Taphephobia - Pray you don't wake up

[DuckforcoveR]

One fearful story of premature burial comes from a pamphlet entitled “The Most Lamentable and Deplorable Accident,” which is more of a legend than anything else. It is the story of a London butcher named Lawrence Cawthorn who fell fatally ill in 1661. Lawrence’s landlady was eager for his swift death so that she could inherit his belongings. She saw to it that he was quickly pronounced dead without a doctor’s consultation and buried at a nearby chapel.

Not long after his entombment, visitors and mourners heard screams and shrieks coming from the grave. They rushed to dig up Cawthorn’s coffin, but it was too late. Cawthorne’s shroud was completely shredded. His eyes were swollen and his head was bloodied beyond recognition from where he’d beaten it against the coffin in an attempt to escape. His landlady was then accused of prematurely putting Cawthorn in his grave, and the story became a thing of myth and legend for hundreds of years.

Myth and Legend. The whispers in the dark that can only be heard by the wood surrounding you as you wake up in a cold, black, and dry box. You can breathe (but not for long) and the air has a taste of pine and soil. 


You scream, but the echo races around your small world where it can only pierce your soul as you come to a terrifying realization…

Yes my love, you have been buried alive.    Now, step into the darkness.

James Hatcher was one of the wealthiest, most renowned citizens to ever grace the small town of Pikeville, Kentucky.  He engaged in several successful business ventures in the coal mining and timber industries. He owned property reaching from Pikeville to present day Coal Run.

In 1889, Hatcher was married in Pikeville to young Octavia Smith. Their marriage would be tragically brief and produce only one son, Jacob, who died shortly after he was born. The infant mortality rate in the 1890’s was much higher than today’s numbers. During the 1800’s, children often died of one illness or another before the age of 10. There were few vaccines and medications for treatment, and illnesses that are minor nuisances today were then fatal. One of such sicknesses took the life of young Jacob Hatcher.

The baby’s death lead to a depression and illness that would soon end Octavia’s own life. Jacob died in January 1891. Octavia took to her bed, likely suffering from depression. She grew ill over the next few months, slipping into a coma from which she could not be awakened. She was pronounced dead of unknown causes on May 2nd, 1891.

That spring was unusually hot, and as embalming was not yet common practice, no time was wasted in burying Octavia. Funeral services were conducted and her body was laid to rest.

Several days later, others began exhibiting similar symptoms to Octavia’s. The bite of a certain fly, now known as the tsetse fly, brought a sleeping sickness from which others began to awaken after a time. Hatcher and his family began to worry if Octavia might have succumbed to this illness. Her breathing had been shallow enough in her comatose state for doctors to believe she had passed, but in actuality, she had been buried alive.

Hatcher secured an emergency exhumation and uncovered a horrific sight with the raising of the coffin. The casket Octavia had been buried in had not been airtight. She had awoken from her sleep to find herself trapped beneath the ground. In a panic, she had torn the lining on the lid of her coffin. Her nails were bloody and her face was contorted in terror, scratched in her frenzy to escape from her grave.

But by this time, she really was dead.

And so went the life of Octavia Hatcher. Consumed by grief in her final days only to awaken inside a dark and dusty nightmare to meet her fate on earth.

The Tragic Story of Octavia




"WHY WOULD YOU LEAVE ME MY LOVE!!"

In July 1893, a farmer named Charles Boger and his wife were living in Whitehaven, Pennsylvania when Mrs. Boger suddenly died of unknown causes. Doctors confirmed her death, and she was promptly buried. That should have been the end of the story, but sometime after her death, a friend told Charles that his wife had suffered from hysteria before Charles had met her, and it was possible that she hadn’t actually been dead. The very thought of Mrs. Boger having been buried alive haunted Charles until he became hysterical.

Unable to live with the thought of his wife dying in her casket, he employed friends to help him exhume her body for confirmation. What he found was shocking. Mrs. Boger’s body was turned over. Her shroud and robes were shredded to pieces and the glass of her coffin lid was broken all over her body. Her skin was bloodied and scratched, while her fingers were missing entirely. It was presumed that she chewed them off while attempting to escape. Nobody knows what happened to Charles Boger after the discovery.

You would be correct to think that medicine and science have advanced to a point where it is almost unheard of for people to mistaken for dead. But unless you are digging up the fresh burials to check for yourself there may be countless mortified and bloodied bodies consumed by a dark and ruthless fear as they suffocated under the ground while their loved ones cried for their souls just 6-feet towards the heavens. 

Some of the most horrifying tales of premature burial are horrifying because the victim miraculously survived the ordeal. Such is the case of Angelo Hays. In 1937, Angelo was a free-spirited 19-year-old boy residing in St. Quentin de Chalais, France. One day, Angelo was riding his motorcycle around the village when he was suddenly thrown from his bike and tossed headfirst into a brick wall. Without hesitation, Angelo was declared dead by doctors and was promptly buried three days after his accident. In the nearby town of Bordeaux, an insurance company became suspicious after realizing that Angelo’s father had recently insured his son’s life for 200,000 francs, and an inspector was sent to investigate the claim.

The inspector had Angelo’s body exhumed just two days after he had been buried to confirm the cause of death, only to find a surprising answer. Angelo wasn’t actually dead! When the doctor removed the death shroud, he found Angelo’s body warm and his heart barely beating. He was immediately taken to a hospital, where he endured several operations and extensive rehabilitation before making a full recovery. As it happens, he had only been in a state of unconsciousness due to his severe head injury.

That’s right, a life insurance policy actually saved his life. Had his father not opened a policy there likely never would have been an investigation. For the sake of his soul we can only hope that he never would have woken up from his unconscious state to experience the hell that would await in that pine box.

Of course, some stories do have a happy ending. Angelo Hays went on to invent a coffin the would help keep a person alive if they happened to find themselves in a similar predicament.

Hays recovered and went on to invent his own security coffin equipped with a chemical toilet and radio transmitter. He became a minor celebrity in France, performing for a TV audience from six feet under.

Or just put a door knob on the inside of your crypt!



And for Mrs. Jones, she wasn’t quite buried but a keen-eyed police office saved her dead life.

A woman wrongly pronounced dead by a doctor has accepted almost £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

Maureen Jones, 65, had slipped into a diabetic coma and was lying face down in her bedroom in Thwing, East Yorkshire, in April 1996.

Dr Marion Meeson, a local GP, was called, declared her dead and an undertaker was called to take away the "body".

However, as the hearse arrived at the cottage, two police officers noticed Mrs Jones' leg twitch and began to give heart massage.
She was taken to hospital, and has subsequently recovered fully.

The Medical Defence Union, which represented Dr Meeson, confirmed the settlement of £38,500 on the eve of a court hearing at Hull County Court.
"If you cannot get back to sleep at night all you think about is being buried alive.

"My eldest daughter said being told that I was not dead was a bigger shock than being told I had had a heart attack."

One of the two officers who noticed that Mrs Jones was not dead said: "We were unsure about telling the family straight away.

"Having being told that she had died half-an-hour earlier and then discovering that she was alive must have been a very emotional moment for them."
The incident was investigated by North Yorkshire and County Durham health authorities.

Dr Meeson was given an official reprimand and told to undergo educational assessment.

  

An even darker trend emerges from this primal fear, people risking everything to experience this first hand … BY CHOICE

For as long as humans have been alive, there have been cases of those trying to defy fate. There are now tutorials on what to do if you find yourself six feet under with no means of escape, and people have gone so far as to be voluntarily buried alive to try and escape death. In 2011, a 35-year-old Russian man did just that, only to succumb to a tragic death. For whatever reason, the man in question believed that burying himself alive for 24 hours would make him lucky for the rest of his life. With some help from a friend, he dug a grave outside of the city of Blagoveshchensk and inserted a makeshift coffin complete with air piping, a single bottle of water, and a cell phone.

Once the man got inside the casket, his friend covered him with nearly a foot of dirt and left. The man called his friend just once to say he was fine, but when the friend returned to relieve him in the morning, he was dead. It seems that an overnight rain might have blocked the air pipes and left the man to suffocate in his own casket. While this story is tragic, the more disturbing thing is that being buried alive was a popular Internet trend in Russia at the time, so who knows how many more suffered the same horrific fate.

Stories Above #1

Stories Above #2

Stories Above #3

More Stories

And then we have stories that are quite accidental, but the feeling would be no different if you find yourself buried and running out of time. Take this story for example:

A 13-year-old boy in upstate New York who was building a snow fort died on Tuesday after being buried alive in snow, police said.

The boy, identified as Joshua J. Demarast of Greenwich, New York, a seventh-grader at Greenwich Junior-Senior High School, ventured on Tuesday afternoon to an area in the town where snow is frequently dumped, Greenwich Police Chief George Bell said. While he was playing there, the boy became trapped, Bell said.

Demarast and a friend of his were playing at the dumping site, digging tunnels, when a truck dropped off snow it had plowed, Bell told ABC News today, adding that the snow was then pushed over onto the boys without the driver's knowing that they were there.

Buried alive, the two boys remained trapped under the snow for hours as police and rescue workers struggled to free them Tuesday evening, police said.

Police received a call for two missing boys around 5 p.m., and a K-9 unit was employed, police said. A dog located a sled the boys took with them, and the digging began. Demarast was found unresponsive under the snow and died shortly after 10 p.m., police said.

Bell said that he spoke to the survivor of the tragedy this morning and that the boy was recovering from the incident.

What is so hard about this one is that the first reaction is relief that one of the boys survived this horror. His family experienced a toxic mix of grief and happiness while the other family can only mourn in the darkness with a gut-wrenching grief. 

Buried Alive in Snow

A playful day at the beach turned dangerous, and in some cases deadly, for several young people buried alive while digging in the sand this summer.

A 12-year-old boy was digging into the side of a sand dune when he was trapped in a collapsed sand tunnel and unable to breathe for several minutes at a beach in Marin County, Calif. He died Sunday at Children's Hospital in Oakland.

But he's not the only one. On June 15, an Indiana teen was severely injured after collapsing sand buried him in a 7-foot pit that he had jumped into while joking with friends and relatives. And on June 11, a 16-year-old boy was buried in sand when a beach tunnel he was digging at Loveladies beach in Long Beach, N.J. collapsed.

The most recent incident involved Michael Newell of Cameron Park, Calif., who has been in critical condition since Friday. He had been on a camping trip with his family at Lawson's Landing, a beach and campground at the mouth of Tomales Bay, about 60 miles northwest of San Francisco.

Newell and another boy had apparently dug a hole about a foot or two wide and about three or four feet deep into the side of the large sand dune hill, authorities said. Such dunes can be as large as houses, authorities said.

Newell was inside the hole when the dune collapsed on top of him. The younger boy was able to escape.

Paramedics with the Marin County Fire Department said Newell was not breathing when they arrived and had been trapped without air for five to six minutes. Michael had no vital signs, but paramedics were able to revive his pulse before loading him onto a helicopter Friday.

Buried for 20 Minutes

In the Indiana case, the 15-year-old boy was trapped for about five minutes before friends and lifeguards pulled him out, breathing but unconscious. And in the New Jersey incident, it took rescue workers about 20 minutes to pull 16-year-old Daniel Correll out of the sand. He had no heartbeat and was unconscious.
Correll and a cousin had been digging holes up to six feet deep on the beach and connecting them with a tunnel when the sand gave way.

Buried Alive in Sand



Granted, with embalming techniques these days the likelihood of you waking after clinical death is near impossible. So, whether it be sand, snow, or dirt, if you find yourself buried alive there are a few things you can do to try and save yourself.

First, DON’T PANIC!  Seriously, panicking will drastically reduce the time you have to work yourself out of this jam.  You’ll use up all your oxygen quite quickly in this state and you likely don’t have a lot of time to start with.  Typically you could survive for one or two hours before using up your oxygen, as long as you don’t panic.  If you happen to be good at meditating, you could last quite a bit longer, such as the case of this man who survived nearly two hours on the air trapped in his helmet.  But of course in his case, he had people digging him out.  If you don’t think anyone is coming to dig you out, then putting yourself in a deep meditative state probably wouldn’t help you be able to extradite yourself from the situation; this would only prolong the inevitable.  Now try to relax yourself as much as possible.  The more relaxed you are, the longer you have to get yourself out and the clearer you will think.

Lesson 1 – DON’T PANIC (um, probably not the easiest thing in the world right now) 

If your relatives were cheap, they buried you in a nice flimsy coffin.  This is nearly the best-case scenario.  If you get out of this, you’ll be forever thankful for the cheap construction of your presumed final resting place.  Given the weight of the 6 feet or so of earth above you, your coffin might have already caved in one place or another.  This is a good thing.  If this has happened, you are literally almost home free (unless you are really short, then you have a bit more work to do).  Odds are, considering you are still alive in your coffin with limited air supply, you weren’t buried that long ago.  So the earth should be quite loose.

Lesson 2 – Increase your chances by asking for your burial to be more … natural … than a steel coffin. Again, as was said above, if you are embalmed none of this will matter anyways. 

Now,  take off your shirt most of the way by pulling it up over your head so it comes off inside out, but doesn’t come all the way off (think hockey fight); so that your shirt is basically now just inside out over your head.  Now tie off the shirt at the top so it is sealed.  At this point, you’ve basically made a “bag” out of your shirt that your head is now in.  This is to help protect you from breathing in dirt.

If your coffin hasn’t already been breached by the weight of the earth above, use your legs to kick an opening somewhere in the coffin.  Generally, the best place will be around the middle of the coffin which is usually the weakest point in terms of being able to hold weight.  Best to keep your head and torso close to the opening to make sure you don’t accidentally get stuck in the coffin where you can’t move around because of all the dirt.

Lesson 3 - No lesson here, I'm terrified just reading this...

If you are buried in a typical cheap coffin, it shouldn’t actually be that hard to breach as the weight of the earth above will already be bowing the top board quite a bit; it is even somewhat likely that the earth has already breached the cheap coffin somewhere, without need of your help;  if you feel dirt in the coffin, thank your lucky stars because the hardest part is accomplished already.   If not, you’ll want to kick has hard as you can to try to get the board flexing.  You won’t be able to move the board much because of the weight of the earth, but that’s fine.  You mainly just want to make that weight of the earth work for you by kicking the board and hopefully having the weight of the earth flex the board down more every time until it breaches.

Once you have successfully breached the coffin, use your legs and hands to push the earth coming in towards the edges of the coffin.  Fill the coffin as much as possible with dirt, packing it in, without losing the ability to be able to get your head and torso out of the hole, head first.

If you are trained in Kung Fu, you can try this as well:

Once you’ve packed in as much dirt as you can, simply get your head near the breach and use all your strength to stand up with your arms straight up; you may need to make the breach bigger as you do so, but this shouldn’t be too hard with a cheap coffin.  As you are doing this, try to get one leg up out of the coffin so you can further push yourself up by standing on the outside parameter edge of the coffin lid.

If you are buried around 6 feet deep and are anywhere from 5 feet tall or above, you should be able to not only have your arms break the surface at this point, but also have your head break the surface due to the fact that you pushed a foot or two of earth into your coffin.  Now getting yourself completely out may take a little time without help, but considering the earth should be fairly lose, should be one of the easier things you just had to do.

Once your head has broken the surface and you can freely breathe, feel free to let yourself panic a bit if you need to and scream your head off, perhaps cackling madly; I mean, you are about 95% there at managing to escape being buried alive.  I think a good healthy manic mad cackle is in order.  Go ahead;  I’ll wait…  Now that that’s done, if no one has come to your rescue, go ahead and worm yourself out as best you can using your arms to pull yourself out, wriggling your body as you go to further loosen the earth holding you in.

If you find yourself waking up in a steel coffin, well …

If your family was really nice and wealthy, they’ll have buried you in a “safety coffin”.  These coffins are equipped with means of letting yourself out safely or means of notifying the outside world you are in fact still alive.  In either case, these tend to always come with some sort of lighting device that doesn’t consume oxygen, like a flashlight.  Use it and you’ll likely find whatever is needed to allow you to alert the outside world that your death was greatly exaggerated.  Note, it is generally not a good idea to light a match or a lighter if you have one.  Not only might you catch yourself on fire, but you’ll use all the oxygen in the coffin extremely quickly this way.

Now, if you’ve gotten to this point and still haven’t gotten out, you should continue trying the above until you start to feel yourself asphyxiate.  At this point, you have two choices.  First, continue on as before and eventuality succumb to the lack of oxygen.  This is pretty much universally thought of as a pretty horrible way to die as you’ve got plenty of air you’ll be breathing in filling your lungs, but little to no oxygen.  It’s a very slow way to die and quite unpleasant from all accounts.  Second, you could always try to end it a little quicker.  If you’ve got a pen or something handy, feel free to stab yourself in the throat.  One quick thrust to your carotid artery (either on the left or right of your neck, pick one!) and you’ll be dead in no time.  No pen or any other device to bleed yourself with?  Well, you’ve probably got teeth at least…  As this article has turned a bit morbid *ha morbid*, I’ll just say, “use your imagination”.  Don’t have a good imagination?  Think wrists.

Last resort: (Some people may use this as a first resort, to each their own)

There is of course also always the chance of divine intervention.  Even if you aren’t normally a “praying man”, might I suggest that in this case, you’ve got absolutely nothing to lose in becoming one, and who knows maybe even something to gain even if things don’t work out.   I’d recommend avoiding offering God anything if he’ll get you out though.  People do this all the time and it makes no sense.  I mean really, if there is a God, what could you possibly offer him that he doesn’t already have or couldn’t get himself?  It would be like trying to come up with gift ideas for Bill Gates, but times a bagillion.  Better to just ask out of mercy or grace for help and possibly forgiveness of any wrongs you might have done in your lifetime (just in case).  He might feel sorry for you and help it end quicker than normal asphyxiation or help you get out; either is win/win 

Step by Step




Now if you find yourself in a mortuary being poked at by a mortician who's trying to convince you that you are dead, well, best of luck! It will only hurt for a moment...




At the end of the day, there are many things to fear in this world and maybe even in the next. How we cross that bridge may have an impact on how your soul moves on. And if you are thinking to yourself "I want to see a demonstration!", well (without posting horrible videos from the web) here's a good start: (Not posting for his message, just the video experience)



Part 2:



And Part 3:

• "As this earth will suffocate me, I implore you to have my body opened so that I will not be buried alive"

Last Words

[Mystic Wanderer]

Thanks a lot @"DuckforcoveR".  (sarcasm)    

More reasons for me to choose cremation. 
Like you said, everyone is embalmed after death these days, so hopefully, being buried alive is no longer an issue... I hope!