Waiting for Heaven. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leeb. And this is Ghost Town.

On October 22, 1844, 100,000 Christians, mostly in New Hampshire, gathered on hillsides in meeting places and fields, looking to the sky in anticipation. They were out there for one

reason and one reason alone, to meet and greet their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, upon his glorious return to earth by way of the clouds in the sky.

This historic day had been introduced to Christian devotees by a prophetic and revolutionary farmer from upstate New York named William Miller,

who was certain from his studies of the Bible that Jesus Christ was going to appear on that

very day. But he didn't. Today on Ghost Town, the sordid, controversial story of what history

calls the great disappointment.

In the early 1800s, really in the years right after the Revolutionary War, Westward expansion

is happening. But not just geographically, religious thought and ideology are also expanding

across the plains and through the already

established religious communities. They called it the Second Great Awakening, and, like the

first, which took place in the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, it was a response to

enlightenment-style technological progress, an emphasis of religion and spirituality over science.

This Second Great Awakening, however, came with a side of zealotry, emotional preaching, wild

camp meetings, and fire and brimstone apocalyptic overtones. As one might imagine,

the Second Great Awakening gave rise to a number of new religious sects in America's frontier, moving east to west. In fact, New York itself was known as the, quote, burned over district because so many revivalist preachers came from that area. The Second Great Awakening gave rise to some religious hits that still exist, and you might

recognize, including the Seventh-day Adventists and Mormonism. Another sect was called the Millerites,

founded by farmer William Miller. One day Miller begins to read the Bible and gets to the book

of Revelation when he's struck with a powerful idea. He knows when this book is going to happen.

If you're a Jew like me and aren't exactly familiar with the book of Revelation, you are not alone.

In a nutshell, the book of Revelation is the last book in the New Testament, and it is wild.

Known as the book of the apocalypse, it is just that, a book that describes in detail how evil could, allegorically for the most part, engulf the world in great and wild detail.

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