What if possession wasn’t about demons? What if you didn’t get dragged kicking and screaming into Hell…but instead, you just woke up one day, and somebody else was driving?

Welcome to Watseka, Illinois, where in the late 1870s, a young girl named Lurancy Vennum began slipping into strange trances, claiming to see spirits and eventually insisting that she was being visited by the spirit of a girl who had died years earlier.

Her name was Mary Roff. And according to the people who witnessed it, Mary didn’t just talk through Lurancy. She knew things, recognized people, and remembered places. This is the Watseka Wonder, one of the strangest and most heavily discussed possession cases to emerge from America’s Spiritualist movement.

But this episode isn’t just about Mary Roff; because possession is not an exclusively Christian phenomenon, and demons aren’t the only entities humanity has blamed for taking the wheel. So we’re opening the Cottage doors and taking a trip around the world to look at the many faces of possession: spirits, ancestors, djinn, wandering souls, trance states, cultural beliefs, and the very strange places where psychology, religion, folklore, and genuine human experience start stepping on each other’s toes.

Is possession a supernatural invasion? A psychological phenomenon? A cultural language for experiences we don’t yet understand? Or did Lurancy Vennum really become somebody else?

Either way…we are Vennum.

MERCH:

https://creepcottagecurioshoppe-shop.fourthwall.com/

OLLIE WORLD MERCH:

https://creepcottagecurioshoppe-shop.fourthwall.com/collections/oellie-woerld

SOURCES:

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.”https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2026/07/14/africana-religions

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https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Things_Japanese/Demoniacal_Possession

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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9239794/

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https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/abs/an-ethiopian-argot-of-people-possessed-by-a-spirit/B61AD14C3053BCE27EB4A08741F0DB4B

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/items/2b91b4f5-d7b8-4bf5-a36b-395da04e7153

Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. University of Chicago Press, 2007.

https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/28799

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https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2026/07/14/africana-religions

Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 2003.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctvrf8bcv