A walk through the woods near Manayunk turned into a terrifying ordeal for 16-year-old Mary Schulz in the spring of 1895.
What began as a simple drink from a running stream became, in Mary’s mind, a death sentence. After her companion spotted a spider on the water, Mary became convinced she had swallowed it, and no amount of reasoning could persuade her otherwise.
The fear took hold with such force that within days she was refusing food, losing sleep, and wasting away.
Her family believed the incident may have awakened an old nervous disorder, while her doctor was left puzzled by the strength of her conviction. To modern readers, the story reads like a case of extreme anxiety or somatic delusion, but to newspaper readers of the time, it was presented as a medical marvel: a “wonderful hallucination” that seemed to be consuming a young woman from within.
Wonderful Hallucination
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania. — A peculiar case of hallucination and one which the physician claims the records of medical science do not furnish a parallel, has taken possession of 16-year-old Mary Schulz, of Baker Street, Manayunk. The result is that the girl is wasting away until she barely resembles the person she was one week ago, when the ailment first seized her.
Mary and a companion named Katie Moore, a neighbor, crossed the Schuylkill River for a walk through the woods. When journeying but a little while the girls became thirsty and on reaching a rivulet which flows into Juniper Lake, they concluded to drink of it.
There was no vessel of any kind convenient out of which they could drink and Mary’s companion stooped down, placed her lips to the running stream and slaked her thirst. Mary was about to drink in the same manner when Katie shouted, “There’s a spider on the water.”
Mary, who was badly frightened, jumped up and insisted that she had swallowed the spider. Katie’s efforts to make her believe that the spider had passed down the stream were useless and Mary kept repeating, “I have swallowed the spider and I shall die.”
She was so firm in her opinion she almost went into hysterics and Katie assisted her until they got to West Manayunk, where special policeman Byrne met the girls and accompanied them over the high bridge.
On reaching her home, Mary told the story of how she had swallowed a black spider, which was floating on the water.
Her parents were disposed at first to believe her, but when Katie stated that there was no truth in the statement they attributed their daughter’s mania to a renewal of a former disorder of the nervous system.
In two days her case assumed such an alarming phase that the parents summoned a physician.
He was puzzled at the forceful declaration made by the girl that she had swallowed the spider and that it was gradually eating her life away. The physician undertook to convince her that if she had the spider in her stomach that under no consideration could it injure her health or cause her death.
Although only a week has passed by since the hallucination seized her she has become sad and emaciated looking and refusing to partake of nourishment excepting at rare intervals. She seldom sleeps at night and when she does she awakes in the most frightful frame of mind. She worked in one of the mills and was regarded as one of the brightest of several hundred hands.
Source: The Indianapolis Journal. Indianapolis, Ind. May 5, 1895.
