Ring My Bell

Where do Halloween come from? It's really an amalgamation of different cultural traditions, but the roots stretched back to an ancient Celtic festival called sween, a word that, by the way, is often pronounced sam hayne because of the way it's spelled,

but you're getting it straight from the source here. They believe that the veil between this world and the next was the thinnest at that time of the year, and so they conducted a series of rituals, festivals, and bonfires to appease or even banish any spirits that happened to

make an appearance. This grew out of a combination of Celtic and Roman traditions, and some of the customs were pretty durable, like the turnips that they carved with faces, the precursors of modern day jack lanterns, dressing up in costumes to be mistaken for another spirit and left alone, although their costumes tended to be animal hides and paint. Even trick or treating has a medieval equivalent in the concept of souling traveling to wealthy houses and offering prayers

in exchange for food and drink. That evolved into children trading poems or songs for snacks, a trick for a treat for some though, the creepy party games weren't just for the end of harvest time. They could be played year round. I think we've seen time and time again that the Victorians knew how to take macab to a whole new level. It turns out that they even applied that to their games. For much of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, ancient Egypt was the obsession d joure. The Europeans were fascinated with Egypt, and not just in the colonial sense. Egyptomania took over literature, art, and science, largely thanks to Napoleon's campaigns in Egypt and Syria. The treasures he brought back to Europe drove an interest that was sparked way back in the fifteen hundreds to new heights for anyone who wanted to access ancient Egypt. In London,

Thomas Pettigrew was a good friend to have. Petigrew was an English surgeon, and he had recently developed a new form of entertainment. If you had some quick cash and were in the right place at the right time, you could get a ticket to the Royal College of Surgeons. It was like trying to rush Hamilton tickets at the box office. Some got lucky, didn't. Anyone who managed to get inside, though, could look forward to the spectacle of a lifetime. A live demonstration by Pedigrew on January fifteenth

of eighteen thirty four. A wrapped audience stared, maybe enthralled or disgusted as the surgeon slowly unwrapped a mummy from the twenty first dynasty for science. Of course, that's right. Victorians went to mummy unwrapping parties the same way that you or I might catch a Broadway show or a Rolling Stones concert, just with more dust and corpses. Now, to be completely fair to Pedigrew, there were already weird habits surrounding mummies in Europe well before he started his demonstrations.

Mummies were for sale in Egypt and abroad, and once people acquired a body, they did all kinds of distasteful things with it, and I mean literally. Some mummies were eaten as a source of medical practice. Mummia, a product made from mummified corpses, was sold in apothecary shops for centuries and consumed by the rich and the poor. It had to have tasted terrible, of course, but ground mummies

were prescribed for everything from headaches to the plague. By the Victorian age, people weren't eating the mummies anymore, but that wasn't because they had gained any kind of respect for the dead. Mummy unwrapping parties became popular pastimes, creating a huge demand in Egypt for new subjects. This probably stressed out the people sent to scour tombs. There were only so many mummies to be found, and this resulted in forgeries rather than royal corpses. Some Europeans got peasants bodies,

some fresher than others. Unwrapping was sort of a ritual in and of itself, and Victorians delighted in the combination of macab behavior and ancient Egypt. This from the people who were too scandalized to show up in public without a chaperone. Of course, usually a lecture preceded the festivities, and then the unwrapper would start unrolling bandages until the body itself was revealed. Oftentimes guests collected any objects or

amulets encased within the body. One observer at the unwrapping of a woman named Nez noted offhandedly that the jeweled hawk on her necklace would make a lovely watch charm. All good things must come to an end. Of course, with the rise of preservation rather than desecration among the scientific and archaeological communities, mummy wrapping fell out of favor.

It didn't completely stop, though, People are still curious right but thanks to the advent of X rays and full body scans, we can now see the person underneath without disturbing their final rest, proof that mummies, like so many of the other Halloween icons we know, aren't as simple as you'd first believe.

or it used to be anyway. Fear of bugs and certain animals is only sensible when trying to survive in an unpredictable, deadly world. Its common sense, rather than cowardice, that gives us the jitters whenever we're confronted with something that could cause us harm. Even if these things aren't as much of a threat now, we still have those leftover instincts from our ancestors. With new technology, many of these old phobias have been erased entirely or at least contained,

but a few still hang on. I'm pretty sure everyone at some point in their lives has had the dream of getting buried alive. Tapophobia is the fear of being buried alive, and it's had a hold on humanity for centuries. Shakespeare's Juliette wonders if she might wake in her own tomb if she isn't rescued in time. In the Victorian age, plenty of penny dress full magazines circulated throughout England with horrible stories of people waking up in their own coffins

too late to be rescued. Hans Christian Anderson demanded that his veins be cut open after his death to ensure that he wasn't prematurely buried. And it wasn't just the poets and the artists who were afraid. It was everybody, and for very good reason. As it turns out, being buried alive was shockingly common in the days before brain scans.

Sometimes it was intentional, in the cases of punishment or sacrifice, but oftentimes people just didn't realize they were doing it, at least until it was too late, and it was a hideous way to go. There are accounts from the fourteenth century of John Dunn's Scotus's tomb being opened and his body found outside the coffin with bloody fingertips, suggesting the priest had tried and failed to free himself. While this tale might not be true or at least exaggerated,

poor Alice Blunden's story is well documented. This seventeenth century englishwoman was knocked out after drinking too much poppy tea. The opiate put her in such a deep sleep that her doctor held a mirror under her nose, and she didn't seem to be breathing. Not wanting the body to smell, her family buried her quickly, and it might have been a sad but ordinary story for the time, except children

playing near her grave started hearing noises. When they ran to get the schoolmaster to check, he could hear Blundon screaming inside, still alive. It took another day to fully exume her, and she was so sick and exhausted from her struggle that she looked dead and was returned to her coffin. This time the family posted a guard, but he deserted his post, and in the morning, luckless Alice was found dead once more. She'd made one final attempt.

they had avoided. The people only grew more innovative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as outbreaks of cholera and several bacterial infections swept across Europe and the Americas, leaving so many people drained and dehydrated that they barely looked alive. Luckily, there was a deluge of new inventions for invalids to rely on, something called the safety coffin. They came in all shape, sizes, and models. Some had glass panels that

fogged up if the person inside was still breathing. Some had tubes that reached up through the earth that a groundskeeper could sniff every day to make sure the body was decomposing on schedule. Most basic models had noisemakers attached like bells or horns that rested above the ground so a passer buyer could hear the clamor and come investigate. The victim had a string attached to their hand in the coffin, and the other ends stretched to the bell

next to their grave. Presumably if they woke up, they pulled for dear life, hoping someone passing by would hear them. There's no indication of what would happen if a gust of wind moved the bell or knocked it over, and honestly, maybe it's best not to ask now. Plenty of these safety coffins were patented and advertised to willing customers, and

the designs only improved over time. German doctor Adolph Gutsmith created his own coffin in eighteen twenty two that had a tube designed to feed the unfortunate and give them air until they could be exhumed. He demonstrated the effectiveness of his device by getting buried alive and spending several hours underground, even enjoying a lovely meal before emerging unscathed. And as far as we can tell, there are no records of the effectiveness of these devices or if anyone

managed to use their primary feature as intended. Honestly, I hope they never had to, but it's nice to know that, in the rare cases that they did, these folks would be saved by the bell. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Ques Curiosities subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works.

I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.