Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (7 page)

It was a long and contentious trial, and, as it progressed, “Dr. [Amos] Hunt,” a “medical clairvoyant” at Fair Haven, was hired to find out what happened. For two dollars, he went into a trance and “minutely described the scene of the murder, the victim and the murderer and what led to the commission of the crime.” According to Hunt, Hayden stunned Mary Stannard with a rock, and as she lay there,

a gleam of hate shot across his face, and approaching her, he turned over and looked at her, then he quickly put his hand in his pocket, drew out his clasp-knife, and after pulling back his shirt sleeves to the shoulder [he had no coat on] he turned her head carefully to one side, and without a moment's hesitation, plunged the knife blade into her neck.
¹²²

Hunt's narrative, with its echoes of Justus Matthews's murder, appears as
The Clairvoyant's Wonderful Story
, part of the 1879 pamphlet
Poor Mary Stannard!

The trial of Herbert H. Hayden ended in a hung jury, so he was released and soon left the ministry to return to his
former trade of carpentry. Amos Hunt presumably continued his psychic medical practice, and the murder of Mary Stannard remains unsolved.

In the 2002 documentary
The Manson Women
, Associated Press reporter Lisa Deutsch describes Charles Manson's “Family” as the United States' “first real cult,” and the murders they committed as the “first cult killings we know of in this country.”
¹²³
They were not, of course, but the Wakemanites' crimes, like the Tate-LaBianca murders, became the standard example of cult fanaticism for generations of Americans.

When Charles F. Freeman of Pocasset, Massachusetts, imitated Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac by stabbing his five-year-old daughter Edith to death in 1879, the “Pocasset Horror” was compared to the Wakemanite murders.
¹²⁴
Wakemaniteism also represented unorthodox sects'
potential
for violence.

In the 1880s, two sisters who had achieved “perfection” and were both inhabited by the spirit of Jesus Christ, led a group of about forty disciples called the “Martinites” at Cincinnati, Ohio. They had done nothing wrong, yet were compared to the Wakemanites for their members were considered likely to “become assassins if the crazy woman who is to
them the Deity should tell them to remove a few citizens of Cincinnati.”
¹²⁵

Ninety-seven years after Justus Matthews's throat was cut, “Wakemanites” still appeared in the
Encyclopedia Americana
, as “certain fanatics who were supposed to be harmless until they committed a murder at New Haven, Conn., in 1855.”
¹²⁶
Today they are almost forgotten. This can be attributed to the passage of time, and cult murders in the second half of the twentieth-century, including Manson's Family, the People's Temple at Jonestown, and Heaven's Gate, that spilled enough blood to wash away memories of the Wakemanites from everywhere except the place it happened.

Mr. Umberfield's death has become part of local legend. The house where he died was by Lake Watrous and burned down after Sanford's rampage (another house built on the site is sometimes identified as Umberfield's), but the popular belief is that he was killed at a more northern section of the Downs Road, toward Hamden.

It is an unpaved track that runs through an appropriately eerie stretch of woods, and is visited by hikers and teenagers who try to scare themselves. In addition to an historical axe murder, the area is supposed to be swarming with ghosts, demonic children, hydrocephalic cannibal mutants
(“melon-heads”), and a Bigfoot-like monster called the Downs Road Creature, making it a natural destination for “legend tripping.”

North American society has few of the formal rites of passage that mark an adolescent's transition to adulthood in traditional societies, so informal ones like legend tripping have appeared. It consists of visiting places with a reputation for being haunted, maybe performing a simple ritual (such as shining headlights or walking around a tombstone), and often ends in headlong flight. Legend trips give young people an opportunity to “tell stories, demonstrate their courage, and possibly experience some of the rumored manifestations of supernatural events associated with the site,”
¹²⁷
as well as connecting them to the community's past.

For teenagers hunting melon-heads or the Downs Road creature, this includes a memory of the Wakemanite's homicidal madness that lingers along one dark and leafy path through the woods of Connecticut.

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

On March 17, 1972, Cloretta Robertson, “Cocoa” to her friends, sat in a fifth-grade classroom at Oakland, California's Santa Fe Elementary School.
¹
It was an ordinary day that anyone who attended fifth grade can imagine: rows of children in different stages of drowsiness, a big clock on the wall that seems to run slower than ordinary clocks and the mingled aroma of chalk dust, peanut butter, and bologna that is the smell of primary education. Shannon Bremmond Sr., the teacher, stands in front of the room revealing the mysteries of photosynthesis or long division, or whatever was on the lesson plan that day, while Cloretta probably gathered wool. She was a bright but indifferent student whose main interest was religion.

Her family belonged to the small church down the street from the school, New Light Baptist, where Cloretta sang in the choir and was a junior usher.
²
She was an unusually
devout ten-year-old who peppered her conversation with scriptural references and spent many afternoons reading the Bible and Christian literature. A week earlier she had finished the book
Crossroads
by John Webster, which “was deeply religious with emotional overtones”; then, on March 13, she watched a movie on television about the Passion and had a vivid dream about the Crucifixion that night. She often dreamed about the Bible, and Good Friday was two weeks away, which presumably contributed to what would be a memorable day at Santa Fe (“Holy Faith”) Elementary.
³

Blood appeared in the palm of her left hand. A friend noticed that she was bleeding and informed Cloretta, whose first thought was, “I had cut myself.”
⁴
Mr. Bremmond saw the blood too, and wiped it away, but it continued flowing; the source was not evident and he sent Cloretta to see Susan Carson, the school nurse. She examined the little girl's hand and later told a newspaper reporter:

“Her palms were bleeding when she first came in,” Mrs. Carlson said. “There isn't any evidence of a wound. It was fresh blood. I wiped it off and after a while . . . it would appear again . . . there were no puncture wounds. I looked with a magnifying glass.”
⁵

When the history of elementary school nursing is written, look for Mrs. Carson as the first of her profession to see a case of stigmata.

Stigmata
is the plural form of
stigma
, the Latin word for branding, burning permanent marks into the skin with a hot iron, and it is used to describe wounds, blisters, or bleeding that spontaneously appear at the same places they were suffered by Jesus. The stigmata take different forms, but they often occur on the extremities where nails were hammered into Jesus's hands and feet, and the torso where a Roman soldier delivered the coup de grâce with a spear. There can be stripes from flagellation, punctures on the forehead caused by thorns, knees abraded from the three falls on the road to Calvary, even a shoulder bruised from carrying the cross. Other forms of stigmata are not directly related to the Passion, such as shedding tears of blood, a cross-shaped wound on the forehead, even a “ring” that appears on the finger of female stigmatics who have “contracted betrothals or a marriage with our Lord.”
⁶
There are also “spiritual stigmata.” These are invisible and allowed saints like Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) to experience the pain of the phenomenon without external signs.

It began more than a century before St. Catherine's time, in 1224, with St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). He was engaged in “peaceful ecstasies of contemplation” on La Verna, a hill near Assisi, Italy, when a six-winged seraph appeared, bearing a cross with the crucified Christ.
⁷
Many artists have depicted the scene, using golden beams of light to connect
Jesus's wounds to the places on Francis's body where he developed a singular form of stigmata described by St. Bonaventure in the
Life of Saint Francis
(1261):

For his hands and feet seemed to be pierced through the midst with nails, the heads of the nails shewing in the palms of the hands, and upper side of the feet, and their points shewing on the other side; the heads of the nails were round and black in the hands and feet, while the points were long, bent, and as it were turned back, being formed of the flesh itself, and protruding therefrom. The right side, moreover was—as if it had been pierced by a lance—seamed with a ruddy scar, wherefrom ofttimes welled the sacred blood, staining his habit and breeches.
⁸

There have been around 330 pious Roman Catholic stigmatics since then, of which more than 60 are beatified or canonized.
⁹
By itself, the phenomenon does not indicate unusual holiness, and seemingly authentic cases have occurred in hysterics, the conventionally religious, and, in rare cases, non-Catholics. Moreover, the church is reluctant to proclaim
anything
miraculous. Even a popular figure like the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio (later St. Pio of Pietrelcina), was suspected of being a “mad . . . self-mutilating psychopath possessed of the devil who exploited people's credulity.”
¹⁰
It took a half century of investigation for Pio's case to be recognized as supernatural.

Pope Benedict XIV (1675–1758) established guidelines for assessing the stigmata, distinguishing between wounds that are “natural, supernatural and preternatural (or else human, divine or diabolical),” and noting the characteristics of heavenly stigmata. They are:

(i) sudden in appearance, (ii) [involve] major tissue modifications, (iii) persistence and inalterability despite all therapy, (iv) hemorrhage, (v) absence of infection or suppuration [some wounds even give off a perfumed smell], (vi) sudden and perfect disappearance . . .
¹¹

None of this was of immediate importance to Cloretta Robertson. When a little girl is black, Baptist, and bleeding from her palms like Jesus, the first priority is seeing a doctor. An appointment was made to see a hematologist on March 20.

Four days after it began, Cloretta's right palm was bleeding. Two days after that it was her left foot, and on the seventh day her right foot and right side of the thorax; when she got the crown-of-thorns stigmata on the fourteenth day, she bled from the middle of her forehead. The bleeding occurred one to five times daily, mostly from the hands, and the different places did not bleed at the same time. When asked about it,
she replied shyly, “‘It happens. It just sort of comes on, I don't know before. It doesn't hurt. I just look down and it's there. I don't know what it is.'”
¹²
She also thought, “‘It's weird.'”
¹³

At the Children's Hospital Medical Center the staff hematologist watched Cloretta for two hours through a one-way glass but saw nothing unusual. It was only when she returned from the ladies' room that he saw “dried blood on her lower right chest.” There was also “a relatively excoriated area on the front of her tongue—reactive and red—which could be sign of bleeding there.”
¹⁴
Medical tests found no physical disorders, or anything in her family history that might be relevant to stigmata, such as blood diseases, cases of prolonged bleeding, easy bruising, or mental illness. Her background was also fairly normal.

Born June 2, 1961, Cloretta was the last of six children born to her mother, Alice. Alice Calhoun was thirty-six years old at the time and not married to Cloretta's father, who lived in Oakland but had almost no contact with his daughter. In 1966, Alice wedded her third husband, fifty-five-year-old Andrew Robertson, and between his job as a longshoreman and Alice's as a dental technician, Cloretta led a “lower middle-class” life with “her parents, three brothers, a sister, three nieces and a nephew in a big house” on 54th Street at Oakland.
¹⁵

The hematologist was evidently skeptical, but no one in the Robertson family seemed to doubt the reality of what was happening. When Cloretta's forehead became speckled with blood (crown-of-thorns stigmata), they photographed it
and gave the pictures to reporters. Meanwhile, Alice Robertson worried about Cloretta's health and her long-term prospects, saying tearfully, “I just don't know how this will affect the rest of her life.”
¹⁶
Getting treatment for stigmata also proved difficult. “It's been a real trial for me,” she said, “going from doctor to doctor and taking her to hospitals in the middle of the night and having people there look at me like I'm crazy.”
¹⁷
She eventually had to walk Cloretta to school to fend off the curious; in fact, the person who seemed most excited about the phenomenon was their pastor.

On March 23, the Rev. Leonard L. Hester described what was happening to the congregation and delivered a sermon about Cloretta; the story was attracting so much attention that it appeared in the religion section of
Jet
.

The article,
Child's Easter Bleeding Puzzles Parents, Doctors
, is as straightforward as the title and illustrated with photographs of the Robertsons at home. We see a serene Cloretta seated on the sofa next to her mother, flanked by Rev. and Mrs. Hester. There is Cloretta standing before an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, reading a letter from a girl in San Francisco (the Sacred Heart is an unusual image for a Baptist household; perhaps
Jet
's photographer brought it as a prop for the pictures). We also see Cloretta taking part in
ordinary activities, like getting ready to dye Easter eggs with her nieces, Frances, Sonya, and Tonya. This was important; Andrew Robertson made a point of saying that, stigmata aside, “his daughter is an otherwise normal girl who likes to watch television and play with her friends.”
¹⁸
Her stepfather might have also encouraged Cloretta's seemingly detached response to the phenomenon.

She was very calm and said of the bleeding, “It happens. I don't feel happy or sad, just in-between.”
¹⁹
Mr. Robertson said, “I've been worrying about my baby and trying to keep her from getting excited.”
²⁰
He added that Cloretta “doesn't get upset (by the bleeding). It's almost as if she doesn't mind. Sometimes we'll be playing, she'll just look down and say, ‘Pop, there it is,' and there's the blood.”
²¹

The doctors “tentatively diagnosed her as suffering from ‘Easter bleeding syndrome'” and the Robertsons hoped it would end with the holiday.
²²
“If the bleeding does not stop after Easter,” Andrew Robertson said, “we may have to do something further.”
²³

In addition to the hematologist, doctors Loretta F. Early of the Department of Pediatrics, West Oakland Health Center, and Joseph E. Lifschutz from the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Berkeley, saw Cloretta; there were several visits and the pair later coauthored “A Case of Stigmata” for the
Archives of General Psychiatry
.
²⁴

The journal article discusses stigmata and psychogenic purpura, a rare disorder, in which bruises are created by the patient's emotions. It also considers Cloretta's background, physical and mental health, and the reality of spontaneous bleeding.

The doctors' initial impression of their patient was of a

pleasant, neatly and attractively groomed prepubescent black girl, cheerful, friendly, and somewhat reserved in her conversations with adult white men. With one of us (L.F.E. [Dr. Early]), however, she was much more spontaneous and conversed freely and openly. Her physical examination results were entirely normal; she was and remained alert, well-oriented, and a pleasant patient.

She considered herself “shy, desirous of getting along with people, happy, and feeling that she had little to offer others,” while

[h]er family describes her as gregarious, likeable, active, creative, happy, and very helpful in household chores. Her teacher described her as talkative, gregarious, and somewhat manipulative. We believe that the family was very close, warm, positive, and apparently emotionally and
physically healthy. We wondered, however, about the effect on the children of considerable overcrowding in the home. We lacked considerable information about pertinent family such as whether she was ever exposed to scenes of violence or to excessive sexual stimulation [experiences associated with cases of psychogenic bruising]. It is notable that both the patient and her mother had strong positive feelings about the sense of intimacy with the many family members in the home.

There “was no apparent conflict over her natural father,” and as for her religious life, New Light Baptist Church was “mildly fundamentalist, with minimal emphasis on hellfire and brimstone, accentuating positive aspects of Christianity and good works.”
²⁵
Her life was not a hothouse for psychopathologies, and Cloretta did not

appear to have a hysterical personality. She was not self-centered, overly dramatic, flirtatious, impetuous, excitable, or manifesting any obvious neurotic symptoms. The only hint of neurotic symptoms was her casual attitude toward the bleeding, a bit of “la belle indifference.”
²⁶

This apparent unconcern might have proved useful, however, for a child trying to chart a course between her mother's fears and her pastor's excitement. The most worrisome aspect of the case were incidents of auditory hallucinations,
which began a few days before the bleeding started and occurred when Cloretta was praying at bedtime.

Her prayer consisted of a blessing to each individually named family member. The hallucination consisted of a simple, positive, brief instruction such as, “Your prayers will be answered.”