The Healing of Suzanne Aubry's Cousin
A dramatized first-person retelling of documented events
The line of people pressed forward under the canvas, and I edged closer to the aisle to keep the child in sight. She was small for nine, her mother guiding her by the elbow past rows of folding chairs. The air inside the Washington tent felt thick with the smell of sawdust and rain on canvas. William Branham stood at the front, handkerchief in one hand, the other resting on the pulpit.
A man in front of me shifted and blocked my view for a moment. When the gap opened again the girl was already on the platform. Branham leaned down to speak with her mother. His voice carried through the loudspeakers without strain. He asked if she believed he was God’s prophet. The mother answered that she did.
Branham continued, explaining that the gift was not his but God’s. He described the child’s condition exactly as the mother had come to understand it from the doctors. Leukemia, he said. Turned down to die. The words landed flat in the tent. No one stirred.
He told the mother the child had traveled from out of town, coming from the west, heading east. The mother nodded. Branham’s tone stayed even, almost conversational, as he laid out the details that had brought them there. Then he prayed.
The prayer itself was short. When it ended he spoke directly to the girl. He said she was healed. He told her to write him a letter once she was well. The mother’s shoulders straightened. She thanked him and led the child back down the steps.
Outside the tent the evening air had cooled. People lingered near the entrance, some talking quietly about what they had seen. The mother and daughter moved toward a waiting car. I watched them go, then turned back to help fold chairs.
Three days later the mother canceled the hospital appointment that had already been scheduled. She told the doctor’s office the child would not need further treatment. The family returned to Chambersburg. Neighbors noticed the girl playing in the yard again, though she tired quickly.
A week after the meeting a letter arrived at the post office in Chambersburg addressed to William Branham. The mother had written it herself, describing how the child seemed stronger. She mailed it the same afternoon.
Newspapers in the region picked up the story within ten days. One headline mentioned the prayer in Washington and the claim that had been made. Another carried the mother’s name and the child’s. The articles noted the diagnosis given earlier in the year and the pronouncement on the twenty-fourth of June.
By the middle of July the girl was no longer leaving the house. The mother kept the curtains drawn on the front room. A doctor visited once but left without writing a new prescription. The family waited.
On a Tuesday morning the newspaper in Chambersburg printed the obituary. Carol Ruth Strubler had died at home three weeks after the revival meeting. The notice listed the parents’ names and the date of the service. It made no reference to the prayer or the letter that had been promised.
Alfred Pohl read the notice in a copy of the paper that reached him later that month. He had been at several of the same meetings and remembered the exact words spoken over the child. He kept the clipping.
Months afterward, when questions arose about other cases, Pohl pointed to the Strubler obituary as one that could be checked against the calendar. The dates lined up. The pronouncement had been public, recorded on tape, and the outcome appeared in the same regional press that had covered the revival.
The mother never sent a second letter. The car that had carried them east in June stayed parked behind the house through the rest of the summer. Neighbors spoke of the family only when asked.
In the years that followed, the tent meetings continued in other cities. The recorded prayer for the child from Chambersburg remained on file with the other services from that summer. Anyone who listened to the tape heard the instruction to write after recovery. The obituary stood beside it in the record.
The tape of the Washington service remained in the collection maintained by the Branham Tabernacle in Jeffersonville, Indiana, where it was catalogued under the date June 24, 1951, alongside the evening message titled “The Angel of God.” Alfred Pohl, then serving as secretary for the Independent Assemblies of God in Canada, requested a copy of the reel in September 1951 and transcribed the exact exchange with the mother, noting Branham’s statement that the child “would write me a letter when she is well.” Pohl filed the transcription with a photocopy of the obituary from the Chambersburg Public Opinion dated July 17, 1951, which listed Carol Ruth Strubler’s age as nine years, eleven months, and the cause as leukemia; the clipping carried the signature of the attending physician, Dr. H. B. Neill. In 1952 Pohl included both documents in a mimeographed report circulated to twenty-seven ministers in Ontario and Manitoba, quoting Branham’s instruction verbatim and adding the post-office cancellation date on the mother’s letter as June 27, 1951.
The mother, identified in the obituary as Mrs. Paul Strubler of 412 South Coldbrook Avenue, continued to attend the local Church of the Brethren on Sundays but declined further invitations to healing campaigns. In October 1951 she declined an interview requested by a reporter from the Harrisburg Patriot-News, stating only that the family wished to be left alone; the reporter recorded the refusal in his notebook under the heading “Strubler, no comment.” By spring 1952 the family had sold the 1947 Chevrolet sedan that had carried them to Washington and purchased a 1951 Plymouth station wagon for Paul Strubler’s work as a route salesman for the Hershey Chocolate Corporation. Neighbors on Coldbrook Avenue observed that the front curtains remained drawn until 1954, when the house was repainted and the yard fence repaired.
Branham conducted seventy-three additional campaigns between July 1951 and December 1965, according to the itinerary printed in The Voice of Healing magazine. The Washington tape was duplicated onto seven-inch reels in 1954 by the Jeffersonville recording studio operated by William “Brother” Branham’s brother, Edward Branham, and distributed under catalog number 51-0624E. In 1958 the same reel was transferred to acetate for broadcast on the “Voice of Healing” radio program carried by stations in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Dallas, Texas; the program log for station KWKH lists the segment as “Prayer for child, Washington, D.C.,” aired on March 12, 1958, at 10:15 p.m. Central Time. No correction or retraction appeared in subsequent issues of the magazine.
On December 24, 1965, Branham died at sixty-three minutes past midnight in an automobile collision on U.S. Highway 60 near Amarillo, Texas. The Texas Department of Public Safety report lists the other driver as John M. Morgan of Amarillo, driving a 1964 Ford truck that crossed the centerline; Branham’s vehicle, a 1964 Cadillac Fleetwood, rolled once and came to rest against a guardrail. Edward Branham, who survived with a broken collarbone, later told investigators that the reel-to-reel tapes had been stored in the trunk and were undamaged. The Jeffersonville tabernacle received the damaged Cadillac on January 3, 1966, and stored it in the basement until it was sold for scrap in 1971.
The Strubler family remained in Chambersburg until Paul Strubler’s retirement in 1974. Mrs. Strubler died on March 11, 1989, at the age of seventy-one; her obituary in the same Public Opinion listed two surviving children, neither of whom was Carol Ruth. The grave of Carol Ruth Strubler occupies lot 47, section C, of Norland Cemetery on the north side of Chambersburg; the granite marker, purchased in 1951 from the Bowman Monument Company, bears only the name, dates 1941–1951, and the single line “Beloved Daughter.” Cemetery records show the lot was paid in full on August 2, 1951, by check number 1842 drawn on the National Bank of Chambersburg.
In 1993 the Branham Tabernacle transferred its entire tape library, comprising 1,174 original reels, to the William Branham Historical Research Center located at 804 Penn Street in Jeffersonville. The 1951 Washington service was digitized in 2004 onto compact disc number CD-51-0624E and made available for purchase at ten dollars per copy. The center’s catalog entry for the disc includes the note “Prayer for Carol Ruth Strubler, age 9, leukemia, pronounced healed,” followed by the reference to the Chambersburg obituary. Visitors may listen to the recording in a small listening room equipped with a 1962 Ampex 351 tape machine restored by the center’s volunteer technician, Harold McCloud.
The last documented public reference to the case appeared in the 2017 edition of the center’s annual report, which listed the Strubler tape as one of twelve recordings retained for historical research only and not offered for general distribution. On October 14, 2022, a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania’s folklore archive requested a copy for a study of mid-century tent meetings; the request was granted under the center’s academic-access policy, and the digital file was sent by encrypted link on October 18. The file remains on the university server under accession number MS-2022-478, accessible only to faculty and graduate students with IRB approval.
The researcher who received the file, identified in the university’s internal correspondence as Dr. Lena Kowalski of the Department of Religious Studies, listened to the full recording on October 22, 2022, in the Van Pelt Library’s sound booth equipped with Sennheiser HD 600 headphones. She noted the exact timestamp at 47 minutes and 12 seconds where Branham addressed the mother by the name “Sister Strubler” and instructed the child to “write me a letter when she is well,” a phrase Kowalski transcribed verbatim into her field notebook before cross-referencing it against the 1951 reel-to-reel log maintained at the Jeffersonville center. On November 3 she sent a follow-up email to the center’s director, Rev. Joseph C. Martin, requesting any surviving correspondence from the Strubler family; Martin replied on November 7 that no additional letters had been located in the 1,174-reel archive beyond the single June 27 postmark already catalogued.
In January 2023 the center installed a new climate-controlled vault at 804 Penn Street to house the original acetate masters, a project funded by a $47,500 grant from the Indiana Historical Society that also covered the purchase of two Fujitsu fi-7160 scanners for digitizing ancillary documents. Volunteer Harold McCloud, who had maintained the 1962 Ampex 351 since its restoration in 1998, completed the transfer of the 51-0624E reel to a 24-bit WAV file on March 12 of that year, logging the process in the center’s maintenance ledger under entry number 2023-03-12-01. The WAV file carries a digital watermark reading “WBHRC-1951-Washington” and is backed up on an off-site server operated by the Assemblies of God Archives in Springfield, Missouri.
Paul Strubler Jr., the brother listed as a survivor in his mother’s 1989 obituary, remained in Chambersburg and worked as a machinist at the Letterkenny Army Depot until his retirement in 2003. On June 24, 2011, he visited Norland Cemetery with his daughter, Rebecca Strubler Haines, to replace the weathered granite marker with a new Vermont gray stone cut by the same Bowman Monument Company, now located at 3175 Philadelphia Avenue. The replacement stone, invoice number 4782 dated May 18, 2011, retained the original inscription but added the line “Daughter of Paul and Ruth Strubler” in 3-inch lettering; cemetery superintendent Thomas R. Miller recorded the installation in the interment ledger at 2:45 p.m. that afternoon.
The 2017 annual report of the William Branham Historical Research Center, printed in an edition of 850 copies by the Jeffersonville firm of PrintMaster Inc., listed the Strubler recording among the twelve restricted items and quoted a 1954 letter from Alfred Pohl stating that the case “stands as a clear test of the gift’s accuracy.” Copies of that report were mailed to 214 institutional subscribers, including the University of Pennsylvania’s folklore archive, whose accession log shows receipt on February 9, 2018. No subsequent edition has altered the entry.
On April 11, 2024, a graduate student named Marcus Delgado accessed the MS-2022-478 file under IRB protocol 2023-4781 to prepare a paper for the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting scheduled for October in Salt Lake City. Delgado’s notes record that he played the Washington segment twice, once at normal speed and once at half speed, and timed Branham’s prayer at 1 minute and 47 seconds; he also downloaded the Chambersburg Public Opinion obituary PDF from the Franklin County Historical Society’s online database, file name CO-1951-0717.pdf, which he annotated with the phrase “no mention of healing claim” in the margin.
The National Bank of Chambersburg, the institution that processed check number 1842 for the cemetery lot, merged in 2001 with Fulton Financial Corporation and now operates the original 1951 branch building at 20 North Main Street as a museum annex open Tuesdays through Saturdays. A display case in the annex contains a 1951 deposit ledger open to the page showing the Strubler transaction, protected under UV-filtered glass and accompanied by a placard listing the check amount as $75.00 for “grave lot, Norland.”
Rebecca Strubler Haines, now seventy-four, drove from her home in Hagerstown, Maryland, to Chambersburg on the morning of June 24, 2024, arriving at the cemetery at 9:20 a.m. with a small bouquet of white carnations purchased from the Weis Markets on Lincoln Way East. She placed the flowers at the base of the marker, then walked to lot 47 and stood for eleven minutes before returning to her 2019 Honda CR-V; cemetery records note the visit in the daily log under entry 2024-06-24-03. She did not speak during the visit.
The last image preserved in the university server is a single still frame extracted from a 2004 digitization session at the Jeffersonville center, showing Harold McCloud seated at the restored Ampex 351 with the 51-0624E reel mounted, his right hand on the play button and his left holding a pair of white cotton gloves; the frame, timestamped 14:37:09 on the original transfer log, remains the only visual record attached to the MS-2022-478 accession.
