Our great American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, says: “To be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of all extremes which have ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”
Is any death more horrible than this? To be embraced, unprepared, down in the deep dark grave! To awake again with the greatest longing for life, suffering the most severe bodily tortures, in the coffin! To realize that there is no escape from inevitable death! Who can conceive the feeling of finding one’s self in the grave, the blood rushing to the head, the body trembling convulsively in the vain endeavors of casting off the oppressing weight, the organs of respiration laboring without avail for air, the muscles of the whole body working without result, and above all, being mindful of certain death near at hand?
From time to time anti-crematists, advocates of earth burial, of course, assert that cases of burial alive are exceedingly rare and occur very seldom. This is very erroneous. Our newspapers teem with the reports of such cases, and one must be a careless reader indeed not to observe them. As I am a daily peruser of some specimen of the secular press, and hardly anything of importance escapes my notice, I succeeded in making a collection of cases of burial alive, from which I will cite some striking examples. A Wheeling, W. Va., special despatch to the Chicago Tribune relates the terrible fate of a young married lady as follows:—
“One of those ghastly stories of interment before life has become extinct, which cause an involuntary shudder of horror to pass through the reader, is current in this city to-night. The victim, so the story goes, is a young married lady of 20 years. In May of last year, three months after her marriage, the lady was taken violently ill, and after lingering for ten days, apparently died. There were certain peculiarities about the appearance of the supposed corpse, however, which caused a suspicion in the mind of the attending physician that his patient might be in a trance, but after keeping the body for four days with no signs of returning life, the remains were consigned to the grave, temporary interment being made in the family lot in an abandoned graveyard. A day or two ago the body was disinterred prior to removal to another cemetery. To the surprise of the sexton the coffin-lid showed signs of displacement, and on its being removed the grave-digger was horrified to find the remains turned face downward, the hand filled with long tufts of hair torn from the head, and the face, neck, and bosom deeply scratched and scarred, while the lining of the coffin had been torn into fragments in the desperate efforts of the entombed victim to escape from her horrible fate. Since the discovery the young husband has been prostrated, and his life is despaired of. The names are withheld.”
The sequent curious case of premature interment occurred at Leipsic, a small town in the state of Ohio. A lady who was pregnant died suddenly. She was put in a coffin and placed, temporarily, to await the burial-day, in a vault. Some of her relatives, however, thought that she had been disposed of too hastily and caused her coffin to be opened. When the air struck her body, she revived. She was taken home and recovered entirely, being soon after delivered of female twins.
A despatch from Woodstock, Ont., dated Jan. 18, 1886, to the Detroit Evening News states:—
“One year ago a girl named Collins died, as was supposed, while playing on the street. The body was moved last week from where it had been buried in the family plot, and the parents wishing to view the remains, had the coffin opened, when to their horror they discovered that a dreadful struggle must have taken place after burial. The shroud had been torn to shreds, the knees were drawn up to the chin, one arm was twisted under the head, and the features bore evidence of dreadful torture,—all unmistakable proofs that the girl had been buried alive.”
The celebrated English anatomist, Winslow, is said to have been twice nearly interred alive.
The Marquis D’Ourches, courageous in all other respects, had the greatest fear of premature burial. He recorded all the stories of burial alive; he believed in them, and even asserted that one of his uncles had awaked under ground.
“I have seen death in every aspect,” said a general to Dr. Josat, a gentleman rewarded for a book on mortuary houses, “and it has never had any terrors for me; but I own that I shudder at the notion of finding it at the bottom of a ditch in the cemetery.”