Aaron Mahnke

She laid before her parents on the bed and would violently arch her back with each episode.

One report claims that she bent so sharply at the waist that her feet touched her head, though I'm honestly not sure how that's possible.

If it happened, I can't imagine a more creepy scene than watching a young woman bend in half backwards while screaming in pain.

It wasn't a one-time thing, either.

These new seizures went on for weeks, leaving the family distraught and Laurence exhausted and in pain.

And this pattern, first seizures, then visions, repeated itself regularly for nearly three months.

Outside family members were beginning to think that the young woman had lost her mind.

They begged the Venoms to send her to Peoria, where there was an asylum well-equipped to help her with her illness.

Instead, the Venoms pushed on alone.

Their doctor didn't know how to help, and while the seizures were something that he could at least put a medical name to, it was her visions of the afterlife, full of spirits and angels and the like, that defied his expertise.

One person who did arrive and offer them answers was a man named Dr. E. Winchester Stevens.

He was a friendly man in his mid-50s from Janesville, Wisconsin, and he worked as a spiritualist doctor, offering a mixture of medical cures and otherworldly solutions to people just like the Venoms.

He had heard of Laurence's story through The Venom's Neighbors, an older couple with an interest in spiritualism and the afterlife.

But when Dr. Stevens entered her room for the first time on the 31st of January, he didn't meet Laurence.

Instead, the voice that came out of the young woman claimed to be that of an elderly German woman named Katrina Hogan.

She had been 63 years old when she passed away years before, and now she was in possession of Laurence's body.

And she wasn't nice, apparently.

This elderly spirit, speaking through the young woman's mouth, insulted and verbally abused Thomas and Lucinda Venom.

This went on for a few moments before shifting into another spirit entirely.

This one claimed to be that of a young man named Willie Canning, who had died after running away from his family.