Barbadian Gothic: The Moving Coffins of the Chase Vault in Socio-Cultural Context

Abstract

The Chase family vault (Oistins, Barbados) is widely known as the setting of a macabre nineteenth-century story of moving coffins. On several occasions between 1812 and 1821, on opening the sealed vault to add a new burial, the neatly stacked coffins were found scattered. This legend has never been examined within its contemporary setting, including the Gothic literary and cultural movement. This article seeks to show that the episode reveals much about the negotiation of power in an island society on the edge of slave rebellion, where the planter class were fearful of the enslaved peoples’ continued practice of the banned spiritual and healing rituals known as Obeah. The article further examines how the story reflects notions of otherness, death, materiality, and memory in early nineteenth-century Barbados, where the ordered Protestant world of the planters clashed with what they perceived as the elemental worldview of the enslaved African and Afro-Barbadian population.

Acknowledgements

This article benefitted from the involvement of a number of individuals in Barbados ready to share their perspective on what is still a big local story. Dr Kevin Farmer of Barbados Museums and Professor Karl Watson were mines of local social history, and some local members of the Christ Church community added their own ideas and theories. We thank especially Dr Matthew Reilly for detailed and pertinent comments on the draft manuscript. Two anonymous referees provided valuable and exhaustive comments, and the authors thank them for their attention to detail. Funding was provided by the Research and Knowledge Exchange grants from the University of Winchester.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niall Finneran

Niall Finneran (PhD, University of Cambridge, UK, 1999) is Reader in Historical Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Winchester, UK. He has directed extensive archaeological fieldwork on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sites on Barbados, and is especially interested in the archaeology of religious identity and the material culture of commemoration in the wider Caribbean. He is Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Christina Welch

Christina Welch (PhD, University of Southampton, UK, 2005) is Senior Fellow in the Department of Theology, Religion and Philosophy, University of Winchester, UK. Her research background is in the visual representation of indigenous religions of the Americas, but she has also published widely on aspects of materiality of death and burial and funerary studies globally. She is currently active in researching wider perspectives on Caribbean death and burial. With Niall Finneran, she is co-author of the forthcoming volume Materialities of Caribbean Religion (Routledge, 2021).