Mutilated: The Sodom Mountain Fortune Teller's Daughter

When Amanda Whipple received her daughter’s frozen body on February 10, 1877, the New England winter had preserved the young woman’s remains in the vault where they had been temporarily placed following her death at the Tewksbury Almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. What Amanda discovered upon examination would transform her grief into a quest for justice.

Living in the remote western reaches of Southwick, Massachusetts, under the shadow of Sodom Mountain, Amanda was known throughout the hilltowns and the Pioneer Valley as the fortune teller of Sodom Mountain. She had not foreseen this tragic fate for her daughter.

Ellen Jane Whipple was only twenty-one years old when she died on February 1, 1877. Far from the quiet shelter of her mother’s hillside home, her final days were spent in the stark, unwelcoming halls of Massachusetts’ institutions, a world far removed from the life she had known. Those who remembered her spoke of a young woman “rather pretty,” though some whispered she was “not overwitted”—perhaps an unkind judgment on someone whose trust and innocence made her vulnerable to a harsher world.

 

 A Widower's Temptation

About a year before her death, Ellen had gone to work for Jeremiah Randall, a widower and Civil War pensioner in the neighboring town of Granville, Massachusetts. Within months, her life began to unravel. What began as employment, according to Amanda Whipple and her neighbors, became something far darker. The mother would later claim that Randall had "stolen" her daughter from her—a characterization that neighbors corroborated. The nature of their relationship changed, and Ellen allegedly became the victim of seduction.

Sent Away in Shame

When "unpleasant results" appeared likely to follow their liaison, Randall reportedly sent Ellen away to Springfield, Massachusetts. She found herself at the Home for the Friendless, an institution for destitute women, before being transferred to the Tewksbury Almshouse. The Tewksbury Almshouse—later notorious for corruption and medical exploitation—was where Ellen spent her final days. Ellen feared returning to her mother's home, perhaps ashamed of her circumstances, perhaps afraid of rejection. She would never make that journey home alive.

Womens Ward - Tewksbury Almshouse (circa 1892)

 

The Fortune Teller’s Grim Discovery

The frozen body of Ellen Jane Whipple arrived at Amanda Whipple's home on February 10, 1877, a stark testament to a winter that had preserved her remains and the horrors she had endured. The genital area of Ellen's body had been "horribly mutilated with knives or surgical instruments." The discovery compelled Amanda to seek answers about her daughter’s death, for the mutilation did not appear consistent with phthisis—tuberculosis—which had been listed as the official cause.

An Unskilled Hand

On February 13, 1877, Dr. Rockwell of Southwick and Dr. Bowen of Granville conducted a post-mortem examination. Their findings painted a disturbing picture: evidence of "very unskillful surgical treatment" and numerous discolorations across Ellen’s body. Bruises marked her chest, bowels, and limbs—injuries consistent with being struck or forcibly pushed back while struggling. While these bruises alone were not severe enough to cause death, they suggested a violent struggle in her final days.

The examination also revealed that Ellen had delivered a stillborn child. Records show that a "Jeremiah Whipple" was born on January 29, 1877—just three days before Ellen's death. The infant’s body was likely sold to a medical school, a practice for which the Tewksbury Almshouse was later investigated.

Despite the doctors’ troubling findings, no further action was taken, and no formal inquest was ever convened. The Tewksbury Almshouse insisted that no surgical instruments had been used and that the stillborn child had died from the mother’s tuberculosis—an explanation in stark contradiction to the bruises and evidence of unskillful treatment documented by the physicians. In the end, the signs of violence and malpractice faded into silence, barely acknowledged and never formally investigated.

Buried Truths

After the examination, Ellen Jane Whipple was buried. The young woman who had left her mother’s home in Southwick, under the looming shadow of Sodom Mountain—whether by her own choice or at the hand of Randall—was finally laid to rest.

Amanda Whipple filed a wrongful death suit against Jeremiah Randall’s father to cover final expenses, as Randall’s Civil War pension likely offered her little recourse. When the case concluded, she was awarded $260—twenty dollars less than she had sought. It was a modest settlement that barely covered the costs of burial and examination. The fortune teller of Sodom Mountain, who once saw futures for others, could not have foreseen how cruelly fate would turn against her own.

 

 

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Edited Out/Author’s Additional Research Notes

• Ellen was sometimes referred to as Ella.
• Some sources say she was 19.
• Ellen’s parents, Otis and Amanda, were both born in Vermont. Ellen herself was born in New Hampshire.
• • Amanda later worked as a housekeeper for Gil Warner and was well-known as the “Fortune Teller of Sodom Mountain.”
• Jeremiah Randall married at least three times.
• • His first wife, also named Amanda, died young.
  • After her death, he impregnated Ellen.
  • In 1879, he married his second wife, Ella. She died young. They had a child who died within a year.
  • His third wife was about twenty years younger than he was.
• Following the scandal, Jeremiah moved to Connecticut.
• Some records incorrectly state that Ellen's child, Jeremiah, was stillborn on January 27.

The Tewksbury Almshouse

• The Home for the Friendless opened in Springfield in 1865.
• The Tewksbury Almshouse was established in 1852 and opened in 1854. It was later renamed Tewksbury State Hospital, and subsequently underwent a few more name changes.
• The primary treatments given to patients included morphine, cod liver oil, and whiskey.
• When the head of the Tewksbury Almshouse read about Ellen in the local newspaper, he wrote a public letter to Southwick authorities informing them that everything was on the up and up and if there were an inquest, he would cooperate and provide any records requested. (Folks suspected that cost was a factor in not investigating)
• Conditions at Tewksbury became notorious:
• • Patients in the insane ward were sometimes left without food for days.
  • Vermin infestation was so severe that some patients had holes eaten in their heads and toes.
  • Bathing practices were unsanitary—because the same dirty water and towels were reused, many patients developed eye infections that went untreated.
• Institutional corruption was rampant:
• • Accounting records were disorganized and routinely falsified.
  • Cash, jewelry, and personal effects of deceased patients frequently disappeared.
  • Families often never received the bodies of their loved ones because the bodies were sold.
  • Money belonging to patients without survivors that should have gone to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was mishandled, leaving the state uncertain whether it was overpaid or underpaid.
• After widespread scandal, the almshouse came under investigation for its high infant mortality rate, resulting in the resignation of the superintendent in 1883.
• Testimony revealed that the Tewksbury Almshouse sold bodies of deceased inmates/patients to Harvard and other medical schools in New England.
• • One witness described seeing “ten bodies on a table and twelve to twenty piled up like cordwood, higgledy-piggledy, the dead infants between the adults’ legs.”
  • Infant bodies reportedly sold for $3 to $5 each.
  • Another man testified that in 1878, a man arrived at his dental school in a covered wagon selling a woman’s corpse, claiming it came from Tewksbury. The students collectively purchased it.
  • Sometimes employees would put blocks of woods in coffins and bury them in a graveyard on the grounds.  
• Anne Sullivan, later famed as Helen Keller’s "teacher," was an institutionalized at Tewksbury from 1876 to 1880. With the help of a state official, she was transferred to a school for the blind in Boston. Sullivan would later describe the Tewksbury Almshouse as “indecent, cruel, melancholy, gruesome.”