Towards the end of his life, Joseph Smith developed a memorable quip. When a critic declared that his people would be damned for their heretical ways, he retorted: โif we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it.โ[1] The Latter-day Saints would exorcise Pandemonium. The Saints had not settled in Hell in 1839 when they settled along the Mississippi River, but the metaphor would not have escaped them. Smith described Commerce, Illinois, where much of the Saintsโ purchase was located, as โliterally a wilderness. The land was mostly covered with trees and bushes, and much of it so wet that it was with the utmost difficulty a footman could get through, and totally impossible for teams. Commerce was so unhealthful, very few could live there.โ[2] Commerceโlater renamed Nauvooโwas chosen as a last resort. This strange group of refugees from Missouri found โno more eligible place presenting itself.โ[3]
Their new wilderness was both haunted and sickly. Before I tell you about its hauntingโof the foul spirits eager to gain possession of or to inflict harm on Latter-day Saint bodies, I remind you of the better-known story of Commerce as a sickly place. Sickly because of the mosquitos that acted as carriers for what we would today refer to as malaria. The Saints, like other nineteenth-century Americans, called the disease the ague. As Jesse Crosby recalled, shortly after their arrival along the Mississippi, โthe sickly season came on and many very many felt its withering influence.โ[4] Accounts of the period included details of the victimsโ most prominent symptoms: fever, shaking, chills, and a debilitating loss of strength.
In the coming decades, memoirists regularly described the desolate scene of early Commerce. In 1881, Helen Mar Whitney wrote, โNearly all were taken down, one after another, and the ones who were not shaking or delirious with fever would do their best towards waiting upon those that were. . . . Hundreds were lying sick in tents and wagons.โ[5] According to Benjamin Brown, for many of the settlementโs ill, tents and wagons were a luxury. โNumbers of the sick and dying had to lie on the ground, with only a blanket over them.โ Brown recalled, โIt was frequently declared that the persecutions in Missouri were small matters compared to the miseries endured at this period in Nauvoo.โ[6] Perhaps you will remember Theodore Gorkaโs well-known painting of Emma Hale Smith tending to the sick along the banks of the river.[7]
This widespread disease was not unrelated to the idea of personified evil in early Nauvoo. For the Saints, visible trials belied invisible realities. Although then only a child, Whitney would state that, at this time, โthe powers of darkness seemed to have combined to put a stop to the work of the Almighty.โ[8] Just as the first settlers faced disease and death, they also faced possession, obsession, and supernatural assault. Just as they considered the impact of miasma when selecting a site to build, there was also a supernatural logic to consider in the decision where they might live.
Early on, according to story, the Saints believed evil spirits haunted some houses in their new settlement along the Mississippi, particularly those structures already standing when they arrived. Whitney related a story set in Far West, a year previous that relays this periodโs understanding of haunted locations. Joseph Smith had purchased a house, โwhich had been formerly occupied as a public house by some wicked people.โ Shortly after the Smith family moved in, one of their children fell ill. Smith performed a healing blessing, but the sickness returned the moment he stepped outside of the home. This scene โtranspired several times,โ when Joseph prayed to know โwhat it all meant.โ His prayer was answered with an open vision in which the prophet โsaw the devil in person, who contended with Joseph face to face for some time. He said it was his house, it belonged to him, and Joseph had no right there. Then Joseph rebuked Satan in the name of the Lord, and he departed and troubled the child no more.โ[9] The logic was clear. The wicked behavior of the previous owners had relinquished true ownership of the home to the source of evil.
While this story identified the malevolent spirit as โthe devil in person,โ it was more common for early Latter-day Saints to believe it was evil spirits of the deceased that haunted locations. Parley P. Pratt would explain in his Key to the Science of Theology, โMany spirits of the departed, who are unhappy, linger in lonely wretchedness about the earth, and in the air, and especially about their ancient homesteads, and the places rendered dear to them by the memory of former scenes.โ Connecting spirits to a site often had ties to disease as much as it might temptation. These spirits, Pratt continued, โafflict persons in the flesh, and engender various diseases in the human body.โ[10] This paper examines three stories of domestic hauntings told through the lens of the demonic and of disease.
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