spirit of a long-dead woman, “Patience Worth.” What began with a Ouija board progressed to direct dictation as Curran slipped into a light trance and the “voice” took over. For years, published novels and poems appeared under the Patience Worth name, drawing both acclaim and controversy. The case remains one of the strangest intersections of literature and alleged possession by a human spirit in American letters.⁸⁹

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5) Borders & Burdens: Why These Stories Endure

Across these accounts, certain themes repeat. First, the borrowed body is often used to help—to comfort the grieving, to offer hidden knowledge, to point to stolen things, or to finish a story. Second, the settings widen a bridge toward the next era of our main timeline: from farmhouse trances and parlors in Watseka to the highly scrutinized séance rooms of Boston and London. The language shifts from “possession” to communication, then to “control” and “trance,” as the dead allegedly come not to terrify, but to testify.

Modern clinicians have even collected case studies claiming relief when supposed “earthbound” human spirits were addressed and released—controversial work, yes, but part of the longer arc of how people have tried to understand these experiences.¹⁰

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Closing the Halloween Circle

We end our Halloween edition with the quietest kind of haunting: not a demon in the dark, but a human voice—urgent, insistent—borrowing breath to be heard. In time, stories like these would no longer whisper from haunted rooms, but from the polished tables of Victorian parlors. When the world grew eager to speak with the dead—and to be heard in return—a new age would begin. But that is a tale for another time, still waiting just beyond the fires of witchcraft.

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Footnotes

1. E. W. Stevens, The Watseka Wonder (1879). Digitized pamphlet with letters and testimony: University of Illinois collection (PDF). Link. ↩︎
2. E. W. Stevens, The Watseka Wonder; A Startling and Instructive Psychological Study (Chicago, 1879). National Library of Medicine scan (PDF). Link and alternate Illinois scan Link. ↩︎
3. Period quotations and community attestations appear throughout Stevens (1879); see the Illinois PDF above for contextual letters and sworn statements. ↩︎
4. Contemporary retrospectives on the Teresita Basa case (1977), including police recollections of jewelry recovery and confession: DNAinfo Chicago feature. Link. Additional summary: The Lineup. Link. ↩︎
5. Media treatments frequently describe the possession of Remy Chua by Teresita; see overview articles (with sources) such as Mamamia’s trial recap. Link. ↩︎
6. Society for Psychical Research material on Leonora Piper (investigations by William James; control phenomena). SPR Psi Encyclopedia overview. Link. ↩︎
7. Early analysis and descriptions of Piper’s trance and “controls,” Project Gutenberg e-text (public domain). Link. See also critical monograph PDF via Wikimedia. Link. ↩︎
8. Patience Worth case history (Smithsonian Magazine). Link. ↩︎
9. Scholarly and public overviews of Pearl Curran/Patience Worth: Public Domain Review essay with references. Link. ↩︎
10. Modern clinical claims of human-spirit attachment and “release” (controversial): Edith Fiore, The Unquiet Dead. Book reference page. Link. ↩︎