Buried Alive : The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales - just think of The Premature Burial - may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1880s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the populace was high. It was speculated, from the number of skeletons found in horrible, contorted positions inside their coffins, that ten out of every one hundred people were buried before they were dead.
With over fifty illustrations, Buried Alive explores the medicine, folklore, history, and literature of Europe and the United States to uncover why such fears arose and whether they were warranted. Jan Bondeson looks at legends from the Renaisance of thieves awakening supposedly deceased women when they try to steal the women's jewelry, as well as people awakening on the way to their funerals or even later in the graveyard. He then looks at the bizarre nineteenth-century security coffins with bellropes or escape hatches, and the macabre waiting mortuaries for decaying corpses, as well as the writers who were inspired to use themes as premature burial in their work. Finally, he questions whether our medical criteria today for determining if someone is dead are truly reliable.

Jan Bondeson is a professor at the University of Wales College of Medicine.