Walk through an old New England cemetery, and you may notice something surprising carved into the weathered headstones. Instead of the familiar crosses, flowers, and angels found in many modern cemeteries, some of the oldest stones display grinning skulls, crossed bones, and strange faces with wings extending from either side.
These carvings can look unsettling today, particularly when the stones are covered with moss or their inscriptions have been worn away by centuries of weather. The skulls seem more appropriate for a haunted house or Halloween decoration than a peaceful burial ground.
However, the people who commissioned these gravestones generally weren’t trying to frighten anyone. Skull carvings were part of a longstanding tradition of funerary symbolism intended to remind the living about death, the passage of time, and the importance of preparing for the afterlife.
The winged skulls that appeared on many colonial American gravestones are known as death’s heads. They were especially popular in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, where religious beliefs strongly influenced attitudes toward mortality.
Understanding why these symbols appeared reveals a fascinating connection between early American religion, medieval traditions, cemetery art, and the changing ways people have understood death.
💀 What Does a Skull on an Old Gravestone Mean?
A skull carved on an old gravestone generally represents human mortality and the inevitability of death. It serves as a reminder that everyone, regardless of wealth, social position, or accomplishments, will eventually die.
This symbolism is closely associated with the Latin expression memento mori, meaning “remember that you must die.” The phrase describes a tradition of contemplating mortality as a way of encouraging reflection on how life should be lived.
In earlier centuries, reminders of death were far more common in everyday religious and artistic imagery than they are today. Skulls appeared in paintings, books, religious objects, and memorial decorations, often accompanied by hourglasses, extinguished candles, or other symbols of life’s temporary nature.
When carved on a gravestone, a skull communicated this message directly to visitors. Seeing the image was intended to encourage reflection on their own mortality and the importance of making meaningful use of the time they had remaining.
Although the skull’s appearance may seem frightening to modern viewers, its original message was generally philosophical and religious rather than threatening.
The gravestone wasn’t suggesting that the deceased person was dangerous, cursed, or connected with supernatural forces. Instead, it reminded anyone passing by that death was a universal human experience.
🪦 What Is a Death’s Head on a Gravestone?
The term death’s head refers to a stylized skull used in funerary art, particularly on early American gravestones. These carvings became especially recognizable in colonial New England, where they appeared on headstones throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Death’s heads could vary considerably in appearance. Some resembled relatively realistic human skulls, complete with hollow eye sockets, exposed teeth, and prominent cheekbones. Others were more decorative, featuring exaggerated expressions, unusual proportions, or elaborate surrounding designs.
Many were carved with wings extending outward from the sides of the skull. Others appeared above crossed bones or alongside hourglasses and additional symbols of mortality.
According to the City of Boston’s research on its historic burying grounds, death’s heads were among the earliest decorative motifs used on the city’s seventeenth-century gravestones.
The designs were particularly well suited to the religious traditions of colonial Boston, where many Puritan communities avoided certain forms of religious imagery.
Death’s heads weren’t intended to be portraits of the people buried beneath them. Instead, they were symbolic representations of death itself.
The skull on one person’s gravestone might look almost identical to one carved for someone else because stonecutters frequently repeated familiar designs.
However, individual craftsmen also developed recognizable artistic styles. Some favored dramatic skulls with large teeth, while others carved simpler faces with carefully arranged wings and decorative borders.
These variations make early American gravestones valuable examples of folk art as well as historical memorials.
⛪ Why Did Puritans Put Skulls on Gravestones?
Puritan religious beliefs played an important role in the popularity of skull carvings in colonial New England.
Many Puritans believed that earthly life was temporary and that people should continually consider their relationship with God and their preparation for death.
Human mortality was therefore an important subject of religious reflection.
Death wasn’t something that could be ignored or avoided indefinitely. Instead, it was understood as a certainty that should influence how people lived.
Gravestone skulls reflected this outlook by providing a visible reminder of the temporary nature of earthly existence.
However, the popularity of death’s heads was also connected with Puritan attitudes toward religious images.
In many Puritan communities, representations of angels, saints, and other sacred figures were discouraged because of concerns about inappropriate religious imagery.
According to the City of Boston, local Puritans generally avoided crosses, cherubs, and representations of divine beings in their places of worship and on early gravestones.
A skull, by contrast, represented the physical reality of death without directly portraying a heavenly being.
This made it an acceptable form of funerary decoration in communities that were cautious about religious images.
The resulting gravestones may seem unusually severe to modern visitors, but they reflected a worldview in which death, spiritual judgment, and religious responsibility were closely connected.
It’s important to remember that Puritan beliefs and burial customs weren’t identical in every community. Gravestone designs also depended on local traditions, available materials, and the preferences of individual families.
Nevertheless, the winged death’s head became one of the most recognizable visual features of early New England burial grounds.
🪽 Why Do Some Gravestone Skulls Have Wings?
One of the most unusual features of colonial gravestones is the winged skull.
The image combines two elements that appear to express different ideas. The skull represents physical death, while the wings may suggest movement beyond the earthly world.
A common interpretation is that the winged death’s head represents the separation of the soul from the body.
In this reading, the skull acknowledges the death of the physical body, while the wings suggest the possibility of spiritual existence beyond death.
The image may therefore combine a reminder of mortality with a hope for the afterlife.
However, historians caution against treating this interpretation as a universally established meaning.
The City of Boston notes that the idea of winged skulls representing physical death and spiritual regeneration is one interpretation rather than a definitively documented explanation for every carving.
The wings may also reflect artistic conventions inherited from earlier European funerary traditions.
Individual stonecutters sometimes repeated designs because they were recognizable, fashionable, or associated with particular workshops.
Over time, the appearance of these winged faces changed.
Some skulls developed more lifelike features, including visible eyes and fuller cheeks. Others gradually resembled human faces rather than skeletal heads.
These changes contributed to the appearance of another important gravestone motif: the winged cherub, sometimes called a soul effigy.
⏳ Why Were Skulls Carved With Hourglasses and Crossed Bones?
Skulls frequently appeared alongside other symbols that emphasized the passage of time and the inevitability of death.
One of the most common was the hourglass.
An hourglass represented the limited duration of human life. Just as sand gradually falls from its upper chamber to its lower chamber, the time available to each person steadily passes.
When paired with a skull, the message became especially clear. Life was temporary, and death would eventually come for everyone.
Some gravestones even featured winged hourglasses, emphasizing the familiar idea that time flies.
These images encouraged visitors to reflect on the importance of using their remaining years wisely.
Crossed bones provided another reminder of physical mortality. Like the skull, they represented the remains of the human body after death.
In the context of early gravestones, crossed bones didn’t necessarily carry the associations with pirates or poison that they later acquired in popular culture.
Instead, they belonged to a broader artistic tradition focused on the reality of death.
Some gravestones also featured coffins, scythes, or additional symbols associated with the end of life.
These images sometimes appeared together, creating elaborate compositions that surrounded the deceased person’s name and epitaph.
Although such carvings can seem grim today, they were intended to communicate ideas that earlier generations considered important and meaningful.
🕯️ Were Skull Gravestones Inspired by Medieval Traditions?
The use of skulls as reminders of mortality existed long before the establishment of colonial New England.
During the European Middle Ages, skulls and skeletons appeared in religious art, funerary monuments, and other imagery associated with death.
These symbols reflected the broader memento mori tradition, which encouraged people to remember that earthly life was temporary.
Medieval European art sometimes portrayed death as a universal force that could reach anyone, regardless of wealth, power, or social position.
One especially striking tradition was the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, in which skeletons or personifications of death appeared alongside people from different levels of society.
Kings, religious leaders, merchants, and ordinary laborers were all subject to the same fate.
The message was that no amount of status or privilege could provide lasting protection from mortality.
Skulls also appeared in European funerary monuments, including elaborate memorials that depicted the deceased in the form of a corpse or skeleton.
These traditions helped establish a visual language of death that later influenced memorial art in other parts of the world.
Colonial American stonecutters inherited aspects of this broader European symbolism, adapting familiar images to local religious beliefs and artistic styles.
The skulls found on early New England gravestones therefore belong to a much longer history of using art to contemplate death.
Their appearance wasn’t an isolated colonial custom, but part of a tradition that had developed over centuries.
👼 Why Did Skulls Eventually Become Cherubs?
As the eighteenth century progressed, another type of winged face became increasingly familiar on New England gravestones.
Instead of a skeletal skull, some stones featured a rounded human face with recognizable eyes, cheeks, and wings.
These carvings are commonly called cherubs or soul effigies.
They were often interpreted as representing the soul and its hoped-for journey to heaven.
Their gentler appearance contrasted with the older death’s-head designs, which focused more directly on physical mortality.
Historians James Deetz and Edwin Dethlefsen famously studied the changing popularity of gravestone symbols in colonial New England. Their archaeological research connected changes in funerary imagery with broader shifts in religious and cultural attitudes.
One influential interpretation suggested that the movement from skulls toward cherubs reflected increasing emphasis on spiritual hope and resurrection rather than the physical reality of death.
However, later research has demonstrated that this transition wasn’t as simple or consistent as it first appeared.
The City of Boston’s cemetery research explains that death’s heads and cherubs remained popular at overlapping times and that the cherub never completely replaced the skull in Boston’s historic burial grounds.
Local carving traditions, artistic preferences, and the availability of particular craftsmen also influenced which designs appeared.
A family might choose a skull even when other families were selecting cherubs, and some stonecutters continued producing familiar motifs long after newer designs had become fashionable.
Nevertheless, the growing use of winged human faces illustrates an important development in American funerary art.
Gravestones increasingly incorporated imagery that could be interpreted as emphasizing the soul, spiritual hope, and life beyond death.
🌳 Why Did Skulls Disappear From Many Later Gravestones?
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American gravestone designs were changing again.
The skulls and winged faces of earlier generations gradually became less common, while urns, weeping willows, and other classical symbols gained popularity.
One of the most recognizable designs from this period was the urn-and-willow motif.
The weeping willow, with its long branches bending toward the ground, represented grief and mourning. Its drooping shape naturally suggested sorrow and remembrance.
The urn drew inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman funerary art. Although urns could historically contain cremated remains, their appearance on later American gravestones generally served as a symbolic decoration rather than evidence that the deceased had been cremated.
Together, these images reflected a growing preference for sentimental mourning imagery.
Instead of reminding visitors directly that death was inevitable, many monuments focused more on the sorrow experienced by surviving family members.
This change coincided with the spread of neoclassical artistic styles and evolving attitudes toward commemoration.
By the Victorian era, cemetery monuments often featured flowers, angels, clasped hands, carved books, and elaborate architectural designs.
The older skull imagery had become less fashionable, although it didn’t disappear from every cemetery at the same time.
These changes reflected artistic trends as well as shifts in how communities expressed grief and remembered the dead.
Where an early colonial headstone might have emphasized mortality, a later Victorian monument might have focused on affection, loss, or the hope of reunion.
🪦 Can Skull Carvings Tell You How Old a Gravestone Is?
Skull carvings can provide useful clues about the historical period in which a gravestone was created.
In New England, winged death’s heads were especially prominent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The National Park Service’s regional archaeology research identifies death’s heads, winged cherubs, and urn-and-willow carvings as three important design traditions found on gravestones between approximately the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.
However, the presence of a skull doesn’t provide an exact date.
Some designs remained popular for many decades, and different communities adopted new artistic styles at different times.
A gravestone carved in one town might feature an older motif long after a nearby community had begun favoring newer imagery.
Stonecutters also influenced local patterns.
A successful craftsman might continue producing a recognizable design because families admired the style or associated it with traditional memorial art.
The type of stone, lettering, monument shape, and surrounding inscriptions can provide additional clues about the gravestone’s age.
Slate was a popular material for many early New England markers, particularly in places where it was readily available or could be transported from established quarrying areas.
For the most accurate dating, examine the inscription and available cemetery records rather than relying on the carving alone.
It’s also worth remembering that gravestones weren’t always erected immediately after someone died. A monument could have been commissioned years later, making the death date different from the date when the stone was actually carved.
👻 Do Skulls on Gravestones Mean the Cemetery Is Haunted?
Despite their unsettling appearance, skull carvings on gravestones have no established historical connection with a cemetery being haunted.
The skulls were generally intended as reminders of death, not warnings about ghosts, curses, or restless spirits.
However, their appearance has contributed to the mysterious atmosphere that many people associate with historic burial grounds.
A weathered skull with hollow eyes and exposed teeth can look particularly eerie when seen in moonlight or partially hidden beneath moss.
As centuries passed and the original symbolism became less familiar, these carvings could seem increasingly strange to visitors.
The growth of Gothic literature, ghost stories, and modern horror entertainment helped strengthen the association between old cemeteries and supernatural danger.
Skulls became familiar decorations in Halloween displays, haunted attractions, and frightening stories.
Yet the skulls carved on historic gravestones were created long before many of these modern associations developed.
The people who commissioned them were usually expressing religious and philosophical ideas rather than attempting to create a frightening scene.
This contrast between historical meaning and modern interpretation helps explain why old burial grounds remain so fascinating.
A carving that once encouraged spiritual reflection may now inspire curiosity, unease, or an imaginative ghost story.
For more about how burial grounds acquired their supernatural reputation, see Why Are Graveyards Considered Haunted?.
🔍 What Can We Learn From Skull Gravestones Today?
Historic gravestones are valuable sources of information about earlier generations.
Their inscriptions preserve names, dates, family relationships, and sometimes details about occupations or community roles.
Their carvings reveal something different: the ideas, beliefs, and artistic traditions that influenced how people remembered the dead.
A winged skull can provide evidence of a local funerary style, while the lettering and decorative borders may help identify a particular stonecutter.
Some craftsmen developed highly recognizable designs, allowing historians to connect gravestones across different burial grounds.
Studying these patterns can reveal how artistic ideas traveled between communities and changed over time.
The gravestones also provide clues about cultural attitudes toward mortality.
Early skull carvings emphasized the temporary nature of physical life, while later cherubs, urns, and willows often reflected different approaches to remembrance and spiritual hope.
However, these interpretations require care.
Not every family chose a particular symbol for the same reason, and many gravestones were influenced by established workshop designs rather than highly individual preferences.
The most useful approach is to consider the carving alongside the inscription, cemetery location, historical period, and available documentary records.
Historic cemeteries also deserve careful preservation.
Weathered stones can be fragile, especially after centuries of exposure to rain, freezing temperatures, pollution, and biological growth.
Visitors should avoid touching unstable monuments or applying chalk, shaving cream, or cleaning products to make faded carvings easier to see.
Photographs taken in gentle side lighting can sometimes reveal details without damaging the stone.
Understanding these monuments allows us to appreciate them not simply as mysterious cemetery decorations, but as surviving works of art created to remember real people.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
What does a skull with wings mean on a gravestone?
A winged skull, commonly called a death’s head, was a popular symbol on early American gravestones. The skull represented physical mortality, while the wings are sometimes interpreted as suggesting the soul’s passage beyond death. However, historians caution that the exact meaning wasn’t necessarily identical on every monument.
Why did Puritans use skulls instead of crosses?
Many Puritan communities discouraged certain religious images, including crosses and representations of heavenly beings. A skull could communicate the reality of human mortality without depicting a sacred figure. This made death’s heads a recognizable form of funerary decoration in colonial New England.
What does a skull and hourglass mean on a tombstone?
A skull and hourglass together emphasize the passage of time and the inevitability of death. The hourglass represents life’s limited duration, while the skull reminds viewers that earthly existence eventually ends. The imagery belongs to the broader memento mori tradition.
Are skull gravestones associated with the plague?
Not necessarily. Although skulls appeared in European art during periods when disease and death were common concerns, a skull carved on a gravestone doesn’t prove that the person died from plague or another particular illness. In colonial New England, skulls were widely used as general symbols of mortality.
When were winged skulls most popular on gravestones?
Winged death’s heads were especially common on New England gravestones during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their popularity varied by region, and some stonecutters continued using the designs after newer funerary symbols appeared.
Did winged cherubs replace skulls on old gravestones?
Winged cherubs became increasingly familiar during the eighteenth century, but they didn’t completely replace skull carvings everywhere. Both designs were used during overlapping periods, and their popularity depended on local traditions, artistic fashions, and individual preferences.
Do gravestone skulls represent evil or witchcraft?
No. Historic skull carvings generally represented mortality and religious reflection rather than evil or witchcraft. Their modern association with frightening imagery developed through broader cultural traditions, including Gothic art, horror stories, and Halloween decorations.
🕯️ Final Thoughts
The skulls carved into old gravestones tell a fascinating story about how earlier generations understood life, death, and the afterlife.
In colonial New England, winged death’s heads became familiar reminders of human mortality. Their imagery reflected a religious and cultural environment in which contemplating death was considered an important part of life.
The skulls weren’t intended to frighten cemetery visitors or warn them about supernatural danger. Instead, they communicated the message that earthly life was temporary and that everyone would eventually face death.
Over time, gravestone designs changed. Winged cherubs, classical urns, weeping willows, and other symbols became increasingly popular as artistic fashions and attitudes toward mourning evolved.
Yet the skulls remain among the most distinctive and memorable features of historic burial grounds.
Today, they offer something more than an eerie visual connection to the past. They provide insight into the beliefs, craftsmanship, and everyday concerns of people who lived centuries ago.
The next time you encounter a winged skull on an old gravestone, remember that it wasn’t simply a frightening decoration.
It was a carefully chosen reminder of one of humanity’s oldest and most universal truths: life is temporary, and the passage of time matters.
🔗 Related Articles
- Why Are Graveyards Considered Haunted?
- Why Do People Tell Ghost Stories?
- What Is an Urban Legend? Origins, Examples, and Why We Believe Them
- History of Halloween: From Celtic Rituals to Modern Traditions
- Haunted Places and Halloween History
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- City of Boston — Iconography of Gravestones at Burying Grounds
- National Park Service — Skulls, Cherubs, and Willows: Interpreting Historic Gravestones
- Archaeology Magazine — Headstones for Dummies, the New York Edition
- Exeter Historical Society — Reading the Graveyard
- Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute — Death and Dying in Puritan New England
- Cambridge University Press — Death’s Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries
