Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear
by Jan Bondeson
WW Norton, £18.95, ISBN 039304906X

As a claustrophobic, I wasn’t looking forward to reading this book, But Jan Bondeson’s skeptical account of the myths behind live burials is so fascinating that I couldn’t put it down.
Anyone who has shuddered at Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” will not be reassured to learn that this terrifying story reflected a common Victorian fear. Before modern medical science, it was not always easy to determine death. Urban myths of live burials abounded. There was the prematurely buried pregnant woman who gave birth in her coffin six feet underground, the aristocratic lady who woke in her tomb to find a grave-robber chopping her hand off, the man who was buried alive in his family vault and survived for years by eating rats … and many more.
To combat this, Victorians invented a range of coffins with ingenious alarm mechanisms, so that anyone buried alive could summon help. Germany instituted “waiting mortuaries” where corpses were kept until putrefaction set in, at which point it could safely be assumed that they were dead. Not surprisingly, neighbours complained about the smell. But were people buried alive? Bondeson is skeptical.
Such cases are mercifully rare. No-one ever woke in a “waiting mortuary” – though there are at least two modern cases of people waking in a hospital morgue. The book is compulsive reading and demolishes many myths. But I still think I‘ll specify cremation in my will.