In 1866 Mollie Francher of Brooklyn, New York, began suffering unexplained symptoms, including blindness, paralysis and trances. Thirteen years later, she became an international sensation, fought over by scientists and philosophers, called a ‘psychological miracle’ and a fraud. Igniting her fame was a remarkable question: How had Mollie lived for six months on a few teaspoons of milk and a small banana…and for the next twelve months, on nothing at all?”
      Mollie’s mother had died when she was 8; two of her siblings had also died; her father remarried and moved upstate, leaving Mollie to live with her spinster aunt Susan. Mollie had experienced a traumatic event with runaway horses at sixteen. But now, at nineteen and engaged to be married, her skirts were caught and she was dragged by a horse-driven streetcar along the cobbled streets.

The human psyche was colliding with a changing climate that threatened Victorian values. In June of 1863, Mollie took to her bed at 160 Gates Avenue and there she would remain for fifty years until her death in 1916.

At the end of nine years Mollie went into a coma-like trance. When she came out, she “went back” to 1866, developed multiple personalities and claimed second-sight and the ability to be clairvoyant. She wrote over 1,000 letters and embroidered cloths that were sold in a downstairs gift shop. Mollie had become a national figure, a “geek” that people would pay money to see in her bed. There are amazing photos in the book of her throughout the years. She became the poster girl for Spiritualists of the time.