Irene Teel – Psychologist, Social Worker, Fortune Teller, Witch
By Linda Rochester
48 HrBooks, 2022
Paperback: $15
Genre: Nonfiction
Reviewed by Jim Plott
For a time in the 1900s, a steady stream of vehicles, many with out-of-county and out-of-state automobile license plates, converged almost daily on the small Clay County community of Millerville. Their destination? Rena Teel.
Irene Vansandt Teel or “Miss Rena” spanned six decades with her “visionary” abilities helping people find lost children, livestock, and hunting dogs. She casually pointed people toward the location of lost wallets, jewelry, and even a set of dentures. She lent her insights to law enforcement agencies and people seeking a resolution to crimes. And, as might be expected, she foretold peoples’ futures.
Nearly all her life Clay County resident Linda Rochester had heard stories about “Miss Rena” and even had some indirect involvement with her. That fascination and another indirect encounter with a psychic in nearby Anniston led her to begin collecting stories from locals about Rena Teel.
Over the course of about 14 years, Rochester, a historian and retired social worker, interviewed 130 people, mostly local, and compiled more than 200 first-hand and passed-down anecdotes involving Rena Teel. She felt she had no choice but to compile them into a book.
“I just started asking people about her everywhere I went,” Rochester said. “People were telling me stories left and right. I could go to McDonald’s (in the city of Ashland) right now and come away with a Mrs. Teel story.”
Overwhelmed by the volume of stories she collected, Rochester broke them in categories to give the book some order. Chapters include missing people, pets, and objects as well as crimes, people’s past, and their futures.
Along with the interviews, Rochester provides some additional insight on Rena Teel, her family, Clay County, and the Millerville community. Drawing from accounts provided by acquaintances and relatives who knew Rena Teel outside her psychic consultations, Rochester addresses rumors surrounding Teel’s life. Those speculations involve believing that Teel was a witch, that her brain was donated to science after her death, and that she possessed two brains.
Rena Teel’s journey into the realm of clairvoyance likely began while growing up in the Flint Hill community in nearby Coosa County. Around age 12 she tearfully confided in her mother about the impending death of her seemingly healthy infant brother. George Vansandt died before he was two months old.
Despite her conservative church upbringing, she was eventually convinced to accept her visionary abilities as a gift and share them with others. She told some that her premonitions were “as easy as breathing.” Often, she would forego her usual practice of looking into a cup of wet coffee grounds and would simply tell people why they had come to see her before they said anything. The coffee grounds ritual was done, she once explained, just for show and because it was expected.
Perhaps her most famous case came when she directed searchers to the location of a 2-year-old boy who had wandered away from his house near Sylacauga in February 1949. After an initial desperation visit to Teel, the father returned after midnight when the search turned up nothing. Teel told them they didn’t go far enough in the woods and supplied them with a handwritten map. Searchers retraced their route and then went 200 yards farther where they found the child and several family dogs all safe despite being missing for about 12 hours.
In another case, she told a person not only where they could locate a horse that had been stolen but how to safely retrieve it.
While many Clay Countians believed in her abilities, others, including those she helped, believed she simply was an astute woman who possessed not only common sense but the ability to read people’s expressions and pull information from them without them realizing it.
That type of logic doesn’t explain how she was able to direct people to lost or stolen items in places she had never been, Rochester said.
“Mrs. Teel knew where things were that no human being could possibly know without a special gift,” Rochester said. “How could she know specifics about situations she never experienced, and places she had never been?”
Rena Teel was wrong at times, especially as she aged, and that troubled her. One prediction she gave was that someone in the family would inherit her visionary abilities. So far that one hasn’t been fulfilled.
Was she legitimate in her abilities to solve mysteries and foretell what was to happen? Linda Rochester lays out the evidence and provides the witnesses.
You get to be the jury.
Jim Plott, who works in public relations with the state of Alabama, spent nearly 30 years as an Alabama journalist, including stops at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Prattville Progress, and the Monroe Journal. He is a graduate of Auburn University with a bachelor of arts in journalism. He grew up in Montgomery and now lives in Prattville but considers all of Alabama as his hometown.
