Prophet Isaiah’s Second Coming House

Isaiah Henry Robertson was just twelve when his mother said she had received a vision from God that Isaiah would go on to do great things. Growing up in Jamaica, Robertson’s mother “had taught him to pray for Salvation and, following Jesus' example, he became a carpenter and built his first house without having been trained in carpentry.”

When he was twenty-four, Robertson moved to Canada and continued to work in construction. In 2004, he moved to Niagara Falls, New York to renovate and resell houses. Robertson’s church, the Mount Erie Baptist Church, hired him to sheetrock and panel the walls. Instead, he used natural wood oak and covered the walls and cathedral ceiling with intricate, interlocking wood cutouts that represented religious imagery. He claims that God told him to use oak, which he purchased with his entire life’s savings.

When Robertson said that God spoke to him again and told him to transform his own Niagara Falls house because the end of the world was coming in 2014, he got to work. To start, he built a 25-foot kaleidoscopic cross near the driveway that is decorated with “hundreds of multichrome wooden armatures.” To the front of the house, he mounted a 300-pound boulder from Three Sisters Island located in Niagara Falls State Park where God told him the Rapture would take place. Robertson believed that eternally damned souls flying past his house would see the cross and have one last chance to repent and be saved.

Roadside America describes the house as “a spectacular piece of spiritual eye candy, with thousands of bright-hued, hand-carved surfaces” and “[m]ulti-denominational religious symbolism” like “doves, trumpets, crescents, multi-pointed stars, [and] wheels within wheels.” Robertson believed that God guided his hands to help him create the beautiful, ornate designs on the house and that “an accidental brush stroke next to the front door was […] an image of the Virgin Mary.”

Inside the house, Robertson established a dedicated prayer room and covered the floors with “candles and symbolic purple bead patterns” that symbolize “the path to Salvation.”

Isaiah Robertson passed away in January 2020 at age 72. He is remembered as being warm and welcoming to all, and, of course, as a talented woodworker and artist.

In 2021, the Kohler Foundation bought the house and gifted it to the Niagara Falls National Heritage Area. Once preservation of the house and restoration of its art are complete, the NFNHA hopes to transform it into a community space to tell Robertson’s story and inspire more community art through events and programs.

Hope L. Russell, Ph.D.