"MAD" MOLLIE FANCHER THE BROOKLYN ENIGMA RELIGIOUS MIRACLE WORKER? OR SUPERNATURAL PHENOMENON?
When Satan tempted a fasting Jesus to command the nearby wilderness rocks to become bread, Jesus answered him that "Man does not live by bread alone." But there are many cases of the devout living on NO BREAD AT ALL! Somehow, miraculously, they survived for years without nourishment of any kind and became famous for their "impossible" feats of self-denial.
"The Brooklyn Engima," Mollie Fancher, is one such case. After suffering through many painful, personal losses and a pair of near-fatal accidents, Mollie took to her bed and did not rise from it for 51 years. She steadfastly refused any food and was regarded as a saint by some in her day, drawing thousands to her bedside to observe her apparent sacred ability to live in defiance of the laws of nature. Read Mollie's rare and hard-to-find biography in this new Global Communications edition and see how utterly strange supposedly ordinary people can become.
Learn about the battle between believers and naysayers from the medical and psychiatric community. Was Mollie truly an example of "anorexia mirabilis," a miraculous loss of appetite? Or simply an early case of misdiagnosed "anorexia nervosa," an eating disorder said to revolve around issues of body image and to compensate for a sense of powerlessness? One opinion holds that religiously-motivated self-starvation was a legitimate form of self-expression, one of the few available to women of the Victorian era, when Mollie's story took place.
Read about Saint Catherine of Siena, who would rise to be a player in papal politics in the 14th century. She claimed to have had a special spiritual wedding with Jesus, who gave her not a ring of gold or jewels but the ring of his foreskin. Saint Catherine stayed so vibrant and energetic in spite of her refusal to ingest even a morsel of food that a local priest suspected she was being secretly fed by demons.
And the strangeness never lets up. There are stories here about a potbelly stove in Italy that began to speak, uttering frightening demonic curses, while two young female mediums served as a conduit for "spirit paintings" created by artists from the world of the dead. In another case, spooky faces began to appear on the tiles of a family home. The faces could not be destroyed even when the floor was dug up.
"Mad Mollie" also deals with historical and modern accounts of stigmata and demonic possession, among other paranormal subjects. Does the supernatural cross over into our everyday reality to the extent that it is possible to simply stop eating entirely and yet survive? Does God sustain the lives of a chosen few without nourishment to demonstrate His powers in our world? As we begin our series on extremely unusual people, Mollie Fancher certainly qualifies as "strange" in anyone's book.
