Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (4 page)

Samuel reportedly took the uneaten food to Dr. Benjamin Silliman at Yale, a renowned chemist who apparently made himself available to the local eccentrics (a statue of him stands in front of the Sterling Chemistry Laboratory). According to Mrs. Wakeman, Silliman found enough poison in each cake to kill ten men, but before he identified it, the prophetess announced that the truth had been revealed to her.
⁴²

God's Messenger was immune to arsenic or other common substances that might sicken her followers, so food had to contain a magical poison made from the “brains of a man,
the oil of men bones, the eyes of dogs, the eyes of roosters, garden basil, topaz stone, copper, zinc, platina [platinum] and the entrails of common toads.”
⁴³
It might have also been a simple case of
E. coli
(particularly if everyone got sick), but some believed that Hunt intentionally doctored Mrs. Wakeman's dinner to see if she was “human and not divine.”
⁴⁴

After ten years of Wakemaniteism, the “bad spirit” troubling him might have been doubt. Perhaps he suspected that Mrs. Wakeman and her various claims, including invulnerability, were not genuine; if so, then Hunt discovered the truth and paid a price for it.

Eben Gould, the Man of Sin, had passed away, and “the power of death was scattered by Satan,” but it was obvious who was “next to take the power.”
⁴⁵
Hunt made “a league with the devil” and to “him was given all the power that was ever on the earth for sin”; this might have sounded ludicrous to outsiders but not to Wakemanites.
⁴⁶
When Sammy said that Hunt should be “given up as a living sacrifice to God,” whose “death will bring the redemption in the twinkling of an eye,” he was not speaking metaphorically, and Hunt offered them a cash settlement.
⁴⁷
Despite Hunt's being an assassin, apostate, and Man of Sin, an arrangement was worked out so that Mrs. Wakeman's lawyer and former governor of Connecticut, the Hon. Henry Dutton, accepted $500 on her behalf.

As with the Cobbites before them, pressure was building on the Wakemanites. Beyond the continual threat of
enchanters and evil spirits, Mrs. Wakeman was betrayed—almost murdered—by a trusted disciple and then accepted money from the Man of Sin. When Hunt sued to get it back, the prophetess declared that “should he gain his suit the world will irretrievably be destroyed and cast into the ‘outer darkness,'” and though she would not touch the money, by taking it “an evil influence fell on us.”
⁴⁸

They had compromised with the devil, and redemption would require something extraordinary, for “it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.”
⁴⁹

By December 1855, Rhoda Wakeman and Samuel Sly were living in a small house, a story and a half tall, at Beaver Street (or possibly in an alley between Beaver Street and Dixwell). There is no mention of children being boarded there—Amos Hunt had used magic to “take the good influence and innocence from them”—but the rooms were crowded with Wakemanites, and at some point the Man of Sin's spirit left Hunt and moved into Justus Washington Matthews.
⁵⁰

Unlike earlier Men of Sin, one of whom opposed Mrs. Wakeman's pretensions with violence, and another with poison, Matthews was an unremarkable thirty-seven-year-old who worked at a pistol factory. He attended meetings with his wife, Mehitable, and her sister, Polly Sanford, but was not an
outstanding Wakemanite nor did he enjoy close contact with Mrs. Wakeman. There is no obvious reason why the evil spirit chose him, but its presence was revealed when Mehitable began experiencing convulsions; Mrs. Wakeman then fell sick, and in the hyper-vigilant atmosphere following the assassination attempt, that was apparently enough.

Matthews was cooperative. He did not object when “members of the sect first attempted to drive out the evil spirit by giving the poor man copious amounts of tea brewed from the bark of witch hazel trees.”
⁵¹
(Unlike Rowan trees, which “put the witches to their speed,” witch hazel is not a traditional apotropaic and belief in its power to drive off evil seems to have been one of Mrs. Wakeman's personal crotchets.
⁵²
(The
witch
in
witch hazel
comes from the Old English
wican
, meaning “to bend.” Flexibility made witch hazel branches popular with dowsers for use as dowsing rods.) Etymology aside, the tea did not work, and the Wakemanites likely prayed over Matthews and begged him to give up the evil spirit.

Around the twenty-first of the month he began a three-day fast while Sammy cut a long branch of witch hazel and put it in the cellar.

On December 23 the Wakemanites began conducting Sabbath worship at two
P.M.
in an upstairs room of the house.
Mrs. Wakeman had about fifteen followers at the time, and since there was a full moon that night they were able to come and go until early Monday morning.
⁵³
(If traditional beliefs about the full moon are true, its influence may have contributed to subsequent events.) Rhoda Wakeman, Samuel Sly, Thankful S. Hersey, Abigail Sables, and Julia Davis were already living at the house, while those attending services included Polly and Almeron Sanford, Israel Wooding, Betsy Keeler, farmers from Hamden, and Josiah Jackson, a gray-haired black man who worked as a porter at the train station; he was a familiar figure around New Haven and “moved within the group on a basis of complete social equality.”
⁵⁴
Jackson used a witch hazel walking stick given to him by Sammy “to keep enchantment away.” (He later said, “Some persons think that colored people have a kind of conjuration power, but I got this idea [for the witch hazel stick] from
white folks.
”)
⁵⁵

“It was generally understood that Matthews would be there that night, and it was expected that a special effort would be made to get the evil spirit out of him.”
⁵⁶
Sammy built a fire in the stove of the front room at around ten that evening and Justus Matthews arrived soon after. He sat down, removed his boots, and was warming his feet when the evil spirit began tormenting Mrs. Wakeman. The gaze of the Man of Sin was capable of causing harm, so Polly Sanford blindfolded her brother with a black silk handkerchief, “because silk would keep off his evil power.”
⁵⁷
She asked him if he was
willing to be bound with a cord, and Matthews said he would “if it would bring the millennium, or subdue the evil power in him.”
⁵⁸
Polly Sanford then tied his wrists together behind his back, saying, “I do this for the Glory of God, and in the fear of the Lord.”
⁵⁹
When the exorcism began, Matthews was on a day bed; he later moved to a rocking chair and ended up on the floor.

For two hours, the Wakemanites alternated between the upper floor, where they prayed for the devil to be driven out of Matthews, and the front room, in order to badger and beg him to renounce the evil spirit. Josiah Jackson “told Matthews he was killing the old woman, and that I would not let him into my house sooner than I would a mad dog.”
⁶⁰
Almeron Sanford and Israel Wooding said that he was “drawing away her [Mrs. Wakeman's] spirit with his evil powers” as well as harming his own wife, and that it was better to have him die than to have Mrs. Wakeman and the whole world die.
⁶¹
There was a general agreement that it would be better if Matthews died, and he was reportedly willing, if it would “quench the evil spirit.”
⁶²

The prophetess spent the night upstairs experiencing bizarre and excruciating torments. Around midnight “she was in great distress and could hardly breathe,” then “[l]aid down to keep from fainting.”
⁶³
An hour later she claimed to be dying from creatures crawling around inside her; Josiah Jackson later testified, “She said she had three live creatures in her, which were crawling up her throat and choking her. Put my hand on her chest and stomach, and
I felt them
!” Sly,
Hersey, and Wooding rushed downstairs saying, “He's killing the messenger, he's killing the messenger!” And with a billion unredeemed souls poised to drop into hell, Samuel acted.
⁶⁴

Sly claimed that Matthews said, “You had better kill me,” to which Sammy replied, “No Mr. Matthews, we will not do that,” and went to retrieve the witch hazel branch, a piece of wood one inch in diameter and two and a half feet long, to “knock this evil spirit out of him.”
⁶⁵
As Matthews sat bound and blindfolded, Sly drew the curtains, secured the door by putting wooden wedges into the latches, and struck the helpless man a blow to the right temple, knocking him to the ground. He hit him several more times, then, feeling “urged on by some influence,” cut Matthews's throat with a small pocketknife.
⁶⁶
There was a fork in the room used for lifting the stove lid, and he plunged it into Matthews's chest twelve times (one source claims the punctures were done in the shape of a cross to release the evil spirit).
⁶⁷
“Uncle Sammy,” who was clearly not harmless, said of the murder, “The influence I was under led me to do this: I was influenced by a wrong spirit to go further than I had anticipated, or had any idea of.”
⁶⁸

Matthews's brother-in-law, Almeron Sanford, heard a gurgling sound coming from the front room and pounded on the door, but the others held him back, saying, “If he's killing himself he'll be raised.” There was another gurgling noise, the sound of blows, and cries of “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Unsure what to do next, some left for home or went back upstairs to pray. By two o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Wakeman felt well
enough to notice strange noises coming from downstairs and told Betsey Keeler that “all was not right below.”
⁶⁹

A half hour later Sammy opened the door. He went to the back room, where Thankful Hersey used a basin of water to wash the blood from his clothing. The shirtsleeves must have been too saturated to save, for they were torn off and burned, which suggests that cutting a throat with a two-inch blade is close and messy work. Sly's witch hazel stick, with Matthews's blood and hair still adhering to it, was dropped through the hole of the privy and the knife placed next to Matthews's body to make it look like he committed suicide. Sammy then wiped at the blood on the floor and went upstairs to pray while Matthews cooled and coagulated.

Josiah Jackson feared that the corpse could still harm the prophetess and told the Sanfords to remove it, but after a long night of worship and murder, the Wakemanites needed sleep. Polly Sanford stayed at Beaver Street, but Almeron walked home, returning at nine
A.M.
with nineteen-year-old Willard Matthews, the eldest of the dead man's five children, who was out looking for his father; Sanford seems to have brought his nephew there intentionally. (For a detailed account of the morning's comings and goings, see “Woodbridge and the Wakemanites a Hundred Years Ago,” a paper read by Grace Pierpont Fuller at the annual meeting of the Woodbridge and Amity Historical Society in December 1955.)

Entering the silent house, Willard opened the door to the front room, where:

the body lay upon the floor, with the head towards a bed in the room; and it was found with the face turned towards the window, lying upon the left side, and very nearly in the middle of the room. Clotted blood and hair lay upon the floor around him, and several pools of blood were found near his head. It was truly an awful scene to witness. The throat was cut nearly from ear to ear, and his head seemed to be nearly severed from his body.

The wound was so big it appeared to be inflicted with a hatchet, and

[a] small rope was found on the floor, and marks of a rope were discovered on his wrists, and it was evident that the wrists had been bound by this rope.
⁷⁰

Willard exclaimed, “Oh! dear, father has killed himself.”
⁷¹
After recovering from the initial shock, he went to the house of a neighbor, who summoned the justice of the peace. With that, the dream world Rhoda Wakeman created and shared with her followers began its fatal collision with the state of Connecticut.

Sheriff Leander Parmalee arrested everyone present the night before and convened a jury of inquest. They heard evidence on Christmas, and continued to sit until the twenty-sixth, when the postmortem was held and Sammy decided to confess. Holding a Bible and speaking in “fear of the Lord,”
he told the story to the jurors, who decided to release everyone except Sammy, Thankful Hersey, Josiah Jackson, Abigail Sables, and Mrs. Wakeman; they went back to jail to await the grand jury. Meanwhile, journalists were busy reporting the crime.

For the
New York Times
the murder was a “Horrible Case of Fanaticism” and one of the “Frightful Effects of Millerism,” but Americans of the period called almost any violence or insanity motivated by religion “Millerism.”
⁷²
In fact, Mrs. Wakeman belonged to an earlier generation of mystics, one that included Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Latter-day Saints movement, and the “Electrical Psychologist,” the Rev. John Bovee Dods, who experienced phenomena similar to the Hydesville Rappings of 1848. Like Smith's
Book of Mormon
and Dods's lectures, Mrs. Wakeman preserved her revelations in writing; she was anxious to have them with her, so a reporter from the
New York Daily Tribune
agreed to visit Beaver Street in the company of Ephraim Lane and retrieve the “sacred papers.”

Neighbors believed that the murder left the house haunted, but Matthews's bloody ghost did not rise to disturb the journalist as he climbed the stairs to Mrs. Wakeman's room. The papers, ten handwritten pages carefully bound with thread and protected by the inevitable witch hazel bark, were under the prophetess's bed in a square basket and rolled up in paper of a “singular color.”