Professor Death

In honor of Halloween I thought I'd address one of man's more gruesome worries.

Dear Professor Death,

I have a crushing fear of being buried alive that I can’t reason myself out of. I know it’s rare, but it happens. My fear has got so bad that it’s affecting my sleep and now I’m afraid that I’m worrying myself into an early grave. Do you have any advice?

Thanks,

Worried in Baltimore

Dear Worried,

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I will copy here a piece I wrote for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's blog. The fear of being buried alive, also known as taphophobia, is very real and not uncommon. I hope this helps you sleep at night.

Best,
Prof. Death

DEAD OR ALIVE?

 

No, it’s not a Wanted Poster. It’s a disturbing, legitimate question. At what point should a body be declared without-a-doubt-dead?

I came across an article this past November in the MIT Technology Review, titled,The Biggest Questions: What is Death? by Rachel Nuwer. She says, “Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.”

Seriously? I thought dead was dead. The heart stops beating. The lungs stop expanding. The person has become a dearly departed.

Apparently not.

In a nutshell, the brain can survive without oxygen much longer than previously thought. Likewise, our organs. This is great news for organ recipients and family members who aren’t ready to let go of a loved one, but it then begs the question: When do you declare a person deceased?

Rachel Nuwer’s MIT article sent me down a twisted rabbit hole of humankind’s relationship with death. I discovered no clear answers, but came across some interesting – and in some cases, cringe-worthy – facts.

When the first person was mistakenly buried alive is lost in the mists of time, but archaeologists know that mankind has been burying our dead for at least 100,000 years (possibly as long as 300,000 years, but that time frame is currently in dispute, so I’ll go with the safer, for-sure number). I suspect the fear of being buried alive showed up soon after not-dead bodies were covered with dirt.

Who hasn’t seen the Bring Out Your Dead plague scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

The scene: Crying. Wooden cart wheels creak. A triangle clangs.

“Bring out your dead!”

“Here’s one.”

“Ninepence.”

“I’m not dead.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.”

“I’m not dead.”

“Here. He says he’s not dead.”

“Yes, he is.” 

“I’m not.”

“He isn’t?”

“Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.”

“I’m not dead yet,” has become a modern catchphrase. A joke we chuckle over. But in not-that-long-ago times, it was often true. Plague epidemics often resulted in premature burials due to the population’s fear of contagion. Careful scrutiny of the presumed dead was ignored and bodies tossed into mass graves, only to have a few crawl back out.

Mystery writers spend a lot of time thinking about death. You could even say we are obsessed with it. It’s our bread and butter. I’m always looking for new and interesting ways to bump off a character, or coming up with characters deserving of being bumped off in nasty ways. In mysteries, there’s never any question that the victim is dead. In real life, that hasn’t always been the case.

In general, death is viewed as an event signifying the end of an organism. Until around 1960, if the heart stopped, it was assumed the person was dead. Then along came CPR, and suddenly the dead could be brought back to life. Mechanical ventilators began to pump air into lungs to keep brain-damaged people alive for extended periods, in some cases, years, even decades.

Taphophobia (or taphephobia), the fear of being buried alive, is as old as the folk tales told about it and all manner of methods have been used to avoid it. Holding a mirror under a person’t nose to see if they were breathing no longer sufficed.

According to D. P. Lyle. M.D, in his book, Murder and Mayhem, as recently as three hundred years ago, a variety of unusual and mostly painful means were employed to verify that a body had truly deceased. Tobacco smoke enemas, nipple pinching with pliers, hot pokers shoved into – I can’t even write it. You’ll have to use your imagination.

Another popular method of checking for life involved a device that clamped onto the tongue and yanked it in and out for several hours. If the victim didn’t complain about any of these, they were pronounced dead.

Fortunately these methods faded in popularity, but the fear of being buried alive did not. Patents proliferated for Safety, or Security coffins, coffins fitted with devices that allowed the occupant to signal they weren’t dead. “Saved by the bell,” a term used when we are saved from a perceived catastrophe at the last minute, rose from the use of a bell to alert those above ground that the corpse was not a corpse. As dead bodies often jerk and move – even flipping over in their caskets – many were hastily dug up, only to be reburied.

Putrefaction was the only certain way to tell that a body was truly dead, but most people don’t go for rotting corpses lying around their homes. One answer was to send the recently deceased to a Vitae Dubiae Asylum, or the Asylum of Doubtful Life, the brainchild of German physician Dr Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland.

The Waiting Mortuaries, as the asylums were commonly called, were kept well-heated to hasten the rotting of the flesh. The first asylum opened in 1792 and they soon popped up all over Germany and Austria. The last one closed in Brussels in the 1870s. The smell of liquifying bodies in an enclosed space must have been unbearable. I can only imagine how difficult it was to hold on to employees.

Although rare, there are still cases when a person is declared dead, only to come to life again. Consider Beck Weathers who was left for dead – twice! – on Mt. Everest in 1996, only to awaken and stumble down to a low-level camp where he was airlifted to a hospital and survived to write a book about his ordeal.

As recently as this past October in the UK, the BBC News reported on an ambulance service that declared a patient dead only to have him wake up in the hospital morgue. The key to avoiding premature burial is to avoid being taken for dead when you are still very much alive. If you suffer from a neurological disease that gives the appearance that you have died, consider getting a prominent tattoo that warns paramedics you might not be dead. And then there’s always the security coffin.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, Risk-Free Burial, “In Italy, Tuscan watchmaker Fabrizio Caselli introduced a special coffin for people who fear they'll be buried prematurely. The $4,500 casket is equipped with a two-way microphone-speaker, a flashlight, a small oxygen tank, a heart stimulator, and a beeper to alert an above-ground monitoring station.”

The price has probably gone up, but if you truly fear being buried alive, this could be the ticket.