Online Talk · The Watseka Wonder: The True Story of a Possessed Girl with Author Asti Hustvedt, PhD
Monday, April 21, 2025
7pm ET (NYC Time)
$8
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org . A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
This talk is an expanded version of an original iteration delivered at Morbid Anatomy’s 2024 Memento Mori Festival.
In 1877, in the quiet town of Watseka, Illinois, a teenage girl with the wonderfully witchy name Lurancy Vennum became the center of international fascination when she became possessed by the spirit of another girl who had died in an insane asylum twelve years earlier. Dubbed the “Watseka Wonder,” her case mesmerized the public and drew intense scrutiny from doctors, philosophers, clergymen, journalists, psychical researchers, and the merely curious. Fierce debate raged over the true nature of her possession: Was she an unwitting medium channeling the dead? A cunning fraud orchestrating an elaborate hoax? A sufferer of hysteria? A victim of demonic forces? Or, as the Dalai Lama of the day speculated, a highly unorthodox case of reincarnation? This illustrated talk will delve into a once-famous but now largely forgotten supernatural mystery.
Asti Hustvedt, PhD, is an independent scholar who is the author of the Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, which was named Editors’ Choice by the New York Times and Book of the Year by the Independent. She is also the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France. She is currently working on a book about hysteria and the occult, focusing on female mediums and the scientists who investigated them.
Monday, April 21, 2025
7pm ET (NYC Time)
$8
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org . A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
This talk is an expanded version of an original iteration delivered at Morbid Anatomy’s 2024 Memento Mori Festival.
In 1877, in the quiet town of Watseka, Illinois, a teenage girl with the wonderfully witchy name Lurancy Vennum became the center of international fascination when she became possessed by the spirit of another girl who had died in an insane asylum twelve years earlier. Dubbed the “Watseka Wonder,” her case mesmerized the public and drew intense scrutiny from doctors, philosophers, clergymen, journalists, psychical researchers, and the merely curious. Fierce debate raged over the true nature of her possession: Was she an unwitting medium channeling the dead? A cunning fraud orchestrating an elaborate hoax? A sufferer of hysteria? A victim of demonic forces? Or, as the Dalai Lama of the day speculated, a highly unorthodox case of reincarnation? This illustrated talk will delve into a once-famous but now largely forgotten supernatural mystery.
Asti Hustvedt, PhD, is an independent scholar who is the author of the Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, which was named Editors’ Choice by the New York Times and Book of the Year by the Independent. She is also the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France. She is currently working on a book about hysteria and the occult, focusing on female mediums and the scientists who investigated them.
Monday, April 21, 2025
7pm ET (NYC Time)
$8
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org . A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
This talk is an expanded version of an original iteration delivered at Morbid Anatomy’s 2024 Memento Mori Festival.
In 1877, in the quiet town of Watseka, Illinois, a teenage girl with the wonderfully witchy name Lurancy Vennum became the center of international fascination when she became possessed by the spirit of another girl who had died in an insane asylum twelve years earlier. Dubbed the “Watseka Wonder,” her case mesmerized the public and drew intense scrutiny from doctors, philosophers, clergymen, journalists, psychical researchers, and the merely curious. Fierce debate raged over the true nature of her possession: Was she an unwitting medium channeling the dead? A cunning fraud orchestrating an elaborate hoax? A sufferer of hysteria? A victim of demonic forces? Or, as the Dalai Lama of the day speculated, a highly unorthodox case of reincarnation? This illustrated talk will delve into a once-famous but now largely forgotten supernatural mystery.
Asti Hustvedt, PhD, is an independent scholar who is the author of the Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, which was named Editors’ Choice by the New York Times and Book of the Year by the Independent. She is also the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France. She is currently working on a book about hysteria and the occult, focusing on female mediums and the scientists who investigated them.