Premature burial

For other uses, see Buried Alive.

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Antoine Wiertz's painting of a man buried alive

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 or intentionally. Intentional burial may occur as a form of torture, murder, or execution; it may also occur with consent of the victim as a part of a stunt (with the intention to escape) or as a form of suicide. The victim may also be buried by others in the mistaken assumption that they are dead. Live burial is said to be one of the most widespread of human fears.

Biology

Premature burial leads to death through one or more of the following: asphyxiation, dehydration, starvation, or (in cold climates) hypothermia. Although human survival may be briefly extended in some environments as body metabolism slows, in the absence of oxygen, which is likely to be within 1–2 hours from burial time based on the consumption level, loss of consciousness will take place within 2 to 4 minutes and death by asphyxia within 5 to 15 minutes.^{[citation needed]} Permanent brain damage through oxygen starvation is likely after a few minutes, even if the person is rescued before death.^{[citation needed]} If fresh air is accessible in some way, survival is more likely to be in the order of days in the absence of serious injury.

A person trapped with air to breathe can thus last a considerable time, and burial has been used as a very cruel method of execution (as in case 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 panic and extreme claustrophobia. The medical term for the irrational fear of being buried alive is taphephobia.

Unintentional

A burial vault built c. 1890 with internal escape hatches to allow the victim of accidental premature burial to escape.

At least one (almost certainly apocryphal) report of accidental burial dates back to the thirteenth century. The philosopher John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was reportedly, upon the reopening of his tomb, found outside his coffin with his hands torn and bloody after attempting to escape.

Revivals of supposed "corpses" have been triggered by dropped coffins, grave robbers, embalming, and attempted dissections. Fearing premature burial, George Washington, on his deathbed, made his servants promise not to bury him until two days after his death. Folklorist Paul Barber has argued that the incidence of unintentional live burial has been overestimated, and that the normal effects of decomposition are sometimes misinterpreted as signs that the person whose remains are being exhumed revived in his or her coffin, but patients have nevertheless been documented as accidentally being bagged, trapped in a steel box, or sent to the morgue after erroneously being declared dead as late as the 1890s.

Newspapers have reported cases of exhumed corpses who 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."

"Safety coffins" have been devised to prevent premature burial, although there is no evidence that any has ever been successfully used to save an accidentally buried person. On 5 December 1882, J. G. Krichbaum received US Patent 268693 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.

Count Karnice-Karnicki of Belgium, after witnessing the revival of a friend's daughter as her coffin was lowered into the ground, patented a rescue device in 1897, which mechanically detected chest movement to trigger a flag, lamp, bell, and fresh air. Along similar lines, in the United Kingdom, various systems were developed to save those buried alive, including breakable glass panels in the coffin lid and pulley systems which would raise flags or ring bells on the surface. Without air supply, as in the Italian model, this naturally would be useless without vigilant guards above ground. As such, undertakers were hired to stay in the graveyard at night to watch out for such signals. 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.

Execution

Chinese civilians being buried alive during the Nanking Massacre

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. 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 medieval Italy, unrepentant murderers were buried alive. This practice is referred to in passing in canto XIX of Dante's Inferno.

In ancient China, during the Warring States period, 400,000 soldiers of the kingdom of Zhao are supposed to have been buried alive after they surrendered to the armies of Qin in the Battle of Changping in 260 BC. During the reign of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi it is said that approximately 400-700 scholars were buried alive near the capital in Burning of books and burying of scholars. They were condemned for saving books from destruction after an imperial ban on the classics, ordered by the emperor in order to strengthen his reign and secure his legitimization, by eliminating other social and historical narratives. After the emperor's death, the warlord Xiang Yu defeated Qin's armies at the Battle of Julu in 207 B.C., and is said to have ordered that the 200,000 surviving Qin soldiers be buried alive.

Within the Holy Roman Empire a variety of offenses like 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 woman was to be beheaded). Female murderers of their own family, or of their own employers, could also risk to be buried alive. In Augsburg 1505, 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, the girl and the cook were buried alive beneath the gallows. The jurist Henke observes 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, Tyrol. The "Berlinisches Stadtbuch" records that 10 women between 1412-47 were buried alive there, and as late as in 1583, the archbishop of Bremen promulgated (alongside with the somewhat milder 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina punishment of drowning) live burial as an alternate execution method for mothers found guilty of infanticide. As noted in, a woman buried alive would then afterwards be impaled through the heart.This combined punishment of live burial+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 a live burial of a woman convicted of infanticide could be carried out, and actually occurred, for example, in a case in Ensisheim from 1570:

Das Urtheil befahl dem Nachrichter, die Thäterin lebendig in das Grab zu legen, "und zwo Wellen Dornen, die eine under, die ander uff sie, -, doch das es Irn zuvor ein Schüssel uff das Angesicht legen, in welche er ein Loch machen und ihr durch dasselb (damit sie desto lenger leben und bemelte böse Misshandlung abbiesen möge) ein Ror in Mund geben, volgens uff sie drey spring thun und sie darnach mit Erden bedecken solle"

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 tube into the mouth, then jump three times upon her, and lastly cover her with earth

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 to become an avenging, undead Wiedergänger.

In Denmark, in the 1269 promulgated Ribe city statute, 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.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in feudal Russia, live burial as execution method was known as "the pit" and used against women who were condemned for killing their husbands. During World War II, Japanese soldiers were documented to have buried Chinese civilians alive, notably during the Nanking Massacre.

This kind of execution was used by nazis against soviet people during World War II.

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 accounts that premature burials used in executions.

In July 2012, a deformed baby girl was allegedly buried alive by her father in Khanewal, Pakistan.

Voluntary burial

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. 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.

During his career, Hungarian-American magician and escapologist Harry Houdini performed two variations on a "Buried Alive" stunt/escape. The first was near Santa Ana, California in 1917, and it almost cost Houdini his life. Houdini was buried, without a casket, in a pit of earth six feet deep. He became exhausted and panicky trying to dig his way to the surface and called for help. When his hand finally broke the surface, he fell unconscious and had to be pulled from the grave by his assistants. Houdini wrote in his diary that the escape was "very dangerous" and that "the weight of the earth is killing."

Houdini's second variation on Buried Alive was an endurance test designed to expose a mystical Egyptian performer who claimed to use supernatural powers to remain in a sealed casket for an hour. Houdini bettered that claim on August 5, 1926, by remaining in a sealed casket submerged in the swimming pool of New York's Hotel Shelton for an hour and a half. Houdini claimed he did not use any trickery or supernatural powers to accomplish this feat, just controlled breathing.

The practice of being buried alive is not uncommon in Russia; in 2010 a man died after being buried alive to try and overcome his fear of death when 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".

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 (and mainland Europe) from Ireland in 563 AD. When St. Columba had repeated problems building the original Iona Abbey, citing interferences 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. The MythBusters also tested whether someone could batter their way out of a buried coffin (as in Kill Bill Volume 2), and decided it was not remotely possible.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Safety coffin
• Immurement
• List of premature obituaries
• Lazarus syndrome, spontaneous return of circulation after failed attempts at resuscitation
• Locked-in syndrome, medical condition described as "the closest thing to being buried alive"
• Edgar Allan Poe returned to the topic of being buried alive repeatedly in his writing. Stories that include the trope include "The Premature Burial", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "Berenice".

External links

• "Nightmares from the Mind of Poe" full text, summary and film information.
• Gracey, James (August 2004). "Your Place And Mine - The Living Dead in Lurgan". BBC Online. 
• Fidicin, E: Berlinisches Stadtbuch, Berlin 1837
• Pufendorf, F.E. v.: Observationes iuris universi, Lüneburg 1757
• Siebenkees, J.C: Materialien zur nürnbergischen geschichte, Volum 2, Nuremberg 1792
• Osenbrüggen, E:Studien zur deutschen und schweizerischen Rechtsgeschichte, Schaffhausen 1868