Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (21 page)

The story's principal figures, however, remain elusive.

No one named John Wrinkle, or anything comparable (e.g., “Winkle”) appears in municipal or state records. There is no proof that he died in 1890, though deaths were not systematically recorded in Missouri before 1910, nor are there documents to show that Minnie and John went to the Children's Home; the Gillis Center's files do not go back to 1890. Silas Wilcox was an itinerant preacher and might be expected to leave little evidence behind, but there is another difficulty.

Newspaper articles about the Samaritans appeared in Wyoming, New York, and West Virginia but not Missouri. There are no follow-up reports, and the local historical society is unable to verify any aspect of it; “such a sensational treatment would surely have been covered in the
Kansas City Star
newspaper, though no story has yet been located.”
²⁶

If the Kansas City blood cult is a hoax, it is a subtle one for 1890; that same year the
Tombstone (AZ) Epitaph
published an article about cowboys killing a giant winged reptile somewhere between Whetstone, Arizona, and the Huachuca Mountains. Though a penny-a-line journalist might have invented the story, it calls attention to the seemingly widespread and forgotten practice of blood drinking.

There were doctors who thought it might have genuine value (as noted in Dr. Gaetano De Pascale's “On the Use of Blood as a Medicine,” which appeared in the May 5, 1866
British Medical Journal
), but like shooting a pterodactyl with a Winchester rifle, blood drinking represents the intersection of two eras. It was a result of the nineteenth-century's industrial-scale slaughterhouses existing when ancient beliefs still thrived about blood as something “potent, full of latent life, and capable of working on persons or things in contact with it.”
²⁷

Idiot Joy

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

Assembling a book of strange-but-true stories is, in most respects, a pleasure for the writer. It is an excuse to dig through accordion files full of old clippings, spend days online, write to librarians and historical societies, and turn over the sofa cushions in search of material. One of the greatest rewards, however, is the way researching one story leads to the discovery of others, such as monster-hunting expedition that Teddy Roosevelt considered making to Patagonia.

An American explorer and prospector reported seeing “a huge lizard-like monster with a curved neck” swimming in a South American lake, and the former president was so intrigued that he took a “special trip of exploration to Southern Argentina and Chile in the hope of ascertaining whether there was any truth in these stories of this monster amphibian, which strongly appealed to him. He wanted
nothing said about it, lest there would be ridicule if he did not succeed.”
¹

Then there was a Springheeled Jack–type figure nicknamed “Dracula” that terrorized residents of Baldwin, Long Island, in the summer of 1906. He was seen in trees, and police found several rude “nests” where he apparently slept. A witness described Dracula as tall, wild-eyed, and dressed in threadbare black clothing; his “hair was intensely black and he also wore a black mustache . . . his feet were incased [
sic
] in patent leather shoes, seemed small and that he apparently had little or no toes.”
²
One hundred two years later, in 2008, a thin figure wearing a black cape and hood was spotted in a tree at Bethpage, and sightings of the “Long Island Devil” continued into 2009.

Even more puzzling is the filthy man found in the Sawyers' family barn at Westbrook, Maine, in 1854. He was around twenty-five years old and had been surviving by eating soap grease, drinking the cow's milk, and sleeping in a hole in the hay. Both of his feet had been crudely amputated, and he could only get about by crawling slowly on his knees, so how he even reached the Sawyers' farm is a mystery. The man was taken to the poorhouse and lived there at least twelve years, spending summers “in a sort of wooden cage-like structure in the yard.”
³
He never spoke, so his identity, where he came from, and what happened to his feet, remains unknown.

A Swedish farmer named Burson also moved about on his
knees but claimed that he did so at God's command. The visionary Burson lived and preached at the Burned-Over District of western New York State, where he reportedly persuaded two hundred people to follow his example. Called the “Knee Benders,” they went about on their knees, or all fours.
⁴

Searching for more information about homemade beheading devices led to the story of George C. Wheeler, a young man who, in 1877, discovered a chemical for resurrecting the dead, no matter what the body's condition. He left instructions on how to apply the reviving agent, then climbed into a machine built from springs, knives, and an ax, and was torn to bits. Wheeler was real, but the report was a hoax, and he died of consumption in 1884.
⁵

One story being saved for the next volume concerns the murder of an occultist and his family in Detroit, Michigan, in 1929. It is a fascinating case studded with strange elements that was not included here because the man's head was chopped off. Between the Sperry-Umberfield murders, James Moon's suicide, and various other decapitations,
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist
was in danger of becoming
A Treasury of American Beheadings
. There is much more to discuss, yet the subject of future books suggests closing on a personal note.

After years of researching and writing something like
Mrs. Wakeman
, the sensible author takes a sabbatical from lunatics, monsters, and blood cults. There are people, however, with a seemingly magnetic attraction to whatever is
eccentric and anomalous. As someone once told me, “I don't care who my parents are; I'm a member of the Addams family.”

I am not the spokesman for those who consider every day Halloween, but I do know that what others consider bizarre often fills me with wonder and a kind of idiotic joy. That is why I began working on new stories before this book was even finished: Fortunately there is no dearth of strangeness in America.

—
Robert Damon Schneck
May 2014

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The Wee-Jee Fiends

1
Most of the names and ages that appear here are taken from the 1920 census, where Italian names are often Anglicized. Reporters spelled the names in various ways (Nagarro Moro's name appears as both
Edward
and
Daniel)
and gave different ages.

2
Nagarro reportedly died in 1919. A different version of the story claims that Mrs. Moro wanted to remarry and that the group was trying to placate his spirit (
Oakland (CA) Tribune
, March 4, 1920).

3
One concerned group was Gypsies, who claimed that its fortune-telling businesses suffered from competition with the Ouija board (
Oakland Tribune
, September 24, 1920).

4
Oakland Tribune
, February 1, 1920. The article mentions that five days earlier, a Ouija board had told two seventeen-year-old girls, Elsie Gerald and Florence Fuller, where a treasure could be found. The girls went looking for it in the frozen woods around Elk Rapids, Michigan, and were believed dead (
Capital Times (WI)
, January 28, 1920).

5
Richmond (CA) News
, March 5, 1920. Folklorist Ruth Ann Musick collected a
dybbuk
-like story that reportedly happened at West Virginia in 1914 (
dybbuk
refers to a Jewish folk belief in
possession by spirits of the dead, rather than demons). It involved Fred Brown, a coal miner, who became possessed by Sam Vincci, a miner who died two years earlier. Musick writes, “I have several other stories of possession,
all of Italian origin
, I believe [my italics].” Ruth Ann Musick,
The Bloody Lilac Bush
(Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1965), 179.

6
Oakland Tribune
(March 6, 1920). There were few black people in El Cerrito in 1920, but the name suggests a real person and not the generic “negro ‘voodoo'” suggested by the
Richmond (CA) Independent
(March 5, 1920).

7
Different dates and times were reported for the Passion Display and learning the secret of the hole. The mystery of the hole was going to be revealed on March 7. According to the
Richmond Independent
(March 4, 1920), Rosa Bottini and her father believed that “[t]he ‘evil spirits' were supposed . . . to disappear through a hole in the back yard at the Moro and Soldavini home, and the good spirits emerged from this hole.”

8
The
Oakland Tribune
reported that the group burned any bill with a seven in its serial numbers. Other newspapers claimed that as much as $700 was destroyed, but Rosa Bottini said that only “small change” went into the fire (
Richmond Independent
, March 4, 1920). Newspaper accounts claimed that there were several Ouija boards in the house, but Rosa said: “It is queer that people should say there four. One is enough to give the messages” (
Oakland Tribune
, March 4, 1920). If the board was incinerated on March 1 or 2, it might reveal something about how the group was evolving with four psychics in one séance room: Mrs. Moro was “chief invoker of the power of the Ouija board”; Josephine had psychic dreams; Mrs. Bottini was a trance visionary; and Adeline, the spirit medium. Perhaps they had become competitive. If so, did the board's destruction represent Adeline's emergence as the leader? She was often described as their “high priestess.”

9
Rosa is the only child who was identified. The Bottinis' three-year-old girl is mentioned in newspaper articles but not the census and
was probably there, along with the Soldavinis' children: two-year-old Eleanor and four-year-old “Masimo.” (His name is difficult to read in the 1920 and 1930 censuses.) As for the fifth child, the
Oakland Tribune
reported that “the door of the shuttered house opened long enough for one of the group to dart out and seize a small child who was kept captive until the police arrived an hour later to find her brown curls had been added to the offerings.” While this sounds improbable, the two-year-old son of Louis Francesco was reportedly missing for a brief period that day and was presumably the child found in the Moro-Soldavini house.

10
The idea that grimoires, books of spells, could not be destroyed or discarded has become part of Ouija board lore. This example comes from an online forum: “he took the board outside to the fire pit and lit it a fire, through [sic] the board into it, and the board came flying back at him, he tried that several times and each time it flew back at him. The last time, it hit his head and caused him to bleed (he still has the scar some 20 yrs later). Gave up on the fire and threw it in the trash. the next day she woke up and it was sitting on the bed stand by her bed.” http://www.shadowsinthedarkradio.com/community.

11
Lima (OH) Sunday News
, March 7, 1920.

12
Richmond Independent
, March 6, 1920.

13
Moberly (MO) Monitor-Index
, March 9, 1920. They were searching for the person who killed John Jones, an “old Welch hermit,” nine years earlier, or perhaps Jones's missing treasure.

14
Oxnard (CA) Daily Courier
, March 5, 1920.

15
Lima Sunday News
, March 7, 1920. Rosicrucians claimed that “the Ouija board has nothing to do with spiritualism, or the claims of spiritualism, or even with the fundamental principles involved in real communication between disembodied personalities and earthly personalities.”

16
William Brady, M.D., “Health Talks,”
Appleton (WI) Post-Crescent
, October 12, 1920. The delusions were also seen as “readily communicable” (
Oakland Tribune
, March 5, 1920).

17
Oakland Tribune
, August 1, 1920. Oakland had an outbreak of Ouija mania in 1919 involving three women: “One fully clothed, was walking calmly into a lake when rescued with difficulty. Another constantly ‘heard mysterious voices.' The brilliant mind of the third had become shattered.”
Charleston (WV) Daily Mail
, December 5, 1919.

18
http://www.bloodydisgusting.com/news/5290.

19
Oakland Tribune
, March 4, 1920.

Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

1
“Plenty of False Christs,”
New York Times
, November 30, 1890.

2
“William Dorril: Early Religious Leader,”
Greenfield (VT) Recorder
, June 12, 1984.

3
William Barton, “On the Manufacture and Marketing of a Religion,”
The Independent
, January–December, New York, 1903.

4
The Index: A Weekly Paper Devoted to Free Religion
, vol. 7 (1876), 438.

5
“Jones Cult Stirs Memory of Cobbites,”
Arkansas Gazette
, December 28, 1978.

6
Ibid.

7
Andrew Jackson Davis,
Memoranda of Persons, Places and Events: Embracing Authentic Facts, Visions, Impressions, Discoveries, in Magnetism, Clairvoyance, Spiritualism. Also Quotations from the Opposition
(Boston: White, 1868).

8
Acts 7:52 (King James Version).

9
2 Kings 2:23–24 (KJV).

10
Robert P. Wakeman,
Wakeman Genealogy, 1630–1899
(Meriden, CT: Journal, 1900).

11
New York Daily Tribune
, April 18, 1856.

12
New York Daily Tribune
, January 31, 1856.

13
New York Daily Tribune
, November 31, 1856.

14
Skaneateles (NY) Democrat
, January 4, 1856, from the
Syracuse Chronicle
.

15
Similar lists appear in different newspapers, including the
Albany (NY) Evening Journal
(January 21, 1856), the
New York Daily Tribune
(January 21, 1856), and the
Auburn (NY) Daily American
(January 21, 1856).

16
New York Times
, January 3, 1856.

17
New York Times
, January 4, 1856.

18
Dr. E. C. Chamberlain testimony, Trial of the Wakemanites.

19
Proceedings of the Worcester Society of Antiquity
, vol. 19 (1903).

20
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

21
Ibid.

22
New York Daily Tribune
, January 21, 1856.

23
James Nelson testimony, Trial of the Wakemanites.

24
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

25
Ibid.

26
New York Times
, December 28, 1855.

27
New York Daily Tribune
, January 21, 1856.

28
Ibid.

29
Ibid.

30
“Trial of the Wakemanites,”
New York Daily Tribune
, January 21, 1856.

31
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

32
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
, vol. 3 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 23.

33
New York Times
, January 4, 1856.

34
Ibid.

35
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

36
New York Daily Tribune
, January 21, 1856.

37
New York Times
, May 10, 1879.

38
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

39
Ibid.

40
Ibid.

41
New York Daily Tribune
, January 21, 1856.

42
Ibid.

43
Ibid.

44
Ibid.

45
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

46
New York Daily Tribune
, January 21, 1856;
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

47
New York Times
, January 3, 1856.

48
New York Times
, January 4, 1856.

49
Leviticus 17:11 (KJV).

50
New York Times
, January 7, 1856.

51
Earl Wesley Fornell,
The Unhappy Medium
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964).

52
“The Folk-Lore of British Plants,”
The Dublin University Magazine
, vol. 82 (1873), 568.

53
Scobie's Canadian Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1855
(Toronto: Hugh Scobie, n.d.).

54
“Woodbridge and the Wakemanites a Hundred Years Ago,” paper read at the annual meeting of the Woodbridge and Amity Historical Society by Grace Pierpont Fuller, December 1955.

55
Ibid.

56
Israel Wooding testimony, Trial of the Wakemanites.

57
Almeron Sanford testimony, Trial of the Wakemanites.

58
Israel Wooding testimony, Trial of the Wakemanites.

59
Wellespring
(newsletter of the Welles Family Association) (April 2004), 4.

60
New York Times
, December 27, 1855.

61
Weekly Hawkeye and Telegraph (IA)
, January 9, 1856.

62
Wellespring
(April 2004).

63
Polly Sanford testimony, Trial of the Wakemanites.

64
Trial of the Wakemanites, quoted in “Woodbridge and the Wakemanites a Hundred Years Ago,” paper read at the annual meeting of the Woodbridge and Amity Historical Society, by Grace Pierpont Fuller, December 1955.

65
“Woodbridge and the Wakemanites a Hundred Years Ago,” paper read at the annual meeting of the Woodbridge and Amity Historical Society by Grace Pierpont Fuller, December 1955; J. W. Daniels,
Spiritualism versus Christianity
(1856).

66
Delaware State Reporter
, January 1, 1856.

67
Donald MacLeod,
Life of Mary, Queen of Scots
(New York: Excelsior Catholic Publishing House, 1898). Dr. David L. Dagget performed the postmortem and found “a wound back of the ear, on the head, and another parallel with the lower jaw on the neck. There were two wounds penetrating the upper lip; the large wound commenced near the top of the spine and extended to the wind pipe. On the fore-finger of the left hand there was a wound. The wounds on the chest were evidently made with a fork. These wounds could not have been made by himself.” Trial of the Wakemanites. This sort of violence, now called “overkill,” indicates personal enmity, but Sammy denied having any ill will toward Matthews. Sly apparently expressed his anger toward Amos Hunt on the body of Justus Matthews.

68
Fornell,
The Unhappy Medium
, 97.

69
“Woodbridge and the Wakemanites a Hundred Years Ago,” paper read at the annual meeting of the Woodbridge and Amity Historical Society by Grace Pierpont Fuller, December 1955.

70
New York Times
, December 27, 1855.

71
Trial of the Wakemanites.

72
New York Times
, December 27, 1855;
New York Times
, December 26, 1855.

73
New York Daily Tribune
, February 5, 1856.

74
“Another Tragedy: Horrible Murders in Woodbridge,” from a New Haven newspaper, January 3, 1856.

75
New York Times
, January 4, 1856.

76
Ibid.

77
Ibid.

78
Wellespring
(April 2004), quoting the
Hartford Daily Courant
, January 3, 1856, 1.

79
New York Times
, January 4, 1856.

80
The Journal of Psychological Medicine
and Mental Pathology
, edited by Forbes Winslow, M.D., Vol. IX, London, John Churchill, New Burlington Street, MDCCCLVI, 1856. According to an appendix in Donald MacLeod's book,
Life of Mary, Queen of Scots
, Charles Sanford “stood over their corpses and gloated in the cry of ‘blood, blood, how bright it seems and how easy it flows. Who would not have blood for the redemption of man?'”