Buried Alive By Mistake: Coffins Designed In Case The “Dead” Woke Up

We call the fear of being buried alive “taphophobia,” and the way that this kind of dread has been haunting people didn’t essentially come from nothing.

People were being wary of premature burial for hundreds of years because, back then, doctors didn’t really have a reliable way of confirming that someone had truly kicked the bucket. The best test for death was just “poke them and see.” Crazy.

One of the first instances of safety coffins that was recorded was in 1792, when it was made for the Duke of Brunswick, a German nobleman. He had his casket custom-fitted, complete with a survival kit.

The Duke of Brunswick had a window built right into the lid of his coffin, to let a bit of light in so a trapped person who was still alive wouldn’t face total darkness. I’m not sure a window could help much with that though!

The duke’s coffin also had a special lock that could be opened from the inside using a key, a key that was typically tucked into his pocket before burial.

Not only that, but it also had an air tube to pipe oxygen down into the coffin. It’s basically a tiny, portable, underground panic room.

The golden age of safety coffins reached its peak during the 18th and 19th centuries. People planned their own funerals quite differently, with creative escape devices built in.

The master of the macabre himself, Edgar Allan Poe, poured fuel on the fire with his chilling short story “The Premature Burial.” In it, he recounted supposedly true tales of people buried alive. Leave it to Poe to take a fear people were already losing sleep over and craft it into a literary nightmare!

Poe didn’t stop at other people’s horror stories. In the same tale, he dove into his own imagined experience of being trapped in a coffin, describing what he pictured it would feel like.

The panic wasn’t built on pure imagination, either. History has documented cases of people who were buried before they were actually dead. It’s one thing to fear something simply in theory. It’s another thing to hear that it happened to a real person just a few towns over.

In 1891, a woman named Octavia Hatcher fell into a deep depression after losing her infant son. She then fell gravely ill, and that May she was pronounced dead. Local legend holds that she had actually slipped into a coma mistaken for death. She was buried within days, in an unseasonably hot spring, at a time when embalming wasn’t common in the area.

Days after Octavia’s burial, local legend says some people in her town started showing the same eerie, coma-like symptoms she’d had, which made her husband James suspect she might have only appeared to be dead, too. Panicked, James supposedly had her exhumed and prayed that he was wrong. According to the story, he wasn’t. The inside of the coffin showed signs that she had woken up.

In 1937, a 19-year-old Frenchman named Angelo Hays crashed his motorcycle into a brick wall and was declared dead at the scene. His injuries looked so severe that his parents weren’t even allowed to see him, and accounts say he was buried three days later. Then, days after that, his body was dug up for insurance reasons, and he was reportedly found alive.

According to accounts, Angelo Hays survived not because his coffin had escape opportunities, but because it was simply not airtight. Enough air managed to seep in and kept him breathing while he lay unconscious six feet under.

After surviving his own burial, Angelo Hays hit popularity in France and did the most on-brand thing possible: he invented and sold his own security coffin. Some would have lived on traumatized, but for Angelo, he turned it into a business idea. At least no one can say his invention didn’t have any merit, because, hey, he learned that from firsthand experience!

It wasn’t just a typical safety coffin like the Duke of Brunswick’s either. Angelo’s version reportedly had a built-in refrigerator and a cassette player. I can’t imagine ever chilling with those after just finding out that I’ve been buried underground, but maybe that’s just me!

You might think modern medicine ended this fear for good, but the dread of being buried alive lingered well into modern times. Some fears are just timeless. If you’ve ever watched Euphoria, one of the main characters was buried alive in a wooden coffin — I’m sure that scene reignited this fear for a whole new generation!

Fast forward to 1987, an Illinois businessman named Stephen Small was lured to one of his own properties by a fake phone call. He was kidnapped, handcuffed, and sealed inside a pine box, then buried three feet underground. His captors demanded a million-dollar ransom from his wife.

Small’s kidnappers had given him water and an air pipe so he could survive underground until the ransom was paid. But the pipe failed. Unfortunately and tragically, by the time police located the burial site, he had already suffocated.

Looking back, the whole safety coffin craze is really a window into a time when medicine couldn’t reliably tell the living from the dead. Every window, bell, and air tube was a response to genuine uncertainty about that line!

This content was created with the help of AI.