Casket-a-go-go, Part 1

heck not. Yeah, yeah, So, you know, we're thinking of things to cover, and some of these, some of these are topics we might may very well cover in the future without We could do chainsaws, we could do uh booby traps, you know. But of course the most obvious one is to consider something about the casket, the coffin, uh, the you know, something about the containers in which we entomb the dead, the vessels of our dead. That's right, And there is more surprising interesting in vation in the

history of this invention genre then you might expect. Yeah, I mean, because it's a pretty basic concept, right, a box into which one puts the dead, and then you put that box any number of places, right, and you know, usually it's not going to be something that you're gonna have to, I don't know, revisit, do anything with after a certain period of time. So it doesn't need to be a complicated box either, Right, It's just like you're gonna bury it. So what kind of features does it

need to have? But in that you touched on the basic human problem here. Like death itself is a pretty simple, laid out process, it becomes complicated or more complicated through our human ideas. And therefore even something as simple as a casket is fine and simple, except people keep thinking about it, they keep worrying about it and what it represents,

and they pour all of these anxieties into new innovations. Right, And so I would say this is gonna be one where the mother of invention is some embination of necessity and paranoid fantasy. Yes, um, basically the fear of death overwhelming um necessity and invention, or paradoxically, the fear of

being alive will come back to that. Uh, you know what, I learned a wonderful phrase while we were preparing for this episode that I don't think I knew before, and it's the the disposal of human remains has a sort of industry term, and that term is final disposition. Be a great movie franchise, right, I mean, it makes it sound like this is you reached your final form, like this is this is the ultimate you. So of course you want to put a lot of money into how

how you look and what you are poured into. Right. But also I think of disposition as something kind of like mood, uh, somewhere between like mood and character trait. So you could be of like a surly disposition, but I guess in finality you are of a dead disposition or you know, just peaceful. You know, it's like I think they're asleep, right, yeah, now, you know, we always

like to ask the question what came before? So if we're talking about containers or vessels for the dead, coffins, caskets, burial vaults, all that kind of thing, asking what came before is probably gonna be looking at the practice of human burial before we were using these uh, these containers or vessels to put people in, and human burial is actually and archaeologically and anthropologically significant practice in the timeline of our species because it's I mean, this is one

of those things where it's hard to know for sure, but it's often taken as a sign of the earliest archaeologically detectable indications of something like human religion. Yeah, Burial sites are often a key means of gazing into the past for starters like this is a way where you might find a very well, you know, comparatively preserved body of the deceased, and you can learn things about their anatomy, how they died, how they lived, what they ate, that

sort of thing. But then also burial customs frequently involved bearing the individual with artifacts, and those artifacts maybe you know, more religious in in uh in their scope and may reveal things about what these people believed. But then they also might well be artifacts from their daily life tools they used, weapons they used, etcetera. It's extremely common throughout human history to bury people with personal effects, as if they would need these things wherever they were going next.

And that's sort of an indication that, again we don't know exactly how or when religious beliefs first took shape and human beings. But when you see, for example, people putting a bow or or a you know, a grooming device like a comb or something in a grave with

a person. You can't know for sure what that means, but it seems to be a sign that the people of this ancient time and place may have imagined their loved ones are living on somehow surviving the death of the physical body, and in some way they might need this thing again. Right, yeah, and and certainly certainly that that does become an aspect of many different belief systems, the idea that there isn't after there is another world beyond death. I wonder too, how much of it is

just through tool use. You know, when we use a tool, it becomes a part of our body, you know, it it updates our body schema, It becomes an extension of the you know, the barriers between our self and the rest of the world. And therefore this kind of like perhaps this is innate idea that the tool that this individual used every day is not nearly a tool, it

is a part of them. And as they go into the earth and perhaps into another realm, of course they have to bring their tools with them exactly, but whatever is going on there, I mean, when you see humans from the ancient world from the Stone Age being buried with tools that they're they're definitely not going to be physically using anymore. You've got to think that there's there's something happening in the brains of the people who are

still alive there, whether it's religious or not. Maybe you could even frame it to some kind of secular sentimentality. You know, they want to think about the person there, you know, resting in peace with these items that they used. Whatever it is, it's it's something that's transcending the mere utility value of tools, right. It's because like if somebody dies and they had a favorite comb, and you're just thinking about pure utilitarian value, you might as well like

keep the comb. You could use it yourself, or you could trade it for something. Leaving it with a dead person suggests a sort of second order way of thinking about life and death. Now, humans and hominance have been burying they're dead for a long time, of burying with grave goods for a long time, like tools and clothing and ornaments, and the Neanderthals buried they're dead with with belongings. Uh. The date of the earliest known human burials is disputed.

I've seen it estimated that burial of the dead goes back roughly at least a hundred thousand years or so UM. But there's so many interesting examples of practices regarding final disposition in the ancient world that are different than what we're used to in many of our cultures today, but are also you can kind of see the through lines

from ancient history until now. One example I want to think of is the burial practices of the ancient Proto city of Chattel Hoyak, which was that it was this early proto city from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Anatolia. It flourished around seven thousand BC, around nine thousand years ago.

This would be in modern day Turkey. So to to picture this ancient proto city, you picture all these homes grouped together, which are each like a boxy pit where you would the roof would be covered and you'd enter and leave through a hole in the roof via a ladder. And then when you're walking around the city, you just be walking around this flat area on top of the houses which are all crammed right up in against each other,

instead of having streets between the houses. Yeah, I believe that this uh, this location has come up on the show before Yeah, it's a fascinating site. We could do whole sections. Probably, probably we could do a whole series on stuff to blow your mind just about Chattel Hoyak, because there's so much interesting stuff to learn and about their culture. It's one of the oldest, you know, settlements

of this size that we know about. But the really interesting thing about the city is that the city itself and these houses that people dwelled in, it doubles as a graveyard because it appears that people in the city of Chadlehoyak would bury their loved ones under the floor in the houses where they lived, but they would also sometimes keep parts of the bodies of their loved ones in the homes with them as like decorative items for

a period of time. For example, some of the remains from Chaddlehoya show that people would cut the head off of a dead person's body, presumably again a family member member, or somebody that you knew or loved, and then they would cover the head in plaster and use ochre to paint a face or some other design on the plaster mask over the real dead person's head and keep that

with them in the house as a decorative ritual item. Meanwhile, the body would be buried in the floor, under the hearth or under the bed, and sometimes bodies here would be placed in some kind of container, maybe like a basket, a woven basket, or wrapping of reed mats. And of course this uh, this civilization, they didn't leave behind any texts or anything. We don't have a holy book from them. We don't know what they believed, what they believed about

life and death and what happened after death. But it's so interesting to try to just try to understand from the physical remains that they left behind. Yeah, because you can go in various directions there, right, I mean, on one hand, you can you can face a vision in which the dead are presumed to still be alive in some fashion, that the remains still have some sort of

life to them. Perhaps they're still speaking to the people in some way, shape or form, or it's believed that they speak to the people, or is it something more removed where they they know that this is the head of someone who is no longer alive, but you are able to to make a testament to that person out of it. Yeah, it's a truly fascinatingness story. And and the tidbits that are there are so interesting, so we

should absolutely come back to Chadlahoyac. But this is just one example of tons of different burial traditions from around the world that established early on a precedent that respectable burial was not one in which a body was just like thrown naked in the soil or left out for scavenging animals. So there are some cultures in which a respectable burial is to be left out for scavenging animals.

An example of that would be the sky burial practices. Yeah, particularly I'm in Tibet, Yeah, where the the ideas of the body is. Uh, there are a few different modes of burial in in Tibet, but but this particular mode would be the ritual um dissection of the body and then those pieces of the body were then made available to scavenging vultures buzzards that within consume it. And it's it's like and it ties into also like the older

animist religion of Tibet. You know, it's the idea that that your flesh is returning to to these divine creatures, these creatures of the sky, which I have long found rather beautiful, right though even though it doesn't line up with a whole lot of traditions throughout the world that would say that what what you should do for respect with the dead body is to sort of hide it, to inter it, to cover it up, and specifically to place it inside some kind of container, whether that be

a wrapping of some kind or a special box, right, which isn't always a possibility in some parts of the world, particularly if you're in a high rocky region such as Tibet, where there may not be a lot of soil in which to bury things. Where there may not be a lot of uh, you know, a freely available would to burn uh in order to reduce a body to ash. Uh. So there are also some environmental concerns taken to account to. Yeah, that's an interesting point to consider to how like the

bioecology of the region contributes to these cultural practices. But I mean, I wonder why it's so calm men to believe that a dead body, again this is not universal, but why it's so common to believe a dead body should be placed in some kind of container. Uh. We

don't know exactly what the reason for that is. Uh, it's pure speculation on my part, but I kind of wonder if it has to do with a learned cultural association from daily life in technological societies where items of value are generally not left out in the open, but they are stored inside containers. And initially this would probably be for practical reasons, like to protect valuable objects and substances from the elements from thieves, from scavenging animals in

the case of foods, like in a grain bin. And thus you learn over time that, uh, when something is of value, you protect it inside a container. And this when you go to buryer deceased relative, you follow that practical precedent and show that they're a valuable thing by placing them inside a container. Yeah, I mean a container is control. It is it is exercise eis in control

um over and against the rest of the world. Be that container something you put your bread in or your grain, or be at the container that you put your family in that you you call your house. Uh. And then when when death enters into our lives, like that is a situation where people often feel completely without control. So yeah, it makes sense that you would turn to this technology of the container to help, you know, put firm boundaries

on what is occurring. Yeah, and you know, I can't help but notice how often objects of religious value are placed inside containers as well, or even over time, the sacred objects are the containers and on the ark of the covenant, yeah, exactly, or mythic items like Pandora's box. Oh yeah. I don't know how much you've seen of like the preparations for the process of Catholic mass, but there's a heck of a lot of opening and closing

of containers. There's things in boxes, containers they get taken out, you know. Uh. Yeah, it's like it's like it's it's a special old place. Yeah. I mean, all our rituals really need a good box. You know, because you have a ritual, you probably have paraphernalia. And that paraphernalia just can't be left laying around on the coffee table. It needs a box. Uh and uh. And so it makes sense that you would you would have a box for

for also the dead as well. Yeah. So of course, not all cultures put their dead in containers of some kind, but many did, and over time, some cultures developed extremely elaborate types of containers for human burial, such as like the ornate sarcoph a guy for the mummified remains of pharaohs and other wealthy figures in ancient Egypt. This is

probably the most famous of all the vessels of the dead. Yeah. Now, Egyptian bombing processes, they span roughly three thousand years of human history, so it changed a lot during that time.

In fact, you can look at the history of just burial in Egypt and see it's just kind of like the evolution of burial in general, because it essentially begins as pit burials in the hot sand, in which they you know, just the body is placed in the in the ground, and then it transforms, and the cosmology that informs the practices also transform, uh, and it becomes a

matter of continuation of the soul. The tomb is not just a you know, a receptacle for the body, but is kind of a kind of like a spaceship kind of a vessel for for for this journey, uh, into the afterlife, into the other world. That is. That's you know, it is rather different than I think, sort of the modern pop culture idea of a heaven or even a

hell like it was. The the Egyptian afterlife was like another realm of adventure and intrigue full of trials, and so you had to be prepared and thus all the preparations, all these uh uh, these different funeral practices, um, you know. But but the evolution of ancient Egyptian funeral practices, you know, puts an increasing demand on the preservation of the biological body after death, something that's very much a part of modern funeral practices as well. Um, which which is actually

fairly recent. Yeah, like the modern reintroduction of embalming. Yeah, it would be interesting to perhaps come back to that in the future. Now. As far as mummification itself, which of course, you know, just the drying out of the body, which can occur either through natural or artificial means. Like there are examples of of bodies that have been mummifized just purely because of the environment in which they were left, or perhaps buried bog bodies and that sort of thing. Yeah.

But as as far as the earliest artificially created mummies, uh, they seem to date back to around six thousand BC in the Atacama Desert region of South America, sandwich between Chile and Peru. And I know you said that it's artificial mummification. There but that that, of course is like an ideal type of environment for preservation, like mummification, because it's what dry and right. Yeah, all right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to

talk about confidence. Alright, we're back, all right. Now, we don't know exactly when humans started using coffins. Some of the earliest evidence appears to be of like solid wooden coffins appears to come from different sites in ancient China. That seems to be something that happened. They're a good bit. But of course there were sarcopher guy in boxes in

ancient Egypt. Two. Yeah, the Egyptians seemed to have turned to wrappings, but then baskets and then ultimately wooden caskets during the pre Dynastic period, and that would have been u Now a question I have long wondered about, but I've never asked until now. What's the difference between a coffin and a casket? I don't know, Joe, what's the difference between a cock and a casket? With that punch line, Oh, you expect there to be a good punch line, it's

not a good punch line. The difference is shape, basically, Yeah, it's shape and design. So as used today, these terms mean that a casket is basically a rectangular box. Now that just means roughly rectangular. It can have round to edges or you know, like angled off edges or whatever, but it's basically a big rectangle, whereas coffins are more like that classic Dracula box that you see. It's angled to be widest at the shoulders and then to taper off at the head and the feet, so it's got

six sides rather than four. And by doing this you can actually use less wood to create your coffin, meaning that the coffin is often cheaper than a casket. Yeah, and it certainly has become iconic. I remember my my dad made me one out of probably like balsa wood or something when I was a kid. Life size, No, not life size. It's large enough for a Gi Joe figure the small kind excited but but it was pretty cool, painted it and everything. Wait, I'm sorry, which one a

coffin or a casket? Uh? It was a coffin Okay, so wider at the shoulders and wider at the shoulders to fit a g I Joe. Yea, even though the g I Joe would mean one size fits all with a g I joe, they would have have probably been better off going into a casket. Now, caskets and coffins are often made of wood, which of course will collapse over time due to decomposition and break through under the ground.

So another thing that you'll often see and actually you can see this going way back to ancient Egypt and stuff, but it's a modern practice as well. Uh. And this is the idea of burial vaults or grave liners that are basically the coffin or the casket goes inside these and they will go under the ground and they hold the ground up better so you don't get the sunken grave effect in the cemetery. Yeah. I do love a good sunken grave effect though, because growing up in really

rural uh Tennessee, we would encounter these. Uh. The region we were in it was near Kentucky Lake, so a lot of the people that lived there had had to leave so that they could flood the area. And so you found the remnants of old homesteads in the woods and sometimes they're there there, their graves were there, and

they were almost always sunken. You would find these sunken graves and these uh and also these uh, these these twin rows of buttercups that still came up, uh lining what used to be like a walkway to a front porch. Oh wow, yeah, that's spooky man. Yeah, hey, it's Halloween. But certainly, yeah, if you have some sort of more reinforced container around your wooden your wooden coffin or casket, you don't have to worry about about the the weight of the soil pressing down into the rotten casketer or

coffin and creating that sunken effect. Now here's a question, Robert, while wandering among the buttercups in the sunken areas, did you ever hear a tiny voice somewhere saying help, No, no, no, all those voices that had ceased. You gotta admit that that'd be even spookier, I get, I mean I would, Yeah, that would be spooky because I mean they would raise a lot of questions about the whole burial process for sure. Well, right,

but this actually is not a completely unfounded scenario. This has happened at various times in human history, and however often it actually happens. People have been obsessed with things like this happening since you know, for a long time, especially at certain periods in history, were for some reason burial alive literature just skyrocketed in popularity, and people got their mind that like, they couldn't stop thinking about it. Right.

One of the main areas we're gonna look at is the Victorian era and uh and and there's plenty to point to there. But we can also go back to um to really like the first century. See to see some other examples um consider the first century. See Greek novel uh Calo by a Cheriton of Aphrodisseus, which Bernard Laying describes as sort of a Romeo and Juliet tale, except the two starcross lovers end up marrying each other at the beginning of the novel, and then he apparently

kills her in a jealous rah. Okay, this is more of a Greek thing. Yeah, but here's the things that she's not dead when when pirates bust into her tomb to rob her grave, they find her alive, and so they take her back to the ship. They sell her into slavery. But at the end of the book the two lovers are reunited, and I guess they forgive that whole attempted murder thing. But but still it is essentially

a story of premature burial um. And of course there were there were other um, you know, treatments of similar things going on at the time. You know, uh, you know touching, you know, the touching on this idea of a of a living individual emerging from a tomb um. I think you can you can look to accounts like this, and even biblical accounts, so say a Lazarus resurrection, the primary focus of Bernard Lang's paper, the Baptismal Raising of Lazarus.

You can you can kind of look at these stories and myths and tales, I think in four different ways. So on one hand, it could be an account of someone that was thought dead and buried prematurely. The other is that it's a ritual of death and resurrection, a symbolic death and rebirth. One these examples of this in various cultures, including some traditions of First Nations tribes in

the Pacific Northwest. I think we've talked about that a little bit on stuff to blow your mind in the past, and Lane describes traditions from the time of Taraton being about a symbolic death that one emerges from immune to or fearless of death, and even baptism itself, the Christian

right of baptism is essentially a symbolic death. I believe George R. Martin was probably playing with this idea when he wrote about the devotion to the drowned God Um in his Song of Ice and Fire books, where they're essentially doing a baptism, but there's kind of a drowning, an actual drowning element to it, and you arise, uh,

you know, stronger than before. It's popular story for a reason, right, Yeah, And so in that we get into also probably the purely uh mythical folkloreic supernatural resurrections, where the idea is, oh, yeah, this person died or this god died and then they came back. And then another way of looking at it is well, a misinterpretation was made of post mortem movements.

And we'll get more into that later. Okay, So that would not be a mistaken death that where somebody was actually still alive, but a real death where they were mistaken for actually still being alive, yes, or or getting into that weird case where like, oh we thought they were alive and then we saw signs that they were

still alive, but then they were dead. Oh and then of course they were the necromongers and chronicles where there's this whole right where they essentially or at least the Grand the Grand Marshal, the Lord Marshall will will venture into the realms of death and return with supernatural powers. You'll have no idea the kind of chronicles of Riddeck Lord that Robert commands. I wouldn't say, let's say that

he is a powerful Riddick universe lor Master. I've probably seen that that movie more than I should have, uh put it that way. But but anyway, back to these just different category worries. I think they do kind of present all together this idea of the grave as being this place of ultimately of mystery. You know, it's of ambiguity. Yeah, it's it's basically uh you know it's it's Strodinger's cat,

right Strodinger's casket, Well you should. Yeah. It's funny because we often think of the grave is like the ultimate finality. It's like the you know, the thing above all other things. It is the state in which all questions are closed. Right. Well, nowadays we we tend to have more certainty in this sort of thing. But yeah, you go back, even just a few centuries to a time where not everything was understood about about how the human body is, you know,

reacting to different illnesses and injuries. Um, maybe they weren't very good at checking for a pulse, right, And then you have a bunch of essentially supernatural ideas of what death means and how one might come back to it you have to contend with and what might one might come back as right now. We mentioned earlier that there were some periods in places in history where fear being

buried alive seemed to be especially supercharged. And one clear case here is Europe in the United States during the Victorian period is like especially I get the feeling in the English speaking world during the Victorian period, so roughly the nineteenth century, people were obsessed with the idea of being buried alive. I think a good case in point is the works of Edgar Allan Poe uh live burial or immurement, of course, which means like being sealed up

inside a wall. A similar concept appears in not just one. I mean you're you're probably thinking of the one work by Poe, right, the Cask of a monte ado where the guy the two guys are hanging out and one leads another guy down into his basement to try some of the fame demonte ado and then he ends up walling him inside a room. I think the story never even even explains what the guy did to deserve it.

There's just some vague reference to some kind of insult or slight and it really I think it kind of works better that way. He just leads it to your imagination and and you know it could be something very small or something very large, and both both are you know, our good choices? Uh? For the the horror storyteller, Yeah, he just he cries out for God's sake montresor and

then nothing else. Um. But so there's not just that he references immurement or being buried alive or or grave robbing in multiple stories, just a lot of concerns about what can happen once you're dead and buried. Uh. And so I wanted to refer to a story that I actually hadn't read before we were preparing for this episode. It's an Edgar Allan post story called The Premature Burial. Have you read this one? Robert? I don't think I have. Uh so, I feel like it's kind of anticlimactic, but

the beginning is actually pretty funny. Poe begins the story by talking about how Quote, there are certain themes of which the interest is all absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. So you leg goes on to point out how it's only because these horrible events are true that they're worthy of exploring and writing. Um, so, what's this horrible true thing the

narrator is going to tell us about? Quote? To be buried while alive is beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality, that it is frequently, very frequently so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think the boundaries which divide life from death or at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and where the

other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called, they are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism, a certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic unions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not forever loosed, nor the Golden

Bowl irreparably broken, But where meantime was the soul. Wow, that's really good, because it's really I feel like he's he's summing up a lot of the ideas and the the discoveries and the mysteries that were, uh like, we're at the center of the zeitgeist in that time. Absolutely, Yeah, these questions of vitality, what is the difference between life

and death? Later on he so he starts from here to get into a bunch of different stories of basically of people being buried alive and in coming to horrible ends or being you know, saved at the last minute. He also gets into some Frankenstein's territory. He tells a totally true story of a guy who is dead and then has resurrected from the dead by a galvanic battery.

So one of the stories he tells, just to give you a kind of flavor of these stories he recounts throughout here, is a supposedly true case from the city of Baltimore about a woman who was the wife of one the most respectable citizens, a lawyer of imminence and a member of Congress. So this lady here, she gets a sudden illness. To all observers, she appears to die, right,

so everybody's like, all right, she's dead. And he tries to hammer at home by saying, yeah, her face looked dead, her lips looked dead, they had marble pallor, her eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth in her body, pulsation had ceased. And they leave her out for three days, unburied, and she's just dead, right, nothing. But then he says, quote, the lady was deposited in her family vault, which for three subsequent years was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term,

it was open for the reception of a sarcophagus. But alas how fearful, a shock awaited the husband, who personally threw open the door. As its portal swung outwardly back, some white apparelled object fell, rattling within his arms. It was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmolded shroud.

A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived within two days after her entombment, that her struggles within the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge or shelf to the floor, where it was so broken as to permit her escape. A lamp, which had been accidentally left full of oil within the tomb, was found empty.

It might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation on the Uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread chamber was the large fragment of the coffin, with which it seemed that she had endeavored to arrest attention by striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swooned or possibly died through sheer terror, and in falling her shroud became entangled in some iron work which projected interiorly. Thus she remained, and thus she rotted erect Man, He

really paints a horrifying scene there. But you can also, I don't know if throughout this whole story you can just tell Poe is getting a thrill about this idea, like he maybe kind of really wants to be buried alive. Well, there's also kind of like some a lot of the burials that are you know, dealt with They're not like the commoners grave, right, They're the grave of of of

of higher uh levels of society. And I guess there is kind of a thrill in uh in in that in that sort of demise, you know, where it's like you can afford the more stately version of death, but even your stately version of death becomes this uh, you know, this this tragic and ridiculous uh situation. Yeah. Well, I would say there's probably also just a practical reason they're for for including the rich people's tombs, because they would be rich enough to have a crypt which you would

have reason to return to later, unlike a normal just burial. Right. But I also agree that, yeah, you're you're onto something about like the class dimensions of imagining this kind of thing, because it also, like you know it, death kind of levels everything, right, um. And he tells a bunch of other stories within this short story. Eventually the narrator reveals that he is obsessed with the topic and that he's terrified of himself being buried alive and has gone to

all these great links to prevent being buried alive. And then there's this kind of anticlimactic ending where the narrator wakes up in a dark, confined place and he thinks he's been buried alive. Then he discovers he hasn't, and this helps him get over his fear. And I'm like, come on, Poe, you can do That's not a great ending. You can do better like that. The ending needs to be that that helped me. I've been buried alive. I

feel like that'd be better. I don't know the ending where he's just like, oh no, I wasn't buried alive and I'm better now. Yeah, I guess how do you landed? Though, especially if you're it's written in the age where there's got to be this uh this you know, presumed means by which the manuscript makes its way into your hand. So it's like you would have to write like I have been buried alive. I am. I am writing this by candle light in my casket. I do not know

how long the light will last. I will um, I like, And then how does he get it up to the surface. I don't know. Burning a candle in your casket is a terrible idea. You're using up your oxygen. How's he writing? There is so many quests, see this is exactly why post said, Okay, I was just I just woke up in a dark round. It's fine. It was the plausibility, yeah, okay. So one thing Poe is really dead set on is

that this kind of thing happens all the time. I think he might be overstating the frequency with which live burial actually happened at the time, but it does appear to be at least a real and we'll explore that in a minute later, maybe reasons why people thought it happened more often than it did, but it does absolutely appear to be a real, terrifying obsession for lots of people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, I came across the story of the Polish pianist and composer

Frederic Chapan. He was apparently so terrified of being buried alive that he took precautions that ended up making his body an object of later science. So I was reading about this in a news fe teacher from the journal Nature from seventeen about research that revealed that Chapin's death in eighteen forty nine was caused by complications due to tuberculosis, and this was detected from kind of like a swelling

around the heart. How did we figure that out? Well, we figured it out because Polish researchers had access to Japan's heart pickled in a jar. I mean, he's going old school here. This is like the ancient Egyptians with the you know, putting their uh, their organs into jars. Oh totally yeah, um and well, so apparently what happened is that Japan's last words on his deathbed, delivered to his sister, were swear to make them cut me open so that I won't be buried alive. And his sister

did as she was requested. She ordered an autopsy in which Japan's heart was removed and pickled in a jar of brandy. Well, that's one way to be sure, right, I mean, he's he's saying like, I'd rather I'd rather you cut my heart out than me be buried alive. And in fact, this reminds me of the thing that I've read about before that's been declared the world's funniest joke, as determined by the psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University

of Hertford. Yeah, he's got this website laugh Lab where he was using like an online rating system to try to discover the joke that had the widest appeal across different cultures, and according to him, this was the funniest joke across different cultures. Two hunters are out in the woods and one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps,

my friend is dead. What can I do? The operator says, calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead. There's a silence, then a shot has heard back on the phone. The guy says, Okay, now what which obviously? I mean, we've both heard it before, so we're not laughing. But I don't know. I do think that's pretty funny. It's it is. It is a good joke. It is

a solid joke. And to make a joke better by explaining why it's funny, I mean, it's the same in going on with Japan, there is like make sure he's dead, so he would prefer to have his heart cut out or be shot, I guess, as opposed to being mistaken for dead. Yeah. I read of some other similar efforts that were made to ensure that the body was dead prior to uh to aternament hands. Christian Anderson and Alfred Nobel both apparently requested that their veins be opened prior

to burial. Uh be better to bleed to death than to be buried alive, I guess. And you know, it's interesting how modern embalming procedures tend to remove the fear of this occurring, because essentially, if you're gonna undergo modern embalming, a lot of terrible things are going to be done to your body that if you're still alive. Um, you know, they're probably going to kill you. I mean they are

going to kill you. You prefer they not happen, right, So it is interesting that Stephen King wrote a short story about this occurring, not a premature burial, but a premature um uh in palming, premature autopsy, titled Autopsy Room four. Uh. And it's uh. I read it several years back. It's it's pretty good. It really gives you, it really makes your skin crawl. Uh. Though I also feel like King, I think this was a this is maybe this is written in the late nineties. Uh, younger King would have

probably gone much grizzlier on this. But but this in this one, he kind of pulls back a little bit in the same way that Poe does, where it's not quite as grizzly and dark as it could have been. There's a story with a somewhat similar premise, though it goes in another weird direction by Stephen Graham Jones. I think it's called Welcome to the Reptile House. But it's one of these things where I guess all horror writers are going to eventually write that story. And that's what

Stephen King says. He's quoted as saying, at some point, I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems to be such a pervasive fear. Yeah, it certainly is a pervasive fear. You know what. I was reading another thing. I was reading a history dot com article I writer named Becky Little and just as another addition about a

person who in history feared premature burial, George Washington. Apparently he was terrified of being buried alive and requested that his body be laid out for three days after his death just to be sure. Even though that wasn't good enough for the lady in the post story, right, they laid her out for a few days, and still she wrotted erect um. So oh, hey, fun bit of vocabulary. Do you know what the fear of being buried alive is called? No? What is it called? I didn't know

this either. It is the word tafo phobia. This is from the Greek tafos, which means like tomb or grave uh and related. The science of taffonomy is quote the study of processes such as burial, decay, and preservation that affect animal and plant remains as they become fossilized, so

basically fossilization and decomposition in the ground. Now, I think we mentioned earlier that we think maybe people of the Victory rein period, posed time and all that who were obsessed with premature burial but probably believed that it happened more often than it actually did. And a very likely reason for this is that back then a lot of times when bodies were exhumed, some natural features of decomposition would be mistaken for signs that a person had been

alive after burial. Yeah. Common examples of this include the appearance of nails or even teeth having continued to grow um, the release of gas from inside the body, which can even produce sounds and uh quite recently, a researcher at an Australian corpse farm. Corpse farms are, of course, so places where bodies are left in various uh uh you know, natural states, so that they're uh, their decomposition can be observed and studied and chronicled, uh generally to better aid

you know, forensics. You know, if you know, like the timeline of human decomposition, that gives you an enormous advantage in figuring out like, uh, when a body would have died, if you find a body out in the woods, etcetera, or in the water or whatever the case may be. Exactly so anyway, this particular researcher used time laps to reveal that a human corpse continues to move significantly for

more than a year after death. What. Yeah, some of the post imortem movements were expected, but the longer term movements were a surprise. So what just like a spontaneous I don't know, like firing or accumulation of salts or something in the muscles caused twitching or yeah, I mean they described as especially like the limbs, limbs kind of moving around you know. And again this is revealed in time laps, so it's not like a constant, year long

flapping of the corpse. I don't know that it could produce a scenario like pole uh laid out, where like the casket is knocked off of the ledge and it breaks open, and then the the the old woman is running around and gets her her clo grave clothes, you know, tangled up around something. I don't think that would necessarily happen, but uh, it's another example. How Yeah, if you were going into a grave or a tomb and you were at all looking for signs that the body had moved,

you might well find them. Yeah, exactly, and often on theme for this month. Often some of these same signs that some uh, some people took as uh evidence that people had been buried alive or also sometimes taken as evidence of vampirism and other types of undead beliefs, like the body is larger now it is bloated. How did

it become bloated now? Of course, the real answer has to do with the decomposition and bacteria breaking down things inside the body and gas and so forth, but one explanation could be put forward well clearly, this body has been leaving the tomb at night and it's been drinking blood. Yeah. Uh So while clearly we think that this probably people of the time probably thought it happened more than it

actually did, it did sometimes happen. There are plenty of documented cases of premature burial where people were alive, they got buried, and then later sometimes somehow people found out. A few cases are mentioned by that in that article I mentioned earlier by Becky Little One is that uh and and this stuck out at me a case of an American woman named see Dunbar. Dunbar lived in South Carolina and in nineteen fifteen she experienced an epileptic seizure

and lost consciousness, after which she was declared dead. They put her in a coffin. They lowered her into the grave. Apparently her sister arrived late to the to the funeral and asked to see her sister one last time. So they brought her back up out of the grave, opened the coffin, unscrewed the lid, and then sc Dunbar sat up and smiled at her sister, and of course funeral attendees freaked out and they fled, but she was not undead. She was just gillar Old alive, and she lived. This

was in nineteen fifteen. She lived until nineteen fifty five. She lived forty more years after this, and it apparently even still happens occasionally today that people wake up in morgues or in funeral homes having having been like mistakenly declared dead. Inteen, there was a case of a seventy eight year old man in Mississippi named Walter Williams who was found dead at his home. He had no detectible pulse.

He was taken to a funeral home, and then while he was awaiting embalming, he started kicking inside his body bag, and so they took him to a hospital and he was okay. He survived the incident. Uh The coroner in the case believed, or at least told the ap that what had probably happened is that Williams pacemaker had stopped

working and then it started working again. There's even one really crazy story I came across, though the accuracy of this account is disputed, but with that caveat, it is a story of a seventeenth century English woman named Alice Blunden who was buried alive twice Basically, the story goes that one night in sixteen seventy four, she drank a bunch of poppy tea and then fell into a deep sleep,

and everybody believed that she had died. She was buried quickly and and she stayed buried until a couple of days later. Children playing near the graveyard heard voices from underground, and they dug her up, and they found signs that she had been struggling inside the coffin, but once she was exhumed, there were no further signs of life. So they thought, well, we accidentally buried her alive. She struggled inside the coffin, but then she died, so they lowered

her back down into the grave. Then the next day, I think the coroner returned or somebody returned to examine the body, and they found signs that she had continued to struggle and escape, tried to escape a second time, but had died again and was actually dead this time. But the details of the story are in dispute either way. Wow. Yeah, I mean it's like they say, bury me alive once, shame on you, bury me alive twice, shame on me. I would say, if you think you may have accidentally

buried somebody alive once, don't put him back in. I mean, give it, give it a while. I also like how this story kind of implies that the children dug up the body, Like I'm just imagined just wild children and they're out playing and they're like, hey, I think I heard a heard a voice from the grave. Dig it up. I think I think the stories they went to get adults. But that would be great too, I mean, that makes a great game, right, But I think it's time to

get to it's okay. So clearly we're faced with this big problem of people being terrified of being buried alive. So we've got to get to the invention that solves this problem. Right, If you are a some Victorian dandy with a paralyzing fear of being buried alive, what are you to do apart from just insist that they make sure you're dead by maybe like stabbing you a bunch of times before they bury you. Or because we've established the necessity here, now, to what extent is a true

necessity or just any necessity? Um, you know, we'll leave that for everyone to decide. But ultimately it doesn't matter. I mean, there's so there there are plenty of of inventions that are made. There are plenty of of devices and uh, and products that are rolled out that aren't really speaking to a true necessity but a perceived necessity, and that's enough to to move some product. Of course. Uh So, I guess we should talk about inventions that I would say amount to an escape pod from the grave,

kind of like a rocket from the crypt. Right. All right, Well, before we get into that, we're gonna take a quick break up, but we'll be right back. Alright, we're back. So we're going to look at some of the inventions that were rolled out to deal with this maddening fear of premature burial, right, and there were quite a number

of these things. For example, if you want to see some really great illustrations, there's a Vox article from by Phil Edwards you can look up that collects examples with illustrations of patents for these are generally called safety coffins, their coffins that were designed to prevent premature burial. And so if you look at that article that they even enhanced a lot of these old patent diagrams with color.

Yeah they're really cool because yeah, they basically took what was probably just a little sketch, like a black and white sketch, and they've they've they brought it more to life. Yeah, so let's look at a few examples from history. Uh, this one is mentioned in that box article, so if you want to look it up, you can see the illustration. Uh, this is one that is patented August sixty eight. The patent awarded one Franz Vestor and it is basically a

coffin with an escape tunnel an escape hatch. So the details are that you'd be partially buried with a tunnel connecting the coffin to the surface, complete with air holes. And I guess the idea is that earth would be filled in around the coffin, but not covering the breathing holes. And if you wake up inside, you've got a few options.

You can pull a lever to ring a bell on the surface, alerting people to your presence, or you pull a lever to open a hatch at the top of this little tunnel, and then you can simply climb out yourself. The tunnel actually had a ladder inside, and this is not the only model in which you could ring a bell to save your life. Actually quite a few safety coffin patents were equipped with strings or levers that would operate some kind of sonic alarm, usually a bell that

would ring on the surface above. And I guess presumably with this one, if you know, you were there for a few days and nothing happened, then finally they could like fill it in, cover up the air holes, or maybe take the hatch off and use it on some other coffin. Yeah, I mean the degree to which this was actually a threat, you know, this is actually a possibility aside, you know, this is a pretty clear cut solution.

All right. If the problem is I might be very long still alive, well, let's just make sure there's a way of communicating that knowledge to the surface world should that occur. Sure. Uh So. Another safety coffin I was reading about is Le Carnie. This is from eight seven. It was a safety coffin created by Count Michel de Carnis Carnikie, who was in the court of the Russians. Are Nicholas the second and this again, this debut in eighteen seven. There's a great twenty sixteen article about this

in Mental Flaws by the writer Claire Voon. If you want to look that up and read more about this thing. But Robert, I've got an image of it attached for you here. Uh So, basically, you've got a standard coffin below, but it's augmented with some devices that go up from the coffin. Uh So, your coffin is connected via a pipe to the surface and then up on the surface

the pipe attaches to a spring loaded iron container. Now inside the coffin below, there is a glass ball dangling by a string or a chain just over the chest of the body inside. So if the body moves, the ball gets nutt and any nudge of the ball triggers the springloaded contraption above, which opens the container to the outside air, and this allows fresh air to get in and get down into the coffin via the pipe. But

it's better than that. So the springloaded device, if set off, not only lets air in, but it also automatically raises a flag over the grave and commences the clanging of an alarm bell. Uh And at the very least, the opening of the container and the presence of the tube would allow the person in the coffin to scream for help. Wow,

So this one really has all the bells and whistles. Um. If anyone out if you've had the experience of shopping for a casket, uh and uh and I have, Uh, you know, it is kind of like shopping for a car, where that we're generally the salesperson will be there to up sail you on other features and models. Um, which can be a little you know, needs to say, be

a little uncomfortable. But I can well imagine a scenario where you're in a room not just normal caskets and coffins, but safety coffins and caskets, so that you're being up sold on these features, like, well, you could go with this model that is our standard model has a bell inside, but to be really sure, wouldn't you prefer to have a flag that emerges? And uh? And also this uh,

this powered ventilation system. Well, yeah, this has more practical plausibility I think than the standard casket up selling, which is like it is a kind of weird thing, the idea of them than trying to sell you better coffins or caskets. I think with the implication right that, oh, you know, if you really want to be respectful to your loved one, you'll buy this more expensive thing, which is sis kind of gross or what what would they have wanted? You know, it's generally the way of of

of getting into that. And you know, I don't know. This is one of the problems about or one of the challenges about any kind of funeral practice, right, is that one does it for the dead, But it's not about the dead, right, The dead, except in these rare scenarios where they're prematurely buried, they're really not affected by the process anymore. It's all about the living exactly. That's my point. With the safety casket, then it really is about the dead. It's like or it's about the the

person in the casket. I guessed it to be clear. But other than that, yeah, it's generally just the domain of the the individuals above ground. Yeah. Uh. Now. Another thing I wonder about though, with Lick Carnice is like, why did the top container have to be sealed at all to begin with? I don't know for sure, but I assume the reason is it's to prevent foul smelling gases that result from decomposition from wafting up uncontrollably into

the cemetery. So it's like sealed to begin with, But then if you trigger the ball, then it opens up and the stuff goes on. Now, of course, this contraption it instantly attracted attention and positive press. When it was debuted in eighteen seven, it became known as Lake Carnice. Carnice Carniki marketed the device in Europe and the United States to an initially pretty warm reception, and it was considered affordable even though it's got all this stuff. Supposedly,

the price tag was not crazy. Uh, it was considered practical, especially since the above ground parts of the event invention could be reused after a period of course to make sure that the person was like really definitely dead. And Carney's Carnegie's representatives and assistance would go around doing live demonstrations with him, where like they'd be placed inside the device and then trigger it to signal, you know, to

signal escape. His representative Emil Cami, speaking to the Medical Legal Society of New York, UH was hyping this thing up and and said in this speech quote, according to the declarations made by grave diggers the great cities of all countries, when at the end of five years the dead or removed from the common grave, they find in the coffins convulsed skeletons with fists clinched, twisted and raised

the jaws. In every part of the world, there is not a community of any importance, town or village where some memory is now preserved if people buried alive, and this memory remains like a permanent terror through all time. So basically just pushing this idea that that we're we're mostly prematurely burying people. Yeah, it's like it's just happening all the time. It's just that every graveyard, every cemetery is just like the muffled screams and whimperings of all

of the people who have been recently buried. Yeah. Yeah, I think that is definitely overselling it. Uh and Lake Kearnice, even though it got initially good press did experience some setbacks. One setback was that apparently during one demonstration and assistant got stuck inside was like buried in the device to

demonstrate it working, but then it didn't work. I think the spring loaded mechanism malfunctioned, and I think the assistant was okay, they got dug out, but obviously this was not good for press, and so they were actually burying the individual in the in the in the device, I think so, at least partially, yeah, because they were I mean, they wanted to show off how good it was. But they were also concern earns about false positives because of

the sensitivity of the device. It was pointed out that it's normal for corpses to swell during decomposition, and such swelling could nudge the glass ball and trigger unnecessary exhumations, right, which would be even more traumatic, right right, Well, I mean, I'm not sure more traumatic than a false negative. I think a false negative would be worse than a false positive,

but they're both bad. Yeah. Well, I mean if if if you if you learn O, I've prematurely buried somebody, and then you dig them up, you definitely want them to still be alive, right, I mean, it would be terrible, but hey, at least at least we get we can we can move forward. But if you just dig them up thinking they're alive and oh no, they're just they're not only are they dead, but they're even grosser looking

now right, Uh yeah, And that's a funny thing. I mean, there were dual fears about death at the time, right. If people had these fears of being buried alive, but people also feared sort of feared being seen in a state of natural decomposition, you know, like that that's a sort of like acquired cultural fear that like that it's bad to decompose, and you don't want people seeing you decompose,

the sort of a mummification mentality. Yeah, And that's a complicated issue under itself, right, I mean, and it is the natural process. Uh. And it is the sort of thing that is going to happen to the body. It's something the body does. Um. But on the other hand, you know, even even those of us, you know, who have probably a pretty liberal idea of how they want their body maintained, we probably don't, you know, probably not

thinking like public decomposition. We've we're probably imagining something a little more private and something that is even you know, even if it's a very green burial or decomposition, we we want it to be you know, private. Um. You know, the worms may be invited to play pinnuckle on our scalp, but only the worms. You know. This is just making me think back to that statement by Emile Cammi is talking about all the the premature burials as this special

knowledge that's in the realm of grave diggers. So it's like the grave diggers are like the people, this community of people who know about all of the premature burials and like they've got all of the grave and decomposition secrets. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think there's there's something to that. You know, as a as a culture removes itself from the physical realities of death and generally you know, relegates those duties to

a certain class or certain professions. Um, I mean, it really creates more room for superstitious ideas and and and just general supernaturalism in general. Like i've i've I think there is there is a finality to seeing the dead. And my view is that when we prevent ourselves from seeing the dead, from having that that physical experience of death, like we often don't have a certainty that it occurred.

You know, there's always this room for even like not even like a a sensible doubt, uh or even a conscious doubt, but there is this idea that the person did not quite die, as they just suddenly were no longer in my life, you know. Uh, So I don't know the asen downs to having a you know, a robust funerary custom. I imagine ultimately, I guess we should say finishing up Lake Arnie. It was never really successful.

It never really was employed at wide scale, right, So it means that the the fear of premature burial never reached like a real fever pitched where it was actually resulting in the sale of these devices and on a large scale. Well, it certainly didn't overcome the negative press that the device that has had gotten for, you know, for those drawback reasons. But there were other safety coffin models, and people did employe actual safety coffins of various kinds.

Um you know, many again had these bells and stuff that could be operated via a string or via lever's. Other safety coffin models were operated with levers that were triggered by the head or the mouth. I think it was often assumed there that maybe you wouldn't be you know, you might be in some state where you couldn't use

your hands or something. One really great model invented around your nineteen hundred is in a patent awarded to one W. J. McKnight for quote electric device for indicating the awakening of persons buried alive. Uh So, what goes on in this pattern here is the person wakes up, they close an electrical circuit which electrically opens an oxygen tank for breathing and sends an s O S signal through a connection to a wire service. It's just what instantly emolates them

in their their casket, emolates them. What do you mean? I mean like we have what like oxygen and then a spark, hopefully those sparks. I don't know. I don't think it's like a you know, like diving bell kind of oxygen rich environment. Okay, but still it seems like I've been through a lot. I've been prematurely buried, and now you're gonna you're gonna, you're gonna blast me with air and shock me. So well, it's good. It's sending

out the message to you know, whoever is listening. I'm not sure exactly what where the wire went though, I do think about Simpson's episode where they they use the Morse code to send for s O S and then it connects to a Morse code exhibit in the museum. But you know, you mentioned like a diving bell, like the bathmosphere, and this does sound a lot like a bathosphere, right.

It's sure, it's tiny container and you're you're lowered down, uh, somewhere beneath the surface, and then there's there's air, and then there's an electrical wire for communication. Right, all right, well, I think we need to call part one there, but we are not done talking about vessels for the dead. That's right. We will return next week and with the next episode of Invention, and we will roll out some

more caskets in the meantime. If you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is rate and review it and make sure you have subscribed. You can also get it an invention pod dot com. Uh. And hey, if if you're if you are listening to Invention, you are not listening to Stuff to Blow your Mind, go check out Stuff to Blow your Mind. Because all October it's spooky Halloween themed episodes. We always put a lot of effort into putting out some really solid Halloween offerings.

Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart radio, because the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,