LynLee Boemer was born twice. While she was still in utero, CNN reports, doctors discovered that LynLee, now 4 months old, had a rare—and likely fatal—tumor. To save the unborn baby’s life, physicians removed her from the womb, performed emergency surgery, and placed her back inside her mother.

Baby With Tailbone Tumor Is “Born Twice” – Once For Surgery, Once For Real https://t.co/LvSdwXa553 via @lilsugar

— Moms and The City (@Momsandthecity) October 21, 2016

LynLee is the third child of Margaret Boemer of Plano, Texas. Boemer had an unusually rough pregnancy: She was originally expecting twins, but she lost one of the babies. Then, four months into her pregnancy, a routine ultrasound revealed that her surviving infant had a fetal tumor called sacrococcygeal teratoma, which grows from the coccyx, or tailbone. Occurring in one out of every 35,000 births, it’s relatively rare—yet it’s still one of the most common tumors doctors find in newborns, CNN reports.

The news was “very shocking and scary, because we didn’t know what that long word meant or what diagnosis that would bring,” Boemer told Carbonated.TV.

The tumor was sucking blood flow from the developing fetus and doctors were afraid the baby would soon die from heart failure. So when Boemer was nearly six months pregnant, doctors from Texas Children’s Hospital opened her uterus, removed LynLee from the womb, and operated on the tumor.

By then, the mass was nearly as large as LynLee. “Her heart stopped and she had to have blood but they were able to remove most of the tumor and place her back in,” Boemer told Texas news affiliate KPRC2.

After the surgery, the infant faced risks like premature birth and even death, but she—and her mother—got lucky: On June 6, 2016, Boemer delivered LynLee via C-section. She was healthy, and weighed 5 pounds, 5 ounces. Subsequent surgeries were required to remove the rest of the tumor, as was a lengthy recovery in the neonatal intensive care unit. Still, LynLee prevailed, and she was eventually deemed strong enough to send home.

Doctors had to remove her tailbone to prevent the tumor’s return, but aside from that, the Boemer family says she’s perfectly healthy. LynLee is now nearly five months old.

[h/t CNN]
 
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When Leonora Evelina Piper (née Symonds) was 8 years old, she was out playing in the garden when she was overcome by a sudden and mysterious blow to the side of her head, accompanied by a hiss, which eventually became words and a message. In utter hysterics, the girl bolted for the house, where she told her mother: “Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but with you still.” A few days later a letter arrived. Sara had indeed died—on the same day, and around the same time the little girl had gone into a fit.

According to her parents, it wasn’t the only time in her childhood that Piper would show possible psychic predilections. But for the most part, the family set that aside. A daughter who might have the ability to commune with the afterlife isn’t necessarily something you want to advertise to the neighbors.

Leonora eventually grew up, married a shopkeeper named William Piper, and moved from New Hampshire to Boston. The pair had a daughter named Alta in 1884, who, despite bringing much joy to the couple, also aggravated a longtime injury in Piper. As a child, Piper had been involved in an ice-sledding accident that led to internal abdominal bleeding. Following Alta’s birth the pain was so bad Piper sought the help of a clairvoyant—an elderly blind man who purported to have the ability to contact healing spirits. When they touched, it ended up being Piper who experienced something otherworldly.

The young woman reportedly entered a trance-like state. She became dizzy and said she heard a myriad of voices, one of which came through clearly enough that she was able to write down a message. As soon as she was finished, Piper handed the dispatch to a man who was also at the parlor that day, a local judge, who said it was a message from his deceased son. As Deborah Blum writes in Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, Piper returned to the blind clairvoyant a few more times, but retreated after she found herself becoming the focus of attention. She was pregnant with her second daughter, and said she didn’t want to practice as a medium.

Despite that resistance, the budding mystic relented in 1885, agreeing to meet with a widow named Eliza Gibbens. According to Gibbens, Piper was able to relay personal details “the knowledge of which on her part was incomprehensible without supernormal powers.” Gibbens then sent her daughter, Margaret, to further test Piper. Margaret brought a sealed envelope with a letter penned in Italian, and the reluctant clairvoyant had no trouble reciting details about the person who had written it. Margaret and Eliza then decided to take the news to their sister and daughter, Alice, who had recently been quarantined with scarlet fever, and whose illness led to the death of her 1-year-old son, Herman. (After her quarantine, the child had been returned to Alice although she hadn’t fully regained her strength; she developed whooping cough, and the infection soon spread to the child, where it turned into fatal pneumonia.)

Alice, and her husband William James—a Harvard professor, founder of the Society for Psychical Research, and skeptic who helped discredit several popular mediums in Boston—went to see Piper. With little knowledge about the couple or their recent circumstances, she successfully conjured the name of their deceased little boy (or at least James felt she did; the name Piper spoke was Herrin, not Herman).

“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black … it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My white crow is Mrs. Piper,” James would later say in his 1896 presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research. Not everyone was so convinced, however, and James himself would later express skepticism of his own.

For years Piper held private readings at her home and allowed members from the British and American Societies for Psychical Research (SPR) to attend. She was reportedly completely cooperative when it came to inquiring minds, permitting researchers to frequently sit in on her séances. She was likely the most thoroughly scrutinized medium of her day: SPR members also sent test subjects and even hired private detectives to follow Piper and her husband around to see if they exhibited any behavior that might indicate information-gathering regarding potential clients. Their quests proved fruitless—no sign of fraud was ever found. According to Amy Tanner’s 1910 book Studies in Spiritism, Piper charged $20 per séance (about $580 today), enough to help support her family.

While in her trances, Piper used so-called “controls”—spirits that spoke through her. “Dr. Phinuit”—a Frenchman—served as the primary control in Piper’s early mediumship, but she went on to become a supposed vessel for a number of spirits who would then communicate through voice or automatic writing. She also employed psychometry, a method in which the medium uses material objects to do readings, and was taken on several trips to Britain to demonstrate her supposed abilities there.

Despite her many believers—she was among the most famous of mediums in the age of Spiritualism—many others called Piper’s supposed abilities a hoax, and not even a good one at that. She often failed to provide accurate details about her clients or their dearly departed, and persistent inaccuracies regarding her controls befuddled those who were studying her. (Dr. Phinuit for example, didn’t seem to know much about the French language or medicine, his two defining characteristics.) Another investigator tested Piper by concocting a story of a dead relative named Bessie Beale, and the medium went on to relay messages from the nonexistent spirit.

Some said Piper had multiple personalities, others believed her to be savvy mentalist with a knack for cold reading and “fishing,” and others still said she had a talent for surreptitiously learning details about guests before they sat down for a session. Even William James didn’t believe Piper was communicating with ghosts, but rather using telepathy, and drawing on memories and other information from her clients as well as others, perhaps even subliminally. The scholar could find no “independent evidence” to back the possibility of of spirit control.

Oddly enough, Piper herself would prove to be conflicted about the nature of her abilities. In a 1901 “confession” in the New York Herald [PDF], Piper announced her separation from the Society for Psychical Research and was quoted as saying, “I have always maintained that these phenomena could be explained in other ways than by the intervention of disembodied spirit forces … I am inclined to accept the telepathic explanation of all the so-called psychic phenomena, but beyond this I remain a student with the rest of the world.” She also described the spirit controls as “an unconscious expression of my subliminal self,” and if all that wasn’t definitive enough: “I must truthfully say that I do not believe that spirits of the dead have spoken through me when I have been in the trance state …”

Needless to say the piece caused an uproar, and even caused SPR member Richard Hodgson, an avid believer, to write an open letter claiming she had been misunderstood. He also released a statement to the Boston Advertiser from Piper, which read: “I did not make any such statement as that published in the New York Herald to the effect that spirits of the departed do not control me. … My opinion is to-day as it was 18 years ago. Spirits of the departed may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know. I have not changed.”

Ultimately, all the press likely only served to fuel the interest in Piper and her clairvoyant services. And while we may never know what she truly believed, it didn’t matter when it came to the business of mediumship: She found fame and fortune in her séances, though she reportedly never sought much attention beyond continuing to meet with sitters and allowing herself to be repeatedly, almost obsessively observed for science.

In the early 1900s, Piper’s trance abilities reportedly began to fade. She gave her last séance in 1911, and officially retired some years later. She lived to be 93 years old, dying on July 3, 1950 from bronchopneumonia at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts. She is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Arlington, Massachusetts. History remembers her as a conflicted character—and as William James’s one “white crow.”

MAN RESCUED FROM CHIMNEY

A 26-year-old man in the University area of Tucson locked himself out of his house on Sunday morning. He tried to get back in by climbing down the chimney. He almost made it, too, except that the chimney is narrower at the bottom, and he became stuck just as his feet touched the floor. A neighbor eventually heard him yelling for help, and called the fire department. The Tucson Fire Department lowered a rope and pulled the unnamed man out. He had been stuck in the chimney for four hours.

51 YEARS, 17 GIRLS, AND ONE PLAID DRESS

It all started in 1965, when Janice Parker bought a dress for her daughter Diana. She loved the dress and insisted on wearing it for her picture day in kindergarten. Her five younger sisters liked the dress, too, and they each wore it for picture day when they went to kindergarten. And so did their daughters. And then their granddaughters.

It’s held up remarkably well. Sure, there are some rips and tears, but nothing that can’t be easily fixed.

Of course, sometimes the girls would complain. The dress isn’t the definition of current style and some of them said they were teased. But, they came around and the tradition continued.

The latest girl in the family didn’t want to wear the dress, or any dress. But she did, along with pants and a baseball cap, so the tradition can continue.

MAN HOSPITALIZED AFTER EATING GHOST PEPPER

The bhut jolokia, or ghost pepper, registers at 1,000,000 on the Scoville scale, making it one of the hottest peppers on earth. Eating any significant amount of the pepper can be dangerous, as we see in a case reported in The Journal of Emergency Medicine. A 47-year-old man ate a hamburger with ghost pepper puree on it “as part of a contest,” became violently ill, and was taken to a hospital. He spent 23 days there after doctors found tears in the lining of his esophagus, with food debris embedded. He underwent emergency surgery to repair his esophagus. 

BEAR DRIVES INTO TREE

A bear entered a car in Grand Lake, Colorado, on Saturday, and apparently had trouble getting back out. The bear threw the transmission into neutral, and the car rolled into a tree on County Road 4651. Someone notified the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department, who came and freed the bear from the car. The incident must not have seemed all that unusual in Colorado, as the story only appeared as an item in the local police blotter.  

CITY OFFICIAL REPORTED AS BURGLAR

A police officer in Brewer, Maine, was called to investigate a possible burglary at an abandoned house. Upon arriving at the address, he saw several people and prepared for a confrontation.

Assistant City Manager James Smith was showing reporter Nok-Noi Ricker and photographer Ashley Conti around a city-owned, foreclosed ranch house at 91 Longmeadow Drive at about 2:30 p.m., which triggered a report to police.

Sgt. Fred Luce drove up in a patrol car and confronted the journalists with his gun drawn, according to Ricker and Conti.

Conti said Luce yelled, “Hey, what are you doing here! Come over here!” The police officer pointed his weapon first at her, and then Ricker, in the backyard for about 10 seconds, even though they identified themselves as journalists, they said.

While the mix-up was resolved quickly, the police report of the incident differs from the accounts of the reporters, with Officer Luce saying he had his gun at “low ready,” while the reporters say he had the gun pointed directly at them. A Public Safety Officer said either response would have been appropriate for the situation. 

BUS DRIVER GETS LOST ON WAY TO SCHOOL

Students in Westchester County, New York, started texting their parents when their bus driver wandered around instead of driving to their school. The students were picked up in New Rochelle to be taken to the school in Harrison, but ended up in Yonkers two hours later. The students tried to tell the driver which turn to make, but he ignored them. The bus company, First Mile Square Transportation, fired the unnamed driver for not following protocol when he became lost.