Escape Coffins
by Joyce Gemperlein
JULY 21, 2009 TAGS:
How do zombies and vampires do it?
They make escaping a coffin that is six feet under look as easy as getting off the couch.
This comes to mind because zombies, the crazed, flesh-eating undead popularized by the 1968 George Romero film, Night of the Living Dead, and blood-sucking vampires, the best known being Dracula, are in vogue. Most recently, zombies are popping up in the incessant replays of the 1983 music video, “Thriller,” in which they unbury themselves niftily to join Michael Jackson in his street dance. Vampires are improbable lovers in Twilight, the modern teen novel and movie, and haunt the HBO series, True Blood.
Not that the idea of the undead has ever had a rest.
The thought-to-be-but-not-dead have continually reinforced the impression that it is a snap to rejoin the living in various cinematic forms ranging from Son of Dracula (1943) to Love at First Bite (1979) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) to Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) to Poultergeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) to Stripper Zombies (2008).
What fiction!
Throughout history, the possibility of being buried alive has terrified mankind precisely because it is hard – nay, impossible – to accomplish without help from the outside world.
In 2008, stars of the popular television show Mythbusters used a robot and human to test the notion that a less-final exit could be accomplished by punching open a coffin and digging out from under six feet of earth. The test failed because of the rapid filling of the coffin with dirt.
Even watching the Mythbusters test is a gut-wrenching, suffocating exercise, which attests to the notion that being buried alive is universally one of humans’ most primal fears, surpassing even that of death itself.
Nonetheless, the phobia has a rich and interesting history.
Fear of botch burials was much more common before the development of medical devices such as the stethoscope, which became commercially available in about 1852, but in 1846 was hailed by Paris scientists as a “means of preventing premature burials.”
According to Jan Bondeson in his fascinating and comprehensive book, Buried Alive (Norton, 2001), taphophobia peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries.
That’s when cholera was killing millions around the world, and quick burials were necessary to prevent its spread. (James Polk, the 11th president of the United States, died of it in 1849, the Russian composer Tchaikovsky in 1893.) Accounts were also rife of people who had died of diphtheria and were buried hurriedly, but whose bodies were outside the casket when their tombs were later opened.
Bondeson details other popular reports of corpses whose hands were found bloody and torn after their caskets were unearthed.
The writer Edgar Allan Poe did nothing to quell the panic in 1844 by publishing “The Premature Burial,” a horror story in which the protagonist is afflicted with a condition that causes a trance, making it appear that he has entered the great beyond.
History records other expressions of taphophobia in the thoughts of famous and learned people -- and in Rube-Goldberg-like inventions.
Consider this account of the nation’s first president’s final words on his deathbed on Dec. 14, 1799, as reported by the 1997 book, George Washington: A Life, by W.S. Randall:
“I am just going. Have me decently buried and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead. Do you understand?”
Or, as he was dying in 1849, the composer Frederic Chopin said: “The earth is suffocating. ... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive.”
According to Dr. Larry Dossey, the executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, people of that era often told relatives or set forth in their wills various measures that were to be taken after they were pronounced dead.
Dossey writes in the journal’s July/August 2007 edition that these instructions ranged from candles being held to their mouths, stabbings through the heart, boiling liquids or red-hot irons applied to a body or decapitation. Some coffins were fitted with nails that punctured tubes of poison gas if disturbed, just to make sure the person died and did not linger in terror.
The fear of being buried alive even became a sales pitch for embalmers after the Civil War, when the process became common. If a person was not really dead, the strong chemicals used in embalming were sure to kill him. (Cremation works, too.)
Victorian Americans in 1896 formed the Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive to advocate for giving suspected dead bodies a chance to resurrect. One publication at the time recommended burial only after the sight and smell of putrefaction were evident.
But perhaps the most interesting manifestations of taphophobia are “safety coffins” or “escape coffins.”
The simplest such coffin was “Bateson’s Belfry,” named after its Victorian-era creator George Bateson of England. It consisted of a bell on top of the ground above a buried casket with a rope that was attached to the deceased’s hand.
Dossey notes that Bateson was so afraid of being buried alive that “in 1886, driven mad by his dread, he committed suicide by dousing himself with linseed oil and setting himself on fire.”
Dossey also tells of a mechanism patented in 1897 in Belgium that consisted of a spring-loaded device that sat on a corpse’s chest to detect body movement. Such moving opened a box on the surface to admit air into the coffin; a flag would also spring up, a bell would ring and a lamp would light.
Thomas Pursell, a retired fireman who lived in Williamsport, Pa., was consumed with the fear of being buried alive and so designed a ventilated, felt-lined (to prevent injury from flailing around) vault for himself and four family members. It could be opened from the inside, but not the outside.
In 1937, at the age of 83, he was buried in the vault in Williamsport’s Wildwood Cemetery, which resembles a large pizza oven with five metal doors. Pursell was entombed, McGyver-like, with a board or two, an ax, a hammer and a piece of bread.
According to Buried Alive, Angelo Hays, a Frenchman, in the 1970s, wanted comfort. He invented a security coffin that cost as much as a car. It had thick upholstering and a soft pillow, was deep enough for the undead to sit up and read some of the books it held and raid its food locker. It had an oxygen supply, a toilet, a shortwave radio transmitter and receiver with an aerial that protruded into the cemetery.
Hays undertook his venture after actually having recovered from being buried while in a coma. His body was exhumed two days later due to an insurance investigation and found to be still warm, according to Bondeson.
Dossey notes that between 1868 and 1925, Americans applied for 22 patents for “life-signaling” coffins. Innovations included ladders, feeding tubes, windows and more.
In 1983 the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for a coffin electronic alarm system triggered by body movement. In Italy, one system incorporated a beeper and intercom.
And now, reports flow in from around the world of people who are buried with their cell phones just in case they wake up and need to be rescued.
Despite all this new technology, Dossey notes that there is no historical record of the successful use of an escape coffin.
Undeterred, Arizona multimillionaire John Dackeney, who died in 1969, was buried in a huge security vault he had built for himself, according to Bondeson. It contained an alarm and steel doors that opened for three hours every night for the first 12 weeks after he died.
Hundreds of people visited the site to see if he – or, presumably, a vampire or zombie -- would wander out.
But he, like Pursell and the others, has not been seen since.
Joyce Gemperlein is a regular contributor to Obit.
They make escaping a coffin that is six feet under look as easy as getting off the couch.
This comes to mind because zombies, the crazed, flesh-eating undead popularized by the 1968 George Romero film, Night of the Living Dead, and blood-sucking vampires, the best known being Dracula, are in vogue. Most recently, zombies are popping up in the incessant replays of the 1983 music video, “Thriller,” in which they unbury themselves niftily to join Michael Jackson in his street dance. Vampires are improbable lovers in Twilight, the modern teen novel and movie, and haunt the HBO series, True Blood.Not that the idea of the undead has ever had a rest.
The thought-to-be-but-not-dead have continually reinforced the impression that it is a snap to rejoin the living in various cinematic forms ranging from Son of Dracula (1943) to Love at First Bite (1979) to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) to Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) to Poultergeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006) to Stripper Zombies (2008).
What fiction!
Throughout history, the possibility of being buried alive has terrified mankind precisely because it is hard – nay, impossible – to accomplish without help from the outside world.
In 2008, stars of the popular television show Mythbusters used a robot and human to test the notion that a less-final exit could be accomplished by punching open a coffin and digging out from under six feet of earth. The test failed because of the rapid filling of the coffin with dirt.
Even watching the Mythbusters test is a gut-wrenching, suffocating exercise, which attests to the notion that being buried alive is universally one of humans’ most primal fears, surpassing even that of death itself.
Nonetheless, the phobia has a rich and interesting history.
Fear of botch burials was much more common before the development of medical devices such as the stethoscope, which became commercially available in about 1852, but in 1846 was hailed by Paris scientists as a “means of preventing premature burials.”
According to Jan Bondeson in his fascinating and comprehensive book, Buried Alive (Norton, 2001), taphophobia peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries.
That’s when cholera was killing millions around the world, and quick burials were necessary to prevent its spread. (James Polk, the 11th president of the United States, died of it in 1849, the Russian composer Tchaikovsky in 1893.) Accounts were also rife of people who had died of diphtheria and were buried hurriedly, but whose bodies were outside the casket when their tombs were later opened.
Bondeson details other popular reports of corpses whose hands were found bloody and torn after their caskets were unearthed.
The writer Edgar Allan Poe did nothing to quell the panic in 1844 by publishing “The Premature Burial,” a horror story in which the protagonist is afflicted with a condition that causes a trance, making it appear that he has entered the great beyond.
History records other expressions of taphophobia in the thoughts of famous and learned people -- and in Rube-Goldberg-like inventions. Consider this account of the nation’s first president’s final words on his deathbed on Dec. 14, 1799, as reported by the 1997 book, George Washington: A Life, by W.S. Randall:
“I am just going. Have me decently buried and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead. Do you understand?”
Or, as he was dying in 1849, the composer Frederic Chopin said: “The earth is suffocating. ... Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive.”
According to Dr. Larry Dossey, the executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, people of that era often told relatives or set forth in their wills various measures that were to be taken after they were pronounced dead.
Dossey writes in the journal’s July/August 2007 edition that these instructions ranged from candles being held to their mouths, stabbings through the heart, boiling liquids or red-hot irons applied to a body or decapitation. Some coffins were fitted with nails that punctured tubes of poison gas if disturbed, just to make sure the person died and did not linger in terror.
The fear of being buried alive even became a sales pitch for embalmers after the Civil War, when the process became common. If a person was not really dead, the strong chemicals used in embalming were sure to kill him. (Cremation works, too.)
Victorian Americans in 1896 formed the Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive to advocate for giving suspected dead bodies a chance to resurrect. One publication at the time recommended burial only after the sight and smell of putrefaction were evident.
But perhaps the most interesting manifestations of taphophobia are “safety coffins” or “escape coffins.”
The simplest such coffin was “Bateson’s Belfry,” named after its Victorian-era creator George Bateson of England. It consisted of a bell on top of the ground above a buried casket with a rope that was attached to the deceased’s hand.
Dossey notes that Bateson was so afraid of being buried alive that “in 1886, driven mad by his dread, he committed suicide by dousing himself with linseed oil and setting himself on fire.”
Dossey also tells of a mechanism patented in 1897 in Belgium that consisted of a spring-loaded device that sat on a corpse’s chest to detect body movement. Such moving opened a box on the surface to admit air into the coffin; a flag would also spring up, a bell would ring and a lamp would light.
Thomas Pursell, a retired fireman who lived in Williamsport, Pa., was consumed with the fear of being buried alive and so designed a ventilated, felt-lined (to prevent injury from flailing around) vault for himself and four family members. It could be opened from the inside, but not the outside.In 1937, at the age of 83, he was buried in the vault in Williamsport’s Wildwood Cemetery, which resembles a large pizza oven with five metal doors. Pursell was entombed, McGyver-like, with a board or two, an ax, a hammer and a piece of bread.
According to Buried Alive, Angelo Hays, a Frenchman, in the 1970s, wanted comfort. He invented a security coffin that cost as much as a car. It had thick upholstering and a soft pillow, was deep enough for the undead to sit up and read some of the books it held and raid its food locker. It had an oxygen supply, a toilet, a shortwave radio transmitter and receiver with an aerial that protruded into the cemetery.
Hays undertook his venture after actually having recovered from being buried while in a coma. His body was exhumed two days later due to an insurance investigation and found to be still warm, according to Bondeson.
Dossey notes that between 1868 and 1925, Americans applied for 22 patents for “life-signaling” coffins. Innovations included ladders, feeding tubes, windows and more.
In 1983 the U.S. Patent Office issued a patent for a coffin electronic alarm system triggered by body movement. In Italy, one system incorporated a beeper and intercom.
And now, reports flow in from around the world of people who are buried with their cell phones just in case they wake up and need to be rescued.
Despite all this new technology, Dossey notes that there is no historical record of the successful use of an escape coffin.
Undeterred, Arizona multimillionaire John Dackeney, who died in 1969, was buried in a huge security vault he had built for himself, according to Bondeson. It contained an alarm and steel doors that opened for three hours every night for the first 12 weeks after he died.
Hundreds of people visited the site to see if he – or, presumably, a vampire or zombie -- would wander out.
But he, like Pursell and the others, has not been seen since.
Joyce Gemperlein is a regular contributor to Obit.
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