Special Collections
Book of the Month, December 2008
Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma
Abram H. Dailey
Brooklyn: Eagle Book Printing Department, 1894
H.P.L. [Fancher]
This is an account of the life of Mary J. Fancher, born in 1848 at Attelboro, Massachussets, who until May 1864 lived a normal life. But on the 10th May in that year she was thrown from a horse and suffered severe head injuries, and just over a year later these injuries were compounded by a fall from a streetcar. Thereafter she was confined to her bed, and became a ‘psychological marvel’ owing to psychic powers that were thought to have been released by her head injuries. Indeed, the full title of the book reads: “Mollie Fancher, The Brooklyn Enigma. An Authentic Statement of Facts in the Life of Mary J. Fancher, the Psychological Marvel of the Nineteenth Century. Unimpeachable Testimony of Many Witnesses.”.
The book describes the progress of her powers and the controversies over their veracity. Chapters relate how she visited her mother in heaven, cited scriptures, survived in a trance condition, developed clairvoyent powers, endured multiple personalities and saw and visited distant places. In June 1866, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published the first article about her, and thereafter she was a public personality. Interest in her case persisted and in 1892, a paper by Dailey, who was a judge, was read to the Psychical Congress held at the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair Auxiliary, in Chicago, August 1892.
The book has several photographs of Mary Fancher, usually reclining; in addition to Dailey’s narrative it has many supporting documents in the form of testimonies from a variety of witnesses including doctors and professors. It is an interesting example of a genre common from about that period of heavily documented investigations into individuals who seemed to have psychic powers - although not necessarily after a blow to the head. This recent addition to the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature adds to the Library’s holdings of that genre, and is the second item in the collection relating to Mary Fancher.
shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk 
020 7862 8470
