The Heart of Nantucket: Dr. Charles Winslow's Peculiar Dying Wish
As the ghost story goes, Dr. Winslow requested his heart be cut from his body and buried on the island of Nantucket. But were his wishes ever truly fulfilled?
“I request, order, and command that, if in the course of 8 and 40 hours it be positively proved that I am dead my heart shall be removed from my body by a competent anatomist, placed in a strong glass vessel […] This I wished enclosed in a plain pine case and buried in the south of Newtown burying ground on the island of Nantucket where I was born. My dear father lies by my mother’s side and a single stone records their final resting place. Thus may this sacred spot be known where I wish my heart to rest. I order that my body be burned and placed in the same grave at Mount Auburn in Boston which contains the precious remains of my great dear and beloved wife. Signed Dr. Charles F. Winslow.”
Dr. Charles F. Winslow’s Last Will and Testament"
On July 7th 1877, Dr. Charles Frederick Winslow died in Salt Lake City, hundreds of miles from his wife’s grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery, and even further still from his beloved home on Nantucket.
The tale of Winslow’s heart is a ghost story often told on the island of Nantucket - one repeated with eerie fanfare, and whispered among children who hold their breath as they pass by the burial grounds. But to me, the story is a heart-warming tale, one I’m sure most of us can relate to—being split between two worlds, feeling as though your heart is in one place, but your home in another.
Winslow was a 19th century renaissance man, he was a physician, graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1843, he was a diplomat, serving as the US Consul in Payta Peru in 1862, and he was an author, penning such titles as “Cosmography, or the Philosophical View of the Universe” in 1853. Not to mention the fact that his cremation was the second ever recorded in American history!
The modern “spooky” connotation of the tale of Winslow’s heart may focus on the ripping of a heart from a body and traveling cross land and sea – disembodied and homeless. But the sentiment of the story reveals a man with a deep and loving connection to his home and family. One so moving that he was compelled to order the removal of a vital organ from his body so that it may rest in his homeland and his remains may rest with his wife, Lydia Jones Winslow on Mound Avenue in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
But is the tale of Winslow’s heart just a ghost story? Were his strange, and intricate wishes ever realized? According to a man named Edward Rose Snow, the story is true. In the 1940’s Snow came to Nantucket on a mission to find the truth behind the tale of Winslow’s heart. With permission from the caretakers of Newtown Cemetery, he used an iron rod to poke around the ground surrounding the Winslow family plot. Sure, enough he hit a small chest and upon opening the chest they found a smaller oak box, and inside this oak box there was a glass vessel, and sitting inside was a human heart—just as Charles Winslow requested.
The above research and script was from a video I never finished making. I went to Nantucket, filmed the grave, and even filmed at Charles Winslow’s old house on India Street off the main drag of the island, and the footage sat on my hard-drive for four years.
Shortly after the finalization of the edit of the video I was diagnosed with cancer, and the story and location lost it’s shine, along with the rest of the world. In 2022, as I was finishing chemo I re-cut the footage I had captured at Winsow’s grave and interspersed it with videos of me in cancer treatment, and adjusting to my new home in Somerville.
More than anything else, the tale of Winslow’s Heart is an important story about home and belonging to me. I closed on my first home on May 13th 2021. One week later I would find the lump in my breast that was trying to kill me. Suddenly, my first home that was filled with optimism and promise became the sick house; The toilet I became all too familiar with after hours of leaning over it. The bed that became my ball and chain because I was too tired to rise from it. The endless list of furniture to buy, and pictures to hang, all postponed because I was too fatigued to make my house a home. At that point in my life, my first house was akin to the room in The Yellow Wallpaper: an undulating cataclysm of uncertainty, nausea, and fear. But as I look back on it in 2024, it was all of those things, but it was also my safe haven.
It was the place where my boyfriend picked me up off the couch when I was crying, hoisted me on his shoulders and told me that he would carry me through this ordeal, just as if he was carrying me on his back. It was where my cat Winslow taught me how to stretch on the floor of my office–where my mother watched me sleep as I recovered from surgery– the doorstep where my friends brought me food. My home was much more than the suffering I endured within it’s walls. Eventually, the nausea and dread I felt when occupying the house shriveled and died along with the cancer inside me.
So when I say that Winslow’s Heart is a story of coming home, it means something more personal to me than the colloquial aphorism. It’s the violence of an enclosed room – a ripped-out heart, but also the potential of belonging and the beauty of sacrifice.
I don’t know if I’ll ever publish that re-cut of The Heart of Nantucket video I worked on all those years ago. I’m protective of it and its vulnerability. But sometimes the room needs to be laid bare for all to see.
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