This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 07:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Supposedly the tradition of the Irish wake (the kind where the family and friends stay up all night getting drunk in the presence of the corpse) was also intended to guard against being buried alive.
I suppose this is the modern-day electronic equivalent, but the traditional method puts the fun in funeral. 😉
In the 19th Century there was a lot of anxiety about waking up in your coffin 6 feet under. The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, reportedly requested that a phone be installed in her mausoleum (this may be apocryphal). This way before mobile phones, of course. As bigmacbear mentions above, the Irish wake originally consisted of watching over the body to make sure that the person was actually dead. I think that Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story the point of which was the person waking up dead in his or her coffin. Finally, there have been reports that some coffins, when exhumed and opened, have scratch marks on the inside of the lid, supposed made by the (not yet) dead person after burial but before their death by asphyxiation.
The prevalence of embalming nowadays in the US and many other places makes it unlikely that many people are buried alive, as if you were alive the embalming process will definitely kill you.
Lastly, I heard of a tale where a man inthe US was buried with a lottery ticket in the pocket of his suit that was a multi-million dollar winner. The relatives got him dug up to retrieve the ticket. Luckily, they didn’t have him cremated.
Supposedly the tradition of the Irish wake (the kind where the family and friends stay up all night getting drunk in the presence of the corpse) was also intended to guard against being buried alive.
I suppose this is the modern-day electronic equivalent, but the traditional method puts the fun in funeral. 😉
the link seems more like a teasing than serious news? Cos, waking up after buried alive sounds odd…
In the 19th Century there was a lot of anxiety about waking up in your coffin 6 feet under. The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, reportedly requested that a phone be installed in her mausoleum (this may be apocryphal). This way before mobile phones, of course. As bigmacbear mentions above, the Irish wake originally consisted of watching over the body to make sure that the person was actually dead. I think that Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story the point of which was the person waking up dead in his or her coffin. Finally, there have been reports that some coffins, when exhumed and opened, have scratch marks on the inside of the lid, supposed made by the (not yet) dead person after burial but before their death by asphyxiation.
The prevalence of embalming nowadays in the US and many other places makes it unlikely that many people are buried alive, as if you were alive the embalming process will definitely kill you.
Lastly, I heard of a tale where a man inthe US was buried with a lottery ticket in the pocket of his suit that was a multi-million dollar winner. The relatives got him dug up to retrieve the ticket. Luckily, they didn’t have him cremated.