Premature burial,
also known as live burial, burial alive, or vivisepulture means to be buried while still alive.
Animals or humans may be buried alive accidentally on the
mistaken assumption that they are dead, or intentionally as a form of torture,
murder, or execution. It may also occur with the consent of the victim as a part of
a stunt, with the intention to escape.
Fear of being buried alive is reported to be among the most
common phobias.
Biology
Premature burial
can lead to death through the following: asphyxiation, dehydration, starvation,
or (in cold climates) hypothermia. A person trapped with fresh air to breathe
can last a considerable time and burial has been used as a very cruel method of
execution (as in cases of Vestal Virgins
who violated the oath of celibacy), lasting sufficiently long for the victim to
comprehend and imagine every stage of what is happening (being trapped in total
darkness with very limited or no movement) and to experience great
psychological and physical torment including extreme panic. The medical term
for the fear of being buried alive is taphophobia.
Unintentional
At least one (almost certainly apocryphal) report of
accidental burial dates back to the fourteenth century. Upon the reopening of
his tomb, the philosopher John Duns
Scotus (1266–1308) was reportedly found outside his coffin with his hands
torn and bloody after attempting to escape. This now is believed to be a myth. Alice Blunden of Basingstoke was said in a contemporaneous account to have been
buried alive, not once but twice, in 1674.
Revivals of supposed "corpses"
have been triggered by dropped coffins, grave robbers, embalming, and attempted
dissections. Folklorist Paul Barber has argued that the
incidence of unintentional live burial has been overestimated, and that the
normal, physical effects of decomposition are sometimes misinterpreted as signs
that the person whose remains are being exhumed had revived in his or her
coffin. Nevertheless, patients have been
documented as late as the 1890s as accidentally being sent to the morgue or
trapped in a steel box after erroneously being declared dead.
Newspapers have reported cases of exhumed corpses which
appear to have been accidentally buried alive. On February 21, 1885, The New York Times gave a disturbing account
of such a case. The victim was a man from Buncombe
County whose name was given as "Jenkins".
His body was found turned over onto its front inside the coffin, with much of
his hair pulled out. Scratch marks were also visible on all sides of the
coffin's interior. His family were reportedly "distressed beyond measure at the criminal carelessness" associated
with the case. Another similar story was
reported in The Times on January 18,
1886, the victim of this case being described simply as a "girl" named "Collins"
from Woodstock, Ontario, Canada. Her
body was described as being found with the knees tucked up under the body, and
her burial shroud "torn into
shreds".
In 2001, a body bag was delivered to the Matarese Funeral Home in Ashland, Massachusetts with a live occupant.
Funeral director John Matarese
discovered this, called paramedics, and avoided live embalming or premature
burial.
In 2014 in Peraia,
Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, Greece,
the police discovered that a 45-year-old woman was buried alive and died of
asphyxia after being declared clinically dead by a private hospital; she was
discovered just shortly after being buried, by children playing near the
cemetery who heard screams from inside the earth and afterwards her family was
reported as considering suing the private hospital. In 2015 it was reported that a separate
incident also occurred in 2014 in Peraia,
Thessaloniki. In Macedonia, Greece,
police investigation concluded that a 49-year-old woman was buried alive after
being declared dead due to cancer; her family reported that they could hear her
scream from inside the earth at the cemetery shortly after burial, and the
investigation revealed that she died of heart failure inside the coffin and
found out that it was the medicines given to her by her doctors for her cancer
that caused her to be declared clinically dead and buried alive.
Attempts at
prevention
Robert Robinson
died in Manchester in 1791. A
movable glass pane was inserted in his coffin, and the mausoleum had a door for
purposes of inspection by a watchman, who was to see if he breathed on the
glass. He instructed his relatives to visit his grave periodically to check
that he was actually dead.
Safety coffins were devised to prevent premature burial,
although there is no evidence that any have ever been successfully used to save
an accidentally buried person. On 5 December 1882, J. G. Krichbaum received U.S.
Patent 268,693 for his "Device
For Life In Buried Persons". It consisted of a movable periscope-like
pipe which provided air and, when rotated or pushed by the person interred,
indicated to passersby that someone was buried alive. The patent text refers to
"that class of devices for
indicating life in buried persons", suggesting that such inventions
were common at the time.
In 1890, a family designed and built a burial vault at the Wildwood Cemetery in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with an
internal hatch to allow the victim of accidental premature burial to escape.
The vault had an air supply and was lined in felt to protect a panic-stricken
victim from self-inflicted injury before escape. Bodies were to be removed from
the casket before interment.
As an execution
method
The burning of books and burying of scholars (simplified Chinese: 焚书坑儒; traditional Chinese: 焚書坑儒; pinyin:
fénshū kēngrú) was a supposed suppression of intellectual thought carried out
by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor
of a unified China. Books and texts
deemed to be subversive were burned and 460 Confucian
scholars were reportedly buried alive in 212 BC. Modern scholars doubt these events – Sima Qian, author of the account of
these events in the Records of the Grand
Historian, was an official of the Han
dynasty, which could be expected to portray the previous rulers
unfavorably.
Tacitus, in his
work Germania, records that German tribes practiced two forms of
capital punishment; the first where the victim was hanged from a tree, and
another where the victim was tied to a wicker frame, pushed face down into mud,
and buried. The first was used to make an example of traitors; the second was
used for punishment of dishonorable or shameful vices, such as cowardice.
According to Tacitus, the Ancient Germans thought that crime should
be exposed, whereas infamy should be buried out of sight.
In Ancient Persia,
Herodotus in his book Histories
records that burying people alive was a Persian
custom, which they practice in order to be blessed by gods
They [Xerxes and his troops] marched into
the Nine Ways of the Edonian to the
bridges, and found the banks of the Strymon
united by a bridge, but being informed that this place was called by the
name of the Nine Ways, they buried
alive so many in it so many sons and daughter of inhabitants. It is a Persian custom to bury people alive for
I have heard that Amestris, wife of Xerxes, having grown old, caused
fourteen children of the best families in Persia
to be buried alive, to show her gratitude to the god who is said to be beneath
the earth.
In ancient Rome,
a Vestal Virgin convicted of
violating her vows of celibacy was "buried
alive" by being sealed in a cave with a small amount of bread and
water, ostensibly so that the goddess Vesta
could save her were she truly innocent, essentially making it into a trial by
ordeal. This practice was, strictly speaking, immurement (i.e., being walled up
and left to die) rather than premature burial. According to Christian tradition, a number of saints
were martyred this way, including Saint
Castulus and Saint Vitalis of Milan.
In Denmark, in
the Ribe city statute, which was
promulgated in 1269, a female thief was to be buried alive, and in the law by Queen Margaret I, adulterous women were
to be punished with premature burial, men with beheading.
Within the Holy Roman
Empire a variety of offenses, including rape, infanticide, and theft, could
be punished with live burial. For example, the Schwabenspiegel, a law code from the 13th century, specified that
the rape of a virgin should be punished by live burial (whereas the rapist of a
non-virgin was to be beheaded). Female
murderers of their own employers also risked being buried alive. In Augsburg in 1505, for example, a
12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl were found guilty of killing their
master in conspiracy with the cook. The boy was beheaded, and the girl and the
cook were buried alive beneath the gallows. The jurist Eduard Henke observed that in the Middle Ages, live burial of women guilty of infanticide was a "very frequent" punishment in
city statutes and Landrechten. For
example, he notes those in Hesse,
Bohemia, and Tyrol. The Berlinisches
Stadtbuch records that between 1412 and 1447, 10 women were buried alive
there, and as late as in 1583, the archbishop of Bremen promulgated (alongside the somewhat milder 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina
punishment of drowning) live burial as an alternate execution method for
punishing mothers found guilty of infanticide.
As noted by Elias
Pufendorf, a woman buried alive would afterwards be impaled through the
heart. This combined punishment of live burial and impalement was practiced in Nuremberg until 1508 also for women
found guilty of theft, but the city council decided in 1515 that the punishment
was too cruel and opted for drowning instead. Impalement was, however, not always mentioned
together with live burial.
Eduard Osenbrüggen
relates how the live burial of a woman convicted of infanticide could be
pronounced in a court verdict. For example, in a 1570 case in Ensisheim:
The verdict commanded
the executioner to place the perpetrator in the grave alive, "and place two layers of thorns, the
one beneath, the other above her. Prior to that he should place a bowl over her
face, in which he had made a hole, and to give her through that (in order that
she would live for a longer time and expiate the evil act she was condemned
for), a reed/tube into the mouth, then jump three times upon her, and lastly
cover her with earth".
In this particular case, however, some noblewomen made an
appeal for mercy, and the convicted woman was drowned instead.
Dieter Furcht
speculates that the impalement was not so much to be regarded as an execution
method, but as a way to prevent the condemned from becoming an avenging, undead
Wiedergänger. In
medieval Italy, unrepentant
murderers were buried alive, head down, feet in the air, a practice referred to
in passing in Canto XIX of Dante's Inferno.
In the Faroe Islands,
a powerful 14th-century woman landowner in the village of Húsavík was said to have buried two servants alive.
In the 16th-century Habsburg
Netherlands, where the Catholic authorities
made a prolonged effort to stamp out the Protestant
churches, live burial was commonly used as the punishment of women found guilty
of heresy. The last to be so executed was Anna
Utenhoven, an Anabaptist buried
alive at Vilvoorde in 1597.
Reportedly, when her head was still above the ground she was given a last
chance to recant her faith, and upon her refusal she was completely covered up
and suffocated. The case aroused a great deal of protest in the rebellious
northern provinces, and foiled the peace feelers which King Philip III was at the time extending to the Dutch. Thereafter the Habsburg authorities avoided further
such cases, punishing heresy with fines and deportations rather than death.
Into the seventeenth century in feudal Russia, live burial as execution method was known as "the pit" and used against
women who were condemned for killing their husbands. In 1689, the punishment of
live burial was changed to beheading. Live burial of Jews in such countries as Ukraine
is reported; for example some instances occurred during the Chmielnicki Massacre (1648–1649) in Ukraine.
Among some contemporary indigenous people of Brazil with no or limited contact with
the outside world, children with disabilities or other undesirable traits are
still customarily buried alive.
Modern examples
There have been a number of cases of people pronounced
incorrectly dead and buried alive thereafter.
Natural disasters
Natural disasters (earthquakes, landslides, mudslides,
avalanches) have also buried people alive, as well as collapsing mines.
Wars
It has been used during wars and by mafia organizations.
Serbian officials
are documented to have buried alive Bulgarian
civilians from Pehčevo (now in the Republic of North Macedonia) during the
Balkan Wars. During World
War II, Japanese soldiers were
documented to have buried Chinese
civilians alive, notably during the Nanking
Massacre. This method of execution
was also used by German leaders
against Jews in Ukraine and Belarus
during World War II.
During the Gulf War,
Iraqi soldiers were knowingly buried
alive by American tanks of the First Infantry Division shoveling earth
into their trenches. Estimates for the number of soldiers killed this way vary:
one source puts it at "between 80
and 250", while Col. Anthony
Moreno suggested it may have been thousands.
In 2014, ISIS
buried Yazidi women and children
alive in an attempt to annihilate the Yazidi
tribe.
Execution
There are also accounts of the Khmer Rouge using premature burials as a form of execution in the Killing Fields.
During Mao Zedong's
regime, there are some accounts that premature burials were used in executions.
Voluntary
On rare occasions, people have willingly arranged to be
buried alive, reportedly as a demonstration of their controversial ability to
survive such an event. In one story taking place around 1840, Sadhu Haridas, an Indian fakir, is said to have been buried in the presence of a British military officer and under the
supervision of the local maharajah, by being placed in a sealed bag in a wooden
box in a vault. The vault was then interred, earth was flattened over the site
and crops were sown over the place for a very long time. The whole location was
guarded day and night to prevent fraud and the site was dug up twice in a
ten-month period to verify the burial, before the fakir was finally dug out and
slowly revived in the presence of another officer. The fakir said that his only
fear during his "wonderful
sleep" was to be eaten by underground worms. However, according to
current medical science, it is not possible for a human to survive for a period
of ten months without food, water, and air. According to other sources the entire burial
was 40 days long. The Indian
government has since made the act of voluntary premature burial illegal,
because of the unintended deaths of individuals attempting to recreate this
feat.
In 1992, escape artist Bill
Shirk was buried alive under seven tons of dirt and cement in a Plexiglas coffin, which collapsed and
almost took Shirk's life.
In 2010 a Russian
man died after being buried alive to try to overcome his fear of death but he
was crushed to death by the earth on top of him. The following year, another Russian died after being buried
overnight in a makeshift coffin "for
good luck".
Buried Alive is a
controversial art and lecture performance series by art-tech group monochrom.
Participants have the opportunity to be buried alive in a coffin for fifteen to
twenty minutes. As a framework program monochrom offers lectures about the
history of the science of determining death and the medical cultural history of
premature burial.
Myths and legends
St. Oran was a
druid living on the Island of Iona
in Scotland's Inner Hebrides. He
became a follower of St. Columba,
who brought Christianity to Iona from Ireland in 563 AD. When St.
Columba had repeated problems building the original Iona Abbey, citing interference from the Devil, St. Oran offered
himself as a human sacrifice and was buried alive. He was later dug up and
found to be still alive, but he uttered such words describing what of the
afterlife he had seen and how it involved no heaven or hell, that he was
ordered to be covered up again. The building of the abbey went ahead,
untroubled, and St. Oran's chapel
marks the spot where the saint was buried.
In the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries, a popular
tale about premature burial in European
folklore was the "Lady with the
Ring". In the story, a woman who was prematurely buried awakens to
frighten a grave robber who is attempting to cut a ring off her finger.
The TV show MythBusters tested the myth to see if
someone could survive being buried alive for two hours before being rescued.
Host Jamie Hyneman attempted the
feat, but when his steel coffin began to bend under the weight of the earth
used to cover it, the experiment was aborted.
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