The Wampanoag chieftain Metacomet, known as King Philip, led a confederation of tribes against the English colonists in 1675–76. Captured, he was punished as a traitor would have been in England, as Increase Mather describes: “cut into four quarters, […] hanged up as a monument of revenging Justice, his head being cut off and carried away to Plymouth, his Hands were brought to Boston” (A Brief 72). Philip's head presided over a day of “publick Thanksgiving” in Plymouth on August 17, 1676. In Mather's words: “God […] delivered Philip into their hands a few dayes before their intended Thanksgiving. Thus did God break the head of that Leviathan, and gave it to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness, and brought it to the Town of Plimouth the very day of their solemn Festival” (A Brief 73). This Thanksgiving is not commemorated in modern Plymouth. A few years later, Reverend Mather brought his son, Cotton, to view the head. The boy ripped the jawbone from King Philip's skull and kept it as a souvenir (Triumphs 107). Robert Lowell may be alluding to this event as well as to John the Baptist in his poem “At the Indian Killer's Grave”: “Philip's head / Grins on the platter” (56) and again in his sonnet “Concord”: “The death-dance of King Philip and his scream / Whose echo girdled this imperfect globe” (1946: 27).

The fate of King Philip's head demonstrates several themes of the New England Frontier Gothic to be examined in this chapter: Puritan visions of apocalypse; fear of organized attack by the indigenous peoples who are seen as monsters in life and after death; and later writers’ nostalgia for the “last of “ their race or guilt over their extinction. Puritan fears of attack by Satanic forces are also evident in accounts of witch trials and demonic possession, which became taproot texts for centuries of New England's Gothic literature.