Enslaved Africans are skeletons in New England's closets. Frances Manwaring Caulkins's History of Norwich (1845) tells of “a poor negro slave, named Jock,” who “hung himself in prison” in the eighteenth century because he had “in a fit of jealousy and anger” shot his lady friend. “His body was given to the elder Dr. Turner for dissection, and his bones formed into an anatomical figure, […] an object of terror and curiosity to the ignorant and the children of the neighborhood” (341). After Dr. Turner's death, pranksters would abstract the skeleton on Halloween until the bones disappeared, with no notion of a proper burial. I have retold the story of “Old Jock's Bones” on many a Gothic tour. Another enslaved man from Waterbury, Connecticut, who continued to serve after death, was immortalized by Marilyn Nelson in Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem.

A few miles away, in Litchfield County, James Mars was “Born and Sold in Connecticut,” as he titled his autobiography (1869). He was inspired to write because in his old age he experienced the same inability of White residents to envision that “the land of good morals and steady habits, was […] a slave state, and that slaves were driven through the streets tied or fastened together for market. […] Yes, this was done in Connecticut” (37).

These skeletons and Mars's now-forgotten autobiography represent the erasure of New England's Gothic history of slavery and racial injustice as well as the restless persistence of dead bodies of color in Gothic fiction.