New England's Gothic Literature History and Folklore of the S... by Faye Ringel

Subsequent analysis showed that the beheading, along with other injuries, including rib fractures, occurred roughly five years after death. I’d never seen anything like it,” Bellantoni recalls. “It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. They lay, he remembers, “in perfect anatomical position.” But when he raised the next stone, Bellantoni saw that the rest of the individual “had been completely.rearranged.” The skeleton had been beheaded skull and thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. When Bellantoni lifted the first of the large, flat rocks that formed the roof, he uncovered the remains of a red-painted coffin and a pair of skeletal feet. Scraping away soil with flat-edged shovels, and then brushes and bamboo picks, the archaeologist and his team worked through several feet of earth before reaching the top of the crypt.

It was one of only two stone crypts in the cemetery, and it was partially visible from the mine face. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests.īellantoni was interested in the grave even before the excavation began. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery.

But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first-until the boy produced a skull.īecause this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene.

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves.

New England's Gothic Literature History and Folklore of the S... by Faye Ringel