 |
| Taberger's Safety Coffin allowed the interred person to ring a bell, alerting passersby. |
Halloween is almost upon us – and that means it’s time, once
again, to reflect upon death and dying. You've probably heard that, back in the day, people used to get buried alive all the
time. Snopes
documents several cases of inadvertent live burial, including the case of
one Marjorie Elphinstone, a Scottish lady who, in the early 17th
century, possibly scared a pack of grave robbers straight by turning out to
still be alive. In 1674, another Scottish Marjorie, a Ms. Halcrow Erskine, woke
up to find herself in a shallow grave, with a sexton trying to cut her rings
off. Both Marjories returned from the grave to live productive lives; history
tells us that Mrs. Elphinstone “outlived her husband by six years,” while Ms.
Halcrow Erskine later raised two sons.
Unfortunately, not all those who were buried alive got as
lucky as Marjorie Elphinstone and Marjorie Halcrow Erskine. William Tebb’s Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented
records, from 19th-century sources, 219 instances in which
someone almost got buried alive, 149 instances in which someone did get buried
alive, 10 cases in which someone got dissected while still alive (definitely
worse if you ask me), and two cases of the embalming process being started on a
still-alive person – a statistic that reminds me of a scary story my aunts used
to tell when I was a girl, in which an anonymous Confederate soldier gets
accidentally embalmed while still alive. Spoiler alert: he’s not still alive by
the end of the story.
Burial alive was common in the past for multiple reasons.
For one thing, people frequently fell victim to epidemics of plague, cholera,
smallpox, diphtheria, and other communicable diseases that packed the double
whammy of making a live person appear to be dead, while also making those definitely-alive
people in the near vicinity a reason to get that dead-looking person into the
ground/crypt ASAP, before the disease could spread. For another thing, as
reported in Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive:
The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, even medical professionals
disagreed on which were the real signs of death; was a person who had stopped
breathing dead? What about someone who no longer had a heart beat? What about
someone who had started to rot? No one could say for sure. Modern medicine was
in its infancy, after all.
So, historically, being buried alive was a common, and not
unfounded, fear; it did, after all, happen occasionally, and such eminent
figures as George Washington and Frederick Chopin requested, on their
deathbeds, that measures
be taken to ensure that they were really dead before they were buried. Eventually,
embalming would become popular; perhaps this was, to some extent, because the
embalming process ensured that if you weren’t actually dead yet, you would be
by the time they put you in the coffin. But Victorian-era inventors also saw a
gap in the market, and filled that gap with patents for safety coffins that purported to offer the
not-actually-dead with a means of rescue from the beneath the crushing weight
of the cold, cold earth. In her compelling volume Coffin Hardware in Nineteenth Century America, Megan
E. Springate writes that safety coffins were America’s answer to the
waiting mortuary, a European establishment in which corpses would be watched for a period of time prior to burial, to make sure they were really dead. There
were two basic kinds of safety devices installed in coffins: pre-burial
devices and post-burial devices. Pre-burial devices were predicated on the assumption
that the not-quite-dead person would revive prior to burial, perhaps at his or
her own funeral, when he or she could activate, for example, a spring-loaded coffin
lid that would allow him or her to pop right out of the coffin in front of the
mourners, a course of events that would no doubt ensure the immediate creation
of a new corpse to fill the recently-vacated casket. Those things aren’t cheap.
Post-burial devices were geared more toward the
not-quite-dead person who had the misfortune to awake when already underground.
The first such coffin, thought to have been designed
by Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick in the 18th century, was a simple
affair sporting an air hole, a window, and a lid that could be unlocked with a
key. This design had its flaws. Later designs implemented air pipes, ropes with
bells that could be rung, and even “smell tubes” that would allow passersby to
ascertain whether or not the presumed-dead person had started to rot, although
why you would want this information is beyond me. Such a device certainly seems
less than helpful to the person in the coffin.
 |
| Vester's Burial Case offered a more elaborate bell-ringing mechanism. |
While plenty of patents for safety coffins were filed, that
doesn’t mean they were popular. Patents are often filed for products that aren’t
ultimately produced or distributed. Safety coffins are often presented in pop
history accounts as having been all the rage back in the 19th
century, but according to Habenstein and Lamers’ The History of American Funeral Directing, it’s unlikely that any
of the patented safety coffins were actually produced. Springate tells us that “examples of safety coffins have rarely,
if ever, been identified archeologically,” and Bondeson points out that those
most afraid of premature burial would be just the types to worry that the safety
devices installed in their coffins would backfire – which, of course, makes
sense. Perhaps the most common safety precaution taken by those who feared burial alive was the inclusion of a loaded pistol, a vial of poison, or a knife, in the coffin, any of which could allow one to end one's misery in the case of a premature interment.
Coffin safety devices aren’t a relic of a bygone era; a
patent for a coffin alarm system was filed with the U.S. Patent
Office in 1983. Of course, we in modern times no longer have to worry about
being buried alive. The miracles of modern medicine have saved us from the
ravages of disease that spawned so much of the premature burial fears of
yesteryear – and our modern, enlightened doctors definitely know how to tell when
someone is dead. Just tell that to Tony
Yahle and Brian
Miller, two men who were both confirmed extremely dead by red-blooded
American medical professionals in the 21st century, and who both
literally came back to life, and are presumably still walking around out there
somewhere, as alive as you or me.
