Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

by Robert Damon Schneck

How sudden I am called away

  Soon as the year begins.

  County Jail

  Thankful Hersey and Mrs. Wakeman shared a cell at the New Haven County Jail, and though God’s Messenger was often sick in bed, she managed to compose a letter addressed to the “ministers of the world.” It catalogs Amos Hunt’s misdeeds and her suffering, interspersed with threats, whining, and an exposition of humankind’s collective guilt with regard to her situation:

  I have plead [sic] with ministers and lawyers, and those in public office to take up my cause and bring to light this cruel murder [a reference to either the “spiritual murder” of the world or the attempt on her life; not the death of Justus Matthews]; but no one has stood for my defense, and in this way the whole world has become guilty of my death before God. A short time now remains in which this work may be done and the whole world saved. O! there is no one that will come up to the help of the Lord against this mighty Man of Sin, who has killed the whole world spiritually with his unseen power brought from the bottomless pit.95

  In another letter enumerating Hunt’s evils she calls him “a liar for he promised his Savior that he would never leave or forsake him; that he would have his head taken off before he would do it” [my italics].96 This suggests that the full or near decapitations of Matthews, Sperry, and Umberfield were inspired by some aspect of the prophetess’s teachings.97 (On a lighter note, Mrs. Wakeman “advised the readers of Greeley’s ‘Tribune’ to brew themselves an occasional cup of tea made from the bark of a witch-hazel tree in order to keep their bodies free from evil spirits. And as a result of this advice which was given some notice in the press several enterprising merchants in New York added this item to their stocks.”)98

  Sammy was also talking to the press. He explained aspects of their faith, such as salvation through Rhoda Wakeman (“At the first there were on the face of the earth, Adam, Eve and the Devil. It was the lie told by the devil, believed by the woman, and obeyed by the man, that caused the fall from immortality to death; and so now this happy time of the redemption must be in likeway brought about through a woman”).99 Like Mrs. Wakeman, Sly could not stop talking about Amos Hunt and the financial settlement, which “took the resurrection of everlasting life and changed it into damnation . . . by the payment of the five hundred dollars in recompensing damages for his attempted poisoning.” Hunt’s malice was exceptional even among Men of Sin, for “[b]y the payment of that money he bound the Saviour under it, and this has never been done before, wicked though former ‘men of sin’ had been.”100 Yet for all of Amos Hunt’s evil, Sammy declared that the Wakemanites had no intention of harming him and wanted to expel the evil spirit through constant prayer.

  Sly also mentioned groups similar, or sympathetic, to the Wakemanites “who entertain the faith, not yet perhaps perfected among them, but nearly sure.” He counted among them the Irvingites, or Catholic Apostolic Church, an English sect whose members spoke in tongues, and Margaret Bishop of the Christian Israelites in New York City, a sect active throughout the English-speaking world that followed the teachings of British visionary John Wroe. Sammy stated that the Christian Israelites “carry out fully our views and meet for prayer such as we had. MRS. BISHOP was much interested in my sister and called on her several times and they frequently conversed on these matters.”101 Margaret Bishop responded promptly in a letter to the editor.

  Sir, you will certainly do me the justice as an individual, and the Christian Israelite members in general, by contradicting the assertion made in your print of Monday last. I never was in sympathy with these people—never had any “interest” in MRS. WAKEMAN. I accidentally saw her in New-Haven about thirteen years ago, and decidedly considered her insane.102

  God’s Messenger on Trial

  The trio was back in court on January 17, when the grand jury found a true bill of murder against Samuel Sly and indicted Thankful Hersey and Rhoda Wakeman as accessories before and after the fact (no attempt was made to link Justus Matthews’s death with the Sperry-Umberfield murders). Josiah Jackson and Abigail Sables were discharged from prison and the prophetess wept upon learning that she had to remain; Thankful Hersey pointed a finger at the old lady, who was sobbing under heavy veils, and announced, “They little know what they are about shutting up that person.”103

  Mrs. Wakeman declared that the world would end before they were tried; “she should” however, “permit us all to live on a little longer on probation, but she should bring judgment day when she got ready to do so.”104

  Three months later, on Wednesday, April 16, Judges Hinman and Waldo were presiding over the Wakemanites’ trial in the Superior Court at New Haven. District attorney E. K. Foster and John D. Candee represented the state of Connecticut, while Joseph Sheldon Jr. and the Hon. Henry Dutton defended the prisoners.

  The courtroom was crowded; every seat and all the standing room was taken, and proceedings began with a plea of “not guilty.” Governor Dutton did not dispute that the defendant killed Matthews, or that the others were accessories to the crime, but “the defence would give conclusive evidence that those persons, at the time the murder was committed, were laboring under an insane delusion.”105 As for the state, when someone is murdered for being the Antichrist, prosecutors often argue that a more conventional motive was involved, such as jealousy, revenge, or, greed. In this case, their contention might have been that Matthews borrowed $200 from a savings association, loaned the money to Mrs. Wakeman, and was killed so they would not have to repay it. The question then became “how much pecuniary interest these parties had in getting Matthews out of the way.”106 To make a plausible argument, the state had to demonstrate that Mrs. Wakeman would kill for money, but if that was the plan they did not press it.

  According to the prophetess she got nothing from Matthews except “a few vegetables, a few apples, and a small piece or two of salt pork,” while Sammy claimed that the victim still owed him money for clothes; nevertheless, “I have never made a claim against him, for I loved him very much and wished him to be freed from sin.”107 No one seemed to know what Matthews did with the $200, and the Wakemanites accepted none of Hunt’s $500 settlement money; they were so poor that Mrs. Wakeman said she “was obliged to sell my best feather bed to get money to pay my rent,” and even then, Ephraim Lane testified, “she would always give away everything she had.”108

  The first day of the trial was dedicated to establishing the facts of the case. Jurors saw a floor plan of the Beaver Street house, heard Matthews’s injuries described, and heard the Wakemanites testify about events on the night of the murder. Sheriff Parmalee related the particulars of Sammy’s confession and displayed the physical evidence, including the knife and bloody clothing. The state rested that afternoon, and the remainder of the first day was given over to testimony about the defendants’ strange beliefs and behavior.

  Witnesses included Phebe A. Beckwith, a former Wakemanite who was declared an unbeliever after Mrs. Wakeman “began to talk so much about this enchantment which I could not believe.” When Beckwith last visited the prophetess, “Uncle Sammy shut himself up in the closet, he was so afraid of me.”109 With that, court adjourned till the next day, when there was more testimony in the same vein, including a baker who told how the Wakemanites “had an idea that my bread . . . was enchanted and that anyone who ate it would die.”110 Friends and relatives took the stand, followed by experts who had evaluated the defendants’ mental conditions.

  Drs. Worthington Hooker, Jonathan Knight, Jerome C. Smith, Pliny A. Jewett, and Mrs. Wakeman’s own physician, E. C. Chamberlain, had some differences of opinion, yet none considered the accused competent. Sly was a weak-minded imbecile, possibly a monomaniac, or suffering from dementia; Dr. Hooker thought that when Sammy killed Matthews “there was an intense excitement in the house, and I think if he had any consciousness that he was doing a wrong act, the consciousness was very slight.”111 Miss Hersey’s mind, though strong, was wholly given
over to Mrs. Wakeman, and she had two relatives who went mad. Mrs. Wakeman was insane, or nearly so, and Dr. Smith believed “from the evidence adduced that her disease has considerably increased within two or three years.” Dr. Jewett doubted the sincerity of Mrs. Wakeman’s beliefs, but this was a minority view; few questioned the depth of her convictions.

  Ephraim Lane said, “You might as well try to move the West Rock [a mountain ridge and local landmark] as to reason her out of her delusions; I have heard ministers speak with her about them, and they said it was no use to talk to her . . .”112 He also had “no doubt but that the old lady got her mind so wrought up that it did really hurt her when a person came whom she thought had a bad spirit.”113

  By the end of day two, with all the evidence pointing in the same direction, the Hon. Henry Dutton asked District Attorney Foster if he would seek a verdict other than not guilty on the grounds of insanity. The prosecutor replied that he did not feel authorized by the evidence to claim any other, for “[t]he case had assumed an aspect not contemplated by him at its commencement.”114 Moreover, he “did not consider it necessary to sum up the evidence, and was willing to let the case go to the jury without argument.”115 With both sides in accord, Judge Hinman rose and told the jurors “they might retire and bring in such a verdict as they thought was right, and such as justice required,” adding that the Court had the power to make an order for the further confinement of the prisoners.116 The men rose and left the courtroom for ten minutes of deliberation before returning with a verdict.

  Between Sly’s mental limitations, Hersey’s fanaticism, and their utter faith in an unbalanced woman, the defendants were found not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Mrs. Wakeman and Sammy wept as they heard the verdict, while Miss Hersey seemed troubled at being considered insane.

  Judge Hinman left the bench and the public began leaving the courtroom when Judge Waldo rose and instructed the sheriff “‘to return these prisoners to jail, where they will be confined until further orders from this Court, or until they are discharged by due process of law.’”117

  Denouement

  Their destination was the sprawling Hartford Retreat, then Connecticut’s only institution for the destitute insane (it is now the Institute for Living); Thankful Hersey was more fortunate. During the trial, the Court received a number of depositions from Worcester and Auburn, Massachusetts, testifying to her excellent character, and a Mr. Samuel A. Foote “gave the requisite bonds for the protection of the community against her, and took her to his house . . .”118 There she did plain sewing and other light work until her death on May 12, 1857.119 Sammy was at the asylum for ten years and in that time came to believe that he was the prophet Elijah. Eventually he stopped eating and drinking and died of starvation on July 14, 1865. By then the prophetess had been dead six years.

  Rhoda Wakeman made her second and last trip to heaven in 1859 when “the prophetess passed on once again into the white clouds of the hereafter—free, one may hope, from evil spirits and sin.”120

  Amos Hunt: Psychic Detective

  With the exception of Amos Hunt, nothing more was heard from her followers, who returned to ordinary pursuits like peddling and shoemaking. The former Man of Sin, however, became a clairvoyant (it is given as his “Profession, Occupation or Trade” in the census of 1880). Hunt’s purported psychic abilities led to him playing a minor role in “the most mysterious of all the cases which have baptized Connecticut in blood”: the death of Mary Stannard.121

  Every era has its favorite kinds of murders, and for nineteenth-century Americans, it was the innocent woman seduced by a respectable man, preferably a clergyman, who kills her to avoid scandal. As the mother of an illegitimate child, twenty-two-year-old Mary Stannard was not the ideal virginal victim, but her good nature and naïveté attracted the Rev. Herbert H. Hayden, a married man with a family, and Mary found herself pregnant again.

  On September 3, 1878, her body was found lying on a path in Rockland, Connecticut. The postmortem revealed that Mary Stannard, who was not pregnant, had been poisoned, beaten, and stabbed (Dr. Pliny A. Jewett, who examined Charles Sanford’s victims, assisted at Mary Stannard’s autopsy), and since the Rev. Hayden was known to have recently purchased arsenic, he was arrested.

  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.

  An Obsolete Atrocity

  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.

  Legacy

  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 trippin
g 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.

  The Littlest Stigmatic

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  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