“In a town where I was brought up, a woman was nearly buried alive through having gone into a trance on being frightened by a young lady who had put on a white sheet and pretended to be a ‘ghost.’ For years she was liable to long spells of insensibility, from which nothing could rouse her.
“The haste with which small-pox corpses are disposed of nowadays is to be deprecated. They are usually buried within twelve hours of their supposed death, and the cases I first mentioned show with what very probable results. The only sure proof of death is decomposition, and a law ought to be passed forbidding burial until signs of it have appeared. Not very long since I was in a church-yard where a drain was being made round the church, and was not a little struck by the horrified look of a labourer who came to the vicar and stated that they had come on a skull face downward, which, he said, put it beyond doubt that the person it had belonged to had turned in his coffin after burial.—I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
“B. A.
“June 18, 1884.”
The Undertakers’ Journal, May 22, 1895, has the following:—
REV. HARRY JONES’ CASES.
“The Reverend Harry Jones, in his reminiscences, and as a London clergyman, declares his conviction that in times of panic from fatal epidemics it is not unlikely that some people are buried alive. Mr. Jones recalls a case within his knowledge of a young woman pronounced to be dead from cholera, and actually laid out for the usual collecting cart to call from the undertakers, when a neighbour happened to come in and lament over her. The story continues thus: ‘And is poor Sarah really dead?’ she cried. ‘Well,’ said her mother, ‘she is, and she will soon be fetched away; but if you can do anything you may do it.’ Acting on this permission the practical neighbour set about rubbing Sarah profusely with mustard. Sarah sat up, stung into renovated life, and so far recovered as to marry; ‘and I myself,’ says Mr. Jones, ‘christened four or five of her children in the course of the next few years.’ In another case, within Mr. Jones’ parochial experiences in London, a man employed as potman lay in extremis. A doctor was called in, who said ‘Turn him on his face, and I will put a thick strip of flannel soaked in spirits of wine down his spine. We will see what that will do.’ A sister brought a store of flannel, the doctor soaked it in spirit, and prepared to apply it as he proposed. First, however, he placed the soaking mass in a heap (almost as big as a small hassock) in the middle of his back. Meanwhile the sister leant forward with a candle and accidently set the hassock on fire. ‘This,’ adds the anecdotist, ‘woke the potman up;’ and not very long ago the doctor told me he had seen him in a street near the Oxford Circus.”
From the Daily Chronicle, September 19, 1895.
“Sir,—I infer from the following facts that numbers of persons are buried alive after being supposed to have succumbed to small-pox.
“Some years ago, at St. Paul’s, Belchamp, near Clare, a young man who had been down with the small-pox was pronounced to be dead, and was put into a coffin, which, fortunately, was left unclosed until after the bell began to toll for his funeral, when he rose and stepped out. He lived for many years after. In the same neighbourhood no less than three other similar cases occurred, saving that the undertakers were not so far forward in their work. Each of these would have been buried alive but for the facts that in one case the nurse, having suspicions, put a wine-glass over the mouth of the person (who had been already ‘laid out’), and on returning in a quarter of an hour found it dimmed with breath; and that in the other case the mother of a mother, who with her baby was declared by the doctor to be dead, had blankets heaped on them, and after a while had the satisfaction of seeing them revive. Two of these three persons are, I believe, still living, and would be just past middle-age. I enclose their names for your private perusal, that you may verify my statements if desired. The first-mentioned case happened about seventy years ago, but I heard of it from residents in the neighbourhood about forty years after it occurred.