Martin Christ | University of Erfurt
At first sight, the division between life and death seems a rather definitive one. At the moment a person expires, a set of religious rituals and legal rules are set in motion to indicate a significant change. In most cases, these rituals are unique to the treatment of the dead and merely echo what went on in life. In modern medicine, the absence of life signs, such as heartbeat and brain activity, might indicate that a person is deceased.
But the boundary between life and death was never really fixed. The belief in ghosts and the undead illustrates that in the imagination of many people, there are many things between life and death. The fact that such stories of the undead seemingly exist in all cultures and time periods shows how powerful the idea is that the dead were not entirely gone. This article considers another kind of liminal state between life and death, that of those people who were buried alive.
In eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, the fear of being buried alive cut across national and gender boundaries, and sources from a wide range of countries indicate that this was a common problem for many people living in this period. It led to some individuals calling for the removal of their hearts or opening of their arteries when declared dead to ensure that they were really dead. Strikingly, many of the sources that discuss this problem form part of an intellectual medical discourse that preoccupied scientists in the eighteenth century. Therefore, the fear of being buried alive was not some “popular superstition” but rather the opposite. It was especially the elites who were concerned about premature burial, and they were the ones who could afford measures to avoid a premature burial, leading to a raft of inventions that cashed in on this fear of being buried alive.
The fear of being buried alive even has a scientific term: Taphophobia. It was not unique to the eighteenth century but is already attested in antiquity. However, in the later eighteenth century, it gained new traction and was once again featured as part of an Enlightenment discourse on the appropriate treatment of the body. The most common story was that of noises emanating from the coffin of a “dead” person. The fears continued into the nineteenth century, resulting in ever more elaborate coffin designs.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), amongst others, expressed his fear of being buried alive. He integrated his own fears into several of his stories, which contain accounts of people being buried alive, most notably in The Premature Burial (see Illustration 1). After giving an account of cases of live burial, the first-person narrator explains that he suffers from catalepsy, resulting in occasional bouts of unconsciousness that may be misinterpreted as death. This, in turn, led to the narrator being afraid of a burial prior to his death. The story concludes with the remarks that:
'There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell -- but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! The grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful -- but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us -- they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.'
While there were some cases in which people were actually buried alive, perhaps more important (and historically interesting) is the fear of being buried alive itself. It was the reason for a range of measures that are indicative of broader societal and cultural changes in the treatment of the dead. One result of the fear of being buried alive was the increase in demand for safety coffins (see illustration 2 for an example). The first safety coffins were attested in late eighteenth-century Germany, and subsequent decades, they became ever more intricate. Indeed, Poe’s protagonist mentioned above also remodels a grave with various contraptions to prevent being buried alive. Safety coffins were also advertised by undertakers, and they contained various measures to help someone who was locked in a coffin and was not dead (yet). One common variety of this kind of coffin had a rope attached to the hand or finger of the corpse that was then connected to a bell or, alternatively, a bell directly installed inside the coffin to enable the living corpse to draw attention to him or herself. In rare cases, coffins could also contain glass lids or sides made of glass to enable onlookers to determine if a person opened their eyes again.
Besides these efforts to look for audio-visual signs that a person was still alive, other inventions were aimed at ensuring a person could stay alive in the first place. This included breathing tubes that were supposed to enable a person to keep breathing until they were discovered. Various patents, especially those granted in the nineteenth century, indicate the ongoing concern for the not-quite-dead and how to prevent wrong burials. It is no coincidence, of course, that inventors wanted to gain recognition for their inventions. Their inventions were not just supposed to ensure people were not wrongly buried alive, but just as much played to a trend that enabled them to make money and sell new coffin designs. The business with the dead was always a lucrative one.
In the nineteenth century, there was also another trend when it came to the not-quite-dead: satire and humour. For example, in an aquatint from 1805, a man reemerges from his coffin to surprise his wife, who seems shocked rather than delighted (illustration 3). Fear and laughter made for good bedfellows in the minds of these authors. In other cases, authors used the image of important political or religious figures speaking again to illustrate that their ideas remained relevant. This was the case in a text printed in 1727, which, in reference to Hebrews, argued that the theologian William Penn was “dead yet speaketh”.
Medical advances make it less likely that people are wrongly declared dead in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, though some cases where this happened still find their way into newspaper articles. A particularly striking case occurred in Kazan, Russia, in 2011. Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov was wrongly declared dead and managed to escape her coffin but was so shocked by her own funeral that she died, and this time for real. Moreover, the recurrence of the theme in fictional iterations, from TV shows to novels, speaks to the fact that people can still relate to the fear of being buried alive. It seems that even in modernity, the boundary between life and death is not as fixed as it might seem at first.
Further Reading:
Jan Bondeson, Buried Alive: the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear (New York: Norton, 2001).
Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead. A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
D. Lawrence Tarazano, “People Feared Being Buried Alive So Much They Invented These Special Safety Coffins. For centuries, inventors have been patenting technology to prevent such a nightmare from happening”, Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/people-feared-being-buried-alive-so-much-they-invented-these-special-safety-coffins-180970627/
Joseph Taylor, The danger of premature interment: proved from many remarkable instances, (London, 1816).
William Tebb, Premature burial, and how it may be prevented, with special reference to trance catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation, ed. Walter Hadwen, Swan, (London, 1905).
Martin Christ studied History at the Universities of Warwick and St. Andrews. He completed his PhD on the Reformation in Upper Lusatia at the University of Oxford in 2017. The research was published as Biographies of a Reformation. Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, c. 1520-1635 (OUP, 2022) and won three international book prizes. In 2024, he completed his second major research project on funerals and burial spaces in London and Munich, c. 1550-1870. He has published widely on urban history, the history of death and burial and religious history. Since 2018 he is a post-doctoral researcher in the research group “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (DFG FOR 2779) in Erfurt.