Wilder’s West

PRELUDE TO

“THE MIRACLE WOMAN”

This story of Mrs. Jessel was written by Mary Edith Wilder.

Grammy had long suffered from severe migraine headaches and was examined by this woman when she and her sisters, Aunt Grace and Avis, went to Crescent City. It was the same year that Aunt Lora, another of Grammy’s sisters, was operated on there for a tumor. Grammy remembered it as being 1939.

Mrs. Jessel told her she could cure her of her migraine headaches… but it would take six treatments—one each week. At that time Grammy had six children and little money; she never went back for treatment.

After writing of her encounter with this miracle woman, some years later, she sent her manuscript to Readers Digest—it was rejected as they were a reprint magazine. Not long afterward Mr. and Mrs. Hansen, friends of Grammy, read almost the same account in True Magazine and published under the name of a newspaper reporter who said he had heard of Mrs. Jessel and went up there to see her.

Enjoy… Dan

THE MIRACLE WOMAN

The Miracle Woman…. in her faded print dress and apron and dusty keds, looked as though she had hurried straight from her kitchen to this place—to rout cancer and goiter and blindness by the laying on of her hands.

Thin hands they were—middle aged hands with large veins on the backs. Tired looking hands that took a sleeping baby from it’s mother and cradled it tenderly while they gently explored its little back and head and neck.

“She is eleven months old,” said the weary young mother who had waited outside for seven hours. “She has never been able to hold up her head or sit up alone. We’ve been so worried Mrs. Jessel—but I know you can make her well.”

As simple as that… she knew. Because that young mother has an old, old grandmother who was blind for several years, until her sight was restored by the Miracle Woman—now she reads and crochets.

In this room, perhaps eighteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long, forty-two people are seated on benches around the walls and on chairs and camp stools in the middle of the room. The Miracle Woman moves about from one to another. Her hands move slowly over the head, face, arms, and body of the one being treated. She talks while healing a patient, sometimes to the one next to her.

While she is speaking the room is still.

The people hang on her words and listen attentively to what she is saying or they laugh at some witticism she makes.

In this crude room, miracles are being performed. The people sit forward on their chairs and there is, on their faces, the joyous look of those who have found hope even after all hope is gone.

Here are people… such as you never see on the street. There is a man with the right side of his face so swollen and distended that all his features are on the left side of his face. He is conversing with a man with a great livid blotch extending from the corner of his mouth down to his neck. (I wonder if this is cancer, as it is unlike any sore I ever saw.)

You hear them assure each other that they are “much better” and you wonder how in the world they could ever have been worse and yet live.

A woman with a great goiter on her neck, so huge that it extends down in bulking folds onto her breast—waits her turn… not with the gasping breath and hunted look peculiar to those suffering from that ailment—but with the smiling assurance that when her turn does come… she will be cured.

There is a young man in a wheel chair and only the head and the thin hands of that rigid body can move. But… when he came to the healing woman, only the eyes could move, in a body totally paralyzed by a fall from a high place. He smiles and that same look of hope and assurance lights up his face—he is improving so fast.

The secretary comes to the door and tells the Miracle Woman there is a very sick person inside—in a car. She goes quickly to a pan of water on the oil heating stove and washes and dries her hands and goes outside.

Instantly the room buzzes with conversation. The people overflow with praise of her wonderful power. They delight in a repetition of stories of her marvelous cures. Are you a stranger? Then you must hear…how her power was discovered.

When the healing Woman was born, her mother suffered from milk fever; she finally became aware of the strange fact that during the time the baby lay close to her she didn’t suffer any pain. She experimented—sent for the baby during a bad spell of suffering and as soon as the tiny body touched her own… the pain left her.

From then on the young child became known and sought after as the possessor of some wonderful power to stop pain and cure the cause of the pain.

And she has a power—don’t ask me what it is. I went there wisecracking and vowing I wouldn’t believe it… if I saw it.

Then I saw the street out front of her house, packed with cars—parked and double parked. Two hundred or more people crowded the small yard. They sat on benches and chairs and on a low stone foundation—and stood about talking. On the small porch, people crowded the benches and chairs, so you could scarcely get through.

An old Indian woman sat on a stool from noon until seven-thirty that evening, immobile– immovable as time itself. She was the oldest human being I have ever seen, wrinkled as an old apple—and patient as Job. What did she seek here? Sight… probably, since she sat all that time with her eyes closed.

There was a little girl nine years old whose mother was badly injured in an automobile accident before the child was born. The baby was paralyzed from birth—had never walked in her life, nor had she ever talked… until her parents brought her to this woman last fall.

Six months later, now… she talks and sings like any active normal child of nine years and she walks in a slow halting gait—holding tightly to someone’s hand. I saw her walk half a block with her daddy.

Later on, in the room, the child moved from one friend to another—helped by loving, kindly hands. She visited with those she knew well, and to one special friend… she sang in its entirety, the little nursery song, “This is the way we wash our clothes – all on a Monday morning.” There were those in the room, who knew her before she was brought to Mrs. Jessel—who saw her inanimate little body… doomed to a living death. They follow her every move. She is living proof, that there is a power that can heal them too.

They told of the man who came from ‘back east’—he was very rich, but he was paralyzed, and with all his money, he had not walked for years. Though so far away, he had heard somehow of this woman, and his great wealth and greater hopes had carried him across the continent to her—as a last resort. By the miracle of her power, he had been healed and walked again. And in awe and gratitude, he had presented to her a fine car—a limousine. Looking around at this crude room, her ‘simple print’ dress and worn shoes, I wondered at the incongruity of the gift.

In another state recently, a man was pointed out to me by a friend. “You see that man?,” he said. “He was totally blind for over three years. Three months ago… he went over to that Healing Woman in Oregon, and she made him see again. He’s gone to all the night softball games this summer—he sees as well as he ever did.”

Cases of restoration of sight are common with her.

“Goiters and cataracts don’t like me,” she says, and smiles and strokes a large goiter that resembles nothing so much as the huge pulsing body of an octopus.

And the man goes home and comes again next day. The thing is smaller by half. And next day, he comes with his collar buttoned—the first time in months… in years.

There is no ballyhoo, no fan fare about her healing—no fantastic gowns or colored lights, no emotional build up… or religious fervor.

People have always flocked to her home for healing, interrupting her work, begging her just to touch them—and she never turned anyone away.

Finally they have overflowed her home and she has had this small building put up on the back of her corner lot facing on the side street. The small front porch has been partitioned off, just beside the front door, and in this tiny room some enterprising soul sells coffee and pies, cakes and sandwiches to the waiting people.

She tries to keep office hours; 10:30 a.m. ‑ 12:30… and 3:30 p.m. ‑ 7:30; but often eleven p.m. finds her moving from one to another until all are touched.

She has a son, a fine boy of twenty who, according to her, possesses greater healing power than she does. She has prevailed upon him to help her at times, when the crowds become too great. But word got around among his school mates and with the inherent cruelty of youth, they made life miserable for him – called him Jesus Christ and ribbed him unmercifully.

There are other children—a girl of thirteen whose power, the mother says, is strongest of all and two other younger girls; but they are not permitted to demonstrate their power because of their youth. The mother admits that “It takes something out of you.”

Under no circumstances does the Miracle Woman ever make an appointment. You simply go there and wait your turn. She has been known to treat or examine, out of turn, someone passing through from a great distance. She explains the circumstances to the crowd and they watch with good natured interest and concern while she finds the trouble and goes about dispersing it.

You wonder why all the sick and afflicted in the world are not at her door. I think they would be, if they could be touched and healed and go home.

But sometimes many treatments are required, and so few are financially able to go to a strange town and establish a residence there—though she always sets a definite limit on the time of cure… such as, 9 treatments or 4 or 12.

She does not treat everyone, every day; only if you come from a great distance and the illness is severe, then she gives a treatment every day.

This necessity for related treatment is at first a great disappointment. After the wonderful stories you hear of her power, you expect to see one ‘regain his sight’ instantly and another ‘take up his bed and walk’—but such is not the case.

She doesn’t charge for her services, but at sometime or other, a grateful patient had thrust some money into her apron pocket and it has become a custom. She turns immediately from one patient to another and it is somewhat awkward to have to follow her and slip the money into her pocket. Some murmured, “Thank you Mrs. Jessel,” and put on their coats and went away. Others shot up and left with no spoken ‘thanks’—and I wondered about them.

Do they pay by the week, by the month—or do they pay at all? There is no evidence, anywhere, of wealth. Quite the contrary. Her home is a modest 5 room house with leaves on the porch and smudges on the door. It has the neglected look that a home has, when the homemaker is busy elsewhere. Gloriously… wondrously and miraculously…busy elsewhere.