The Early Family Rocking Cradle
By Rebecca Pickard, Museum Experience Leader
Early Family Rocking Cradle, 2021.27
Gift of Tom Jackson and Joan Coleman
As the traditional season of frights and hauntings approaches, we here at the Lynchburg Museum are delighted by a recent addition to our collection—the Early family rocking cradle. While the cradle is a fine example of early 19th-century craftsmanship, we’re most excited about a much spookier fact: it is the “self-rocking cradle” that haunted the home of Rev. William A. Smith in 1839 or 1840.
Our earliest written evidence of the “cradle-rocking” is from 1858, in Margaret Anthony Cabell’s Sketches and Recollections. She says only,
The incident of the self-rocking cradle is of too recent date, and the facts too well known in Lynchburg, to need here any comment.
While versions of the story trickled through various newspapers in the late 1800’s, the version of the story that has become most well-known is found in William Asbury Christian’s Lynchburg and Its People, published in 1900:
An occurrence, partaking of the marvelous, created a good deal of excitement in the town. It took place in the spring of 1839, in the one-story brick house between Eleventh and Twelfth.
“The Rocking Cradle House,” 1104 Jackson Street, Lynchburg, Virginia
Courtesy of Library of Virginia
1104 Jackson Street to be precise. It would become known as “the house where the cradle rocked.” Even today it is known by many longtime residents simply as the “Rocking Cradle House.”
Rev. William A. Smith was renting the house in the midst of his career as a Methodist preacher in Lynchburg. Smith’s wife, Laura Brooking Smith, had given birth to a little girl, and the couple borrowed a cradle from Rev. John Early, a prominent leader in the Methodist church. Early’s daughter Elizabeth, now a toddler, no longer needed the cradle to rock her to sleep.
From here, the story goes:
One morning, as [Rev. Smith] was at breakfast, his wife, who was in bed in the next room, called to him and said: “Dr. Smith, come here and look at this cradle, how it rocks.” He arose and came to the door, and, to his amazement, the cradle was rocking vigorously, and there was no one near it. Dr. Smith moved the cradle from near the fire-place into the middle of the floor, and said: “Now Geoffrey[1] (he called the Devil by that name), rock!” and he did.
The news of it spread through the town like wildfire, and hundreds closed their places of business and went to see the “rocking cradle.” Various explanations were given, but none seemed satisfactory to the people.
The cradle continued rocking for some time, perhaps a month—then stopped.
Gravestone of Laura A. Smith in Old City Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia
The story traditionally ends there, but tragedy followed over the next few years. The Smiths’ newborn girl passed away as a child. Then in 1845, Smith’s wife Laura passed away; she is buried at Old City Cemetery. Before she passed, she had given birth to a second daughter; unfortunately, this daughter died young as well. Elizabeth Early, the toddler whose crib had been gifted to the Smiths, was labelled a “lunatic” in her early 20’s, and she was institutionalized at Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton until her death.
The “hundreds” who witnessed the cradle-rocking spread its story far beyond Lynchburg. In 1872, a newspaper story called “The Smith Cradle-Rocking” was published in newspapers across Virginia. In this version, the cradle performs its rocking on a schedule, and Smith does not command the cradle in the name of the devil. Instead, witnesses conduct a more scientific investigation: taking the cradle apart, moving it to other rooms and apartments, and calling in experts such as Rev. Abram Penn.[2] This story made its way into books such as The Clock Struck One (1872) and Facts magazine (1882) as proof of the spiritual world.
The Smith family’s perspective is largely missing from these retellings. O. P. Fitzgerald, who lived in Lynchburg from 1842 to 1848, says in his memoir (1900) that his interactions with Rev. Smith were “tinged with awe because of a story that his parsonage was ‘haunted’ at night” by the “sound of the rocking of an invisible cradle by invisible hands.” In 1894, a Richmond newspaper published an interview with another Methodist reverend, who describes Smith’s perspective on the supernatural event:
Dr. Smith was a matter of fact person, robust in brain, and not inclined to believe in “sperits.” I asked him about the cradle. He said the cradle did rock as reported, but the discoveries of science would explain its actions at some future day and that ghosts had nothing to do with it. Science up to date has not found out the reason of the rocking.
At some point, likely before Rev. Smith moved to Boydton, Virginia, in 1846, the cradle was given back to the Early family, who stored it in the attic of their home at 700 Court Street (the present-day location of the Arlington Apartments). The house passed from Bishop Early to his daughter upon his death. At her death in 1930, the house passed to John Early Jackson, a great-grandson of Bishop Early. He and his wife Elinor Hart Jackson disassembled the house and reconstructed it on Peakland Place.
But as they cleaned out the house to prepare for the move, Elinor and John discovered the cradle. The rockers had been removed and it stood in a dark back corner of the attic. They moved the cradle with the house and held onto it for many years.
Meanwhile, in 1937, the Virginia Works Progress Administration collected a report on the house on Jackson Street, now known as “the house where the cradle rocked.” Trueheart Poston, the son of the owner, told the rocking-cradle story with several elements embellished for drama: the baby is in the cradle, and has been for hours; the devil is no longer called “Geoffrey,” but the more sinister “Beelzebub.”
Poston mentions that the Jacksons had found the cradle, and he gives this description:
The cradle itself is a very beautiful Sheraton mahogany, high poster affair with turned spindle sides and a field bed canopy. It gives the effect of being a miniature Sheraton field bed on rockers. (Mrs. Jackson has restored the rockers, the original ones never having been found).
After the 1937 report, the cradle disappeared from public record. Elinor and John kept the cradle until about 1969, when they passed it down to their son, George, who passed it down to his son, Tom Jackson. Tom kept the cradle safe for many years, but recently donated it to the Lynchburg Museum System so that everyone can enjoy its spooky history.
Footnotes
While “Geoffrey” may seem like an odd name for the devil, the name has traditional roots: “Old Jeffrey” was the name of the ghost that haunted the Epworth Rectory, the boyhood home of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism.
In 1839, Penn was the presiding elder of the Lynchburg-area Methodist churches, but he spent most of his career as a prominent minister in Richmond.