... in doubtful cases of death
- polstarphotography
- Jan 3
- 4 min read
The Fear of Being Buried Alive: A Haunting Preoccupation
During one of my many digital expeditions through online museum and library collections, primarily to find images for collages, I stumbled upon a peculiar advertisement: the "Life-preserving coffin - in doubtful cases of death." While I was familiar with the concept of bell-ringing systems designed to alert the living if someone mistakenly awoke in their tomb (like Dr. Johann Gottfried Taberger's ingenious contraption), this "Life-Preserving Coffin" was a novelty.
Invented in 1843 by Christian Henry Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, MD, and manufactured by Bobeth and Shulenburg, this coffin boasted an ingenious (though likely impractical considering it didn't account for if the deceased was already 6 feet under) system.
As the inventor claimed, it featured
"an arrangement admitting of pure air, and with springs and levers on the inside, that the slightest motion of the inmate will be instantly communicated to the springs, which, freeing the coffin-lid, it flies open..."
This intriguing discovery sent me down a rabbit hole of research into the chilling phenomenon of premature burial. Perhaps the most famous literary example is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Before consuming the potion designed to mimic death, Juliet expresses her profound fear of being entombed alive:
"How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? There's a fearful point.
Shall I not then be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place—"
Her soliloquy vividly depicts the horror of waking in the suffocating confines of a tomb, surrounded by the remains of her ancestors.
Taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive, has long haunted the human imagination. Edgar Allan Poe, a master of the macabre, explored this morbid fascination in eight of his works, most notably in his 1844 essay "The Premature Burial" published in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper.
Poe articulated the sheer terror of this fate:
"To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality."
He highlighted the terrifying possibility of diseases that mimic death, where:
"We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality..."
"...that the well-known occurrence of such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise, now and then, to premature interments."
Poe chillingly described a woman afflicted with catalepsy, a condition characterized by rigidity and a waxy flexibility of the limbs, as described by the National Library of Medicine:
"A condition characterized by inactivity, decreased responsiveness to stimuli, and a tendency to maintain an immobile posture. The limbs tend to remain in whatever position they are placed (waxy flexibility)."
The narrator foreshadows his own anxieties about entrapment by recounting a tale of a woman prematurely buried.
"She presented all the ordinary appearances of death. The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lustreless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity. The funeral, in short, was hastened, on account of the rapid advance of what was supposed to be decomposition."
The horrific consequences of this misdiagnosis were tragically revealed when her husband, three years later, opened the tomb to find her decomposing corpse tumbling out upon him.
This harrowing tale deeply impacted the narrator, consuming him with a paralyzing fear of premature burial:
"In all that I endured there was no physical suffering but of moral distress an infinitude. My fancy grew charnel, I talked "of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs." I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain."
The Victorian era, with its morbid fascination with death, saw the rise of organizations dedicated to addressing this fear. The London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial, founded in 1896 by figures like social reformer William Tebb and physician Edward Perry Vollum (who himself had narrowly escaped premature burial), aimed to raise awareness and implement safeguards against this horrifying fate. Their book, Premature Burial and How it May Be Prevented serves as a testament to the enduring human anxiety surrounding this morbid possibility.
It is no wonder, then, that inventors like Eisenbrandt and Gottberger sought to devise methods of internment that could prevent such a horrific fate.
This brief exploration of mine into some of the history of taphephobia reveals a profound human fear, a testament to our deep-seated anxieties about mortality and the fragility of life itself. It's definitely a topic I will delve deeper into another time I'm sure.
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