Thanks to Nate Parker’s controversial (and apparently struggling) film, The Birth of a Nation, the story of Nat Turner has once again pricked America’s popular imagination.

For those who don’t know, Turner led one of the bloodiest slave rebellions in American history in the year 1831. When it was all said and done 55 white men, women and children lay dead.

Retribution against the black community was swift and fierce. More than 200 African Americans in Virginia lost their lives as payback, but Turner was able to initially escape into the woods. After two months on the lam he was captured, tried, and executed by hanging on Nov. 11, 1831, in the town of Jerusalem, now Courtland, Va.

What happened to his remains was a mystery. Until now.