The Watseka Wonder: The Double Life of Lurancy Venum

I have to tell you that I – the penultimate skeptic, confirmed and happy atheist, believer in nothing supernatural – became convinced that there is “more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy” when my daughter, at age three began to say things that I couldn’t explain. Once she was sitting quietly on a little couch in her room, hugging her toy bunny “lovey” when she sadly said, “I couldn’t kill my brother yesterday. That’s why there wasn’t enough food. After all, I was supposed to be a preacher man.” (For the record, she adored her real brother who is much older than her. And no, she didn’t see it on TV and I was with her 24/7 so no one said it to her and here in the northeast no one is called a “preacher man.”) Other times she talked several times of a young man she just called “Starting Over” — one time she picked up a rose, put it to her cheek and said it was just like the one “Starting Over” had given to her. And there was one “imaginary friend” who was here for the better part of a year – Denne – she typed some letters on the computer and asked how to say them and said he was a boy who used to live where her preschool was (a building that was renovated from a barn from the 1800s.) I wrote all these things down (especially because there were a couple verging on scary) and so I know I haven’t embroidered them over the years. I still believe that there are reasonable explanations for everything — after all even physicists say that there is no reason that time has to be sequential, so perhaps there are little time warp overlaps from time to time — whatever the reason, it was a very strange but numinous year.

K. Jacobs, I agree that the writing is confusing. The 18-year-old died 12 years earlier, so she was actually born 30 years prior to the events in the story.

LisaL, It went on for about a year and a half or so (I think Denne was the last to go — he was the only one she ever referred to by name and who seemed to talk to her, rather than through her. (BTW probably utter, utter coincidence but last year, while working on my family history, I found that one of our ancestral families in the 1700s had the last name of Denne.) In any case, she’s nearly ten now and doesn’t remember anything at all about it. I told her that I’d let her read about it when she’s older but don’t want to freak her out now!

Elagie- That’s very interesting about your daughter. If it still interests you, I would recommend checking out this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Before_Life
The author is a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Division of Personalities center, which studies reincarnation basically.

That was very interesting.

People do really stupid things when they’re grieving. Hell, even when they’re not grieving.