SYMHC Live: Not Dead Yet - Safety Coffins and Waiting Mortuaries

For the west coast tour, Holly and Tracy talked about the fear of being buried, which reached a fever pitch in Europe and the U.S. from the 18th to the early 20th century. That fear led to some very interesting inventions as humans tried to ensure they wouldn't end up interred before their time. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and we recently
finished the West Coast leg of our tour UH that
had a different show than the East Coast dates which

(00:23):
has already aired, which was about and royal UH. And
since we were traveling to Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and
San Francisco in October, my favorite month, we decided to
make it a creepy episode, and that is actually how
we're closing out our Halloween programming for the year sort of.
We recorded one about a classic horror actor, which has
become our tradition, that's going to come out in November

(00:45):
for logistical calendar reasons and also because it turned out
it was not really that Halloween. Yeah. When we when
we had our unexpected switcheroo in the calendar, we went
through it and I said, Okay, of these Halloween episodes
already recorded, this is the one that's not tied to
a specific date and is slightly less halloweeny, so you
can look forward to that in November, And without further ado,

(01:07):
here is one of the shows we recorded during this tour. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I am Holly Fry and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and you guys already win the
prize for best Tour audience so far. That was, like,

(01:29):
I don't know if anybody listens to saw Bones. That
was a Sydney McElroy level of sering, you're so good.
So the idea of premature burial and our collective fear
of it has of course been written about for centuries,
and the fear of being buried alive is called tafa
phobia in case you did not know, which for some

(01:51):
reason makes me think about the Bob's Burgers episode where
Um Louise makes a friend out of a man made
of taffy. I don't it's a whole different thing. But
tafa phobia is alive and well today. But there was
a period from the eighteenth and into the twentieth century
where it reached this fever pitch in Europe and the
United States. So we're gonna break down today a little

(02:14):
bit where that phobia really came from, at least in
terms of that period of time and how people tried
to deal with it. Uh, and really just how real
a possibility of a live burial actually was or was not.
That there's a lot of emphasis on them was not
part just as a spoiler. Uh. Theologian John Dunnes Scotus,

(02:37):
the first of many delightful names we have in this episode,
was said to have been buried alive in eight so,
according to a pretty widely accepted story, he had experienced
some kind of an attack that left him completely unresponsive.
He was buried in Cologne, and then when his servant,
who had been away when this all happened, came back,

(02:57):
he insisted that the body be exhumed, and so when
the tomb opened, Dune Scottis's hands were bloodied and worn down,
indicating that he had been trying to fight his way
out of the tomb, which is horrifying. However, Uh, that
account did not actually show up until Francis Bacon wrote
about it in Historia Vitae at mortis and that's the

(03:20):
history of life and death, and he wrote that in
the early seventeenth century, so three hundred years after done
Scotus died, and it is completely unclear. We have no
idea where he got this information, because it didn't seem
to exist before then, I have an idea. He made
it a fevered imagination when he first put out the story,

(03:41):
though it didn't really cause any kind of a panic.
But by the late eighteenth century, leading right through the
Victorian era Europe and the United States in particular, we're
just fascinated with and terrified of the thought of live burial.
And there were a lot of factors that contributed to
this huge cultural anxiety. So, for one thing, there was

(04:01):
this thesis that was written in seventeen forty by Um,
a Danish born anatomist whose name was Yaka Benin Winslow,
and it was titled Morte and surte Signa or Death
Uncertainty Standards, So it really sounds like a page turner um.
And in it he wrote about the pitfalls of how
the medical community was applying its methodology to determine that

(04:25):
someone was or was not in fact dead. Uh. And
he referenced as an example this John Done Scottish story
as though it were a verified fact. I like how
I pronounced his name totally different from me. I don't,
I don't. I'd never found a consistent pronunciation. So if
I horrified anyone, sorry, Uh, that's just a bonus. So

(04:47):
Winslow's ideas were pretty sound. Though he thought that a
lack of a pulse and the appearance that respiration had ceased,
he thought that was probably not enough to conclusively and
confidently declare someone to be dead, which man is pretty
reasonable conclusion, but for him, the only way he thought
to be sure was to wait and see if the

(05:08):
body started decomposing, which, like, that's an abundance of caution. Yes.
I feel like if Winslow were watching modern TV and film,
he would be that guy in the audience going, that's
not how you're doing at all, because all they do
is look at him for like a second, do the
eye clothes, and they're out of there. Um, And that
would not be nearly enough for him. But then another physician,

(05:32):
Jean Jacques Boullier Dablancour, he was French, y'all um. He
took Winslow's writing and he kind of ran with it
because winslows thesis had been written in Latin, and so
Brullier translated it into French, and to kind of illustrate
the points that were being made, he added in anecdotes
of people who had been buried alive as a sort

(05:54):
of commentary, and he published this as a two volume work,
and the first volume was published in seven in ten
forty two, it was titled Discertitude de senor de la
mare or The Uncertainty of Signs of Death. So riz
ah I said it badly. His translation didn't rely on
any kind of verified information when it came to adding

(06:16):
in these anecdotes. He relied on folklore and rumor in
legend to fill out this whole version of his book.
And that really sensationalized adaptation of Winslow's earlier work became
incredibly successful. It was translated and republished in Europe and
in the United States, and then some of these translations
then added their own flourish with all kinds of other stories,

(06:39):
uh the beyond what had been supplied. So to lay people,
this came off as incredibly credible. It was written by
a doctor, two doctors, depending on the attribution and the translation.
I'm not gonna name any names. I feel like there's
still a doctor out there who's saying stuff from people

(07:00):
are believing it because he's a doctor. Um. But of
course the doctor said that premature burial was a real
and common danger that must be true, So he made
a lot of money off of this work. Yeah, they
all wanted to be ready and understand this whole situation.
And even though other medical professionals eventually wrote their own
critiques of Bruyer's work, pointing out how much of it

(07:21):
was really speculative and in fact quite fanciful, the damage
was already done in so many ways. People had already
latched onto it, and so many people had grown terrified
that they were going to be misidentified as dead that
there was absolutely no walking back dis belief. It's kind
of like that thing where once you believe it, even
when credible evidence is presented, you just think it's a

(07:43):
double arc. Right. No, it's real and you're hiding it.
You're working for big coffin. Um So. So there was
no way that was going to get fixed. Um But
on the plus side, this book and its popularity and
the public consciousness of about the possibility of live burial
did make physicians a lot more careful about declaring their

(08:05):
patients did. This is like the opposite of Virginia Apgar
needing to look at the babies. Um So. The case
of Hannah Bestwick is this clear indicator of how deeply.
People were starting to fear being buried alive in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Hannah was a wealthy woman.
She was unmarried, and because her brother had allegedly been

(08:25):
almost buried alive, she was really, really completely terrified of
premature burial, so much so that she made a deal
with her Manchester doctor Charles White to keep her body
from burial indefinitely an even bigger abundance of caution, for

(08:46):
the sum of twenty thousand guineas. So some retellings say
that he inherited the entirety of her fortune. Others say
that he merely had this one lumpsome pay out. But
the important thing is that he really did keep her
from being buried for a very long time. So after
Ms Beswick died in seventeen fifty eight, Dr White embalmed her.

(09:06):
He kept her in his home for years and years
and years. He would check on her annually with a
witness standing by to make sure everything was cool and
that she was in fact well preserved. Um. I read
one thing that said that he eventually moved her from
like kind of an out in the open thing to
like putting her in a clock. But I'm not sure
if that's true. Is that not where you keep your bodies?

(09:27):
I don't. I got a house full of grandfather clocks
I gotta open once a year. UM, I don't really
don't anybody come for me. I so expect police at
my hotel later. Um. So he totally kept his promise
and and went through with what this deal had entailed.
But then when Dr White died in eighteen thirteen, the

(09:48):
executive the executors of her of his estate were like,
I don't know what I don't want to do with
his dead body. Uh So they gave it to the
museum of the Manchester Society of Natural History and she
went on display, just probably not what she had in mind. Um.
She was finally buried in eighteen sixty eight, and that
was a hundred years after she died. So this led

(10:10):
to rumors that that had been the timeline that was
specified with her doctor. But I don't think that's actually
the case. And while she was on display at the museum,
she took on the nickname the Manchester Mummy. If I
had a time machine in our series of Ridiculous Things
we would do with time machines, I would I would
go back in time and reassure her honey once once

(10:32):
they embalm you. If you weren't dead before, you are
super definitely are now. In eighteen seventeen, a man named
John Snart This is Gonna Get Better published a book

(10:54):
called The Saris of Horror, Yeah, in which he recounted
a number of sentence of alleged live burials, and one
such story reads quote, about forty years ago, a man
well known about the streets of London and its environs
as an itinerant vendor of handkerchiefs, etcetera, was not only

(11:16):
supposed dead, but partly buried alive. However, he was happily
rescued from the above horrible fate by some providential accident
of delay in totally filling up the grave, and before
the grave diggers had left the spot, he was heard
to groan and was instantaneously relieved from his perilous situation.
The particulars of where it happened have escaped the author's recollection,

(11:43):
but the awful substance is not obliterated in the least.
So Snart described this man. I know that name, dude,
change it up. Um described this man as quote a
living witness of the horrible temerity of immature interment, and
he wrote that while this nameless handkerchief vendor went on

(12:05):
to live a really long life, it wasn't a great
life because he was taunted and made fun of for
being the dude that got buried alive. Um. And this
whole tale, though, I mean, you guys are smart, you
heard it. It has all of the trademarks of a
tall tale that is told to stir up fear and
probably sell books in the process. Um. So it's very
convenient that the man in question, who has no name,

(12:28):
also has no ties to anyone else and any sort
of records. He was just an itinerant salesman, y'all. We
don't know. Um, But he lived through this horrible near
burial and then suffered the jokes of insensitive jerks for
the rest of his life. So it's kind of this
double whammy of sad stories, and we all love those.
So that's why it sold a lot of books. Yeah.

(12:50):
So Smart went on to suggest that for every near
misslike that, a thousand other people were buried before their time.
He is not alone in this totally made up statistic.
Numerous writers are publishing their opinions and their warnings on
the matter of being buried alive, with a whole array

(13:11):
of unsubstantiated and very scary statistics. Everything from one false
burial a week to two out of every one hundred
burials being premature were reported. Yeah, and that one was
completely made up. There was like some of these would
describe like how they came to those figures, but it

(13:31):
was always based on like weird supposition and not not
really anything scientifically sound. And that topic of this potential
to be buried alive remained really popular with readers throughout
the eighteen hundreds. As we said, it sold a lot
of books. In eighteen ninety, more than seventy years after
Snarts publication, doctor Moore Russell Fletcher wrote a book titled

(13:54):
Our Home Doctor, Domestic and Botanical Remedies Simplified and Explained
for Family Treatment, with a treatise upon Suspended Animation, the
Danger of Burying Alive, and Directions for Restoration um, which
I kind of love. I mean you want the antidote right, uh,
And it ran with a secondary title of one thousand

(14:18):
Persons Buried Alive by their best friends. So text your
best friend after the show and be like, check on
me make sure it doesn't happen. As the eighteen hundreds
went on, a number of other influences raised more cultural
anxiety about premature burial, and one of those was the

(14:40):
fiction of the time. In July of eighteen forty four,
Edgar Allan pose the Premature Burial was published in Dollar newspaper.
And this story, in case you haven't read it, features
a narrator who has catalepsy, and that is medical condition
in which the person falls into a deathlike state of unconsciousness. Us.
I think we talked about it in that episode we

(15:02):
did on narcolepsy um. And because of it, the narrator
of the story is afraid for his whole life of
being buried alive. Uh. And we won't give the whole
plot away. In case you haven't read it, it's a
really lovely discovery because step Pop kind of knew what
he was doing. But the narrator cites examples in the
Book of Premature Burials to give his concerned credence, and

(15:24):
he describes all of the many, many ways in which
he has carefully prepared his own tomb to escape from
in case he suffers. The quote true wretchedness of being
buried alive, and this story was of course sensational, and
it preyed on this idea and fear that was already
really taking hold in the culture at the time. He'd
also already touched on premature burial in his short story Baronice,

(15:48):
which was published in The Southern Literary Messenger in eighteen
thirty five, and post story Cask of a Man Seato
also played on the fear of live burial in a
revenge plot. I remember that one from school, premature. I
lost my place on my paper. I think it's because
I left a word out of this paragraph, because that's

(16:10):
what I like to do to bury, said Jack, with
her a little bit keeper on her toes. It's fine.
Pretymature bury old figured into the nine nine Burton's Gentleman's
Magazine debut of The Fall of the House of Usher.
Another thing we read in school. We read a lot
of poss um. So Poe was certainly fascinated with this
idea of being buried alive, which is probably not a

(16:32):
surprise to anybody, and also recognized the potentially lucrative nature
of these tales that prayed on the reader's fears. I
feel like I should have an aside and go, I
know we talked about Poe a lot, but I am
a woman with a framed portrait of a girl and
Poe in her dining room, so clearly I have a
little bit of a focused situation. There used to apparently
be a lot more Poe in this outline, and then

(16:53):
it was pulled back. There was a whole lot more
Poe because I just want to talk about his work
all time, because I uh. And all of these stories
though about premature burial that he wrote came before his
really rapid rise to fame in eighty five with the
publication of The Raven. But once he became popular and
The Raven became popular, his other stories were reprinted to

(17:15):
capitalize on that fame, and so his work continued to
gain new readers and become more famous and build on
the already common fear of awakening in a tomb or
grave that had just been, you know, already kind of
bubbling up in the US and Europe. So keep in
mind that while embalming had been practiced all the way
back to ancient Egypt, it really wasn't all that common

(17:38):
in the United States or Europe at this point. Embalming
isn't necessary. A lot of cultures and religions look on
it as a defacement of the body, and it really
became more popular during the United States Civil War when Dr.
Thomas Homes started embodying embalming bodies so that there would
be some time to ship the bodies of soldiers who

(17:58):
had been killed in the battle home to their families.
Holmes had been experimenting with embalming practices before that. He
claimed to have embalmed more than four thousand bodies during
the war, making himself a whole lot of money in
that process. And then after that, embalming became a business
that was offered to the general population, and it gave

(18:18):
funeral professionals away to give grieving families more time to
make their their funeral arrangements rather than needing to bury
the body pretty much immediately. Yeah, that four thousand bodies
number gets really big when you consider that at the
time he was apparently charging a hundred dollars per body,
So during the Civil War that was a loado cast.

(18:38):
That is like a huge amount of money. Uh. And
as the twentieth century approached, discussion of premature burial became
even more common in public discourse. And we're going to
get into that a little bit, but right now we're
gonna pause. So in eighteen ninety six, a British businessman

(19:01):
and activist named William teb formed the London Association for
the Prevention of Premature Burial. He wanted to ensure I mean,
they had a mission. He wanted to make sure that
steps were taken to minimize the likelihood of anyone suffering
this fate, and he worked with doctors and survivals of
near burial to develop the ideas that the group formed together.

(19:24):
So in ve tab tab published a book. It was
titled Premature Burial and How It May Prevented with special
reference to trance, catalepsy and other forms of suspended animation.
And this book had a bunch of different methods, building
on the work of the writers that came before, that
the medical community would be able to be very very

(19:46):
certain that a person was really dead before declaring them
to be dead. These are not pleasant methods, no, just
to warn you brace if you're squeamish. Um. These included
holding fire to their hands, um and applying hot irons
to the body and injecting them with various substances, some

(20:07):
of which would have killed them. Um. But the idea
here was that people in trance like states that were
causing these false death declarations could perhaps be jolted to
consciousness by some form of shock to the body. Um,
like the I guess slapping was too nice. I don't
know what that's about. Why they're like, let's burn them. Um.

(20:28):
But this book also offered up some really pretty cool
new ideas for the time. So uh. It mentioned attempts
at resuscitation through electric shock or artificial respiration, and this
is a very new idea. Chest compression was super new
at this point. It had been discussed and practiced in
some form or another, although not commonly, for about ten years,

(20:50):
and mouth to mouth resuscitation was still fifty years off,
So in that regard, it was really ahead of its time.
So you may have noticed that trans states have come
up a lot. You might wonder why were there so
many people in comas and trances during this time. That
seems odd. There were a couple of things going on,
and one big problem was cholera, and in the nineteenth century,

(21:12):
cholera pandemics were pretty common, and global trade was helping
to carry contaminated food and water basically everywhere. Uh. But
one of the advanced states of the illness was a
coma that presented very much like death, and there were
cases where a person was determined to be deceased when
they were in fact not. Additionally, just knowing that it

(21:35):
was possible to get so sick that you looked dead,
even to a physician, really helped spread a public sense
of fear that that might happen. Another problem was what
came to be called lucid hysterical lethargy, or more casually,
death trance. I continue to be really curious about what

(21:57):
was really going on here, but there were numerous cases
in the nineteenth century of people who confronted with certain
topics or situations would experience this highly elevated heart rate
followed by a drop into a death a death trance.
And it was actually Dr George did Tourette the Tourette
I'm gonna say that really not the way anyone should

(22:19):
say this word. How does this go? Holly? Uh? Dctor
George gil de Latorette, that guy for whom Tourette's syndrome
is named, who came to this conclusion that it was
a mental disorder and not a contagion or a medical issue. Yeah,
that's one of those things that um it sometimes gets
written off under the category of hysterical women. Um. But

(22:42):
there were actually instances where they were recording this, like
they were taking these people's pulses and they were rising
rapidly and then dropping to almost nothing. So if that
was a case of someone kind of working themselves into it,
like their body was definitely responding to their mental state,
I'm just like, what was it? Thought it was fashionable maybe,

(23:05):
But here's the thing that kept all of this panic
and hysteria going. There absolutely have been people who were
buried prematurely, um, which stinks, But there were a lot
more that were mistakenly identified as having buried having been
buried prematurely, and because of the improved communications that were

(23:26):
happening in the late nineteenth century industry was causing great
communication advances, these horror stories would get picked up and
spread like wildfire, and they were largely at the result
of people not understanding science and how the human body decomposed.
For example, a lot of these stories hinged on this

(23:47):
evidence and air quotes that the person was heard to
cry out after having been buried. But this is actually
a phenomenon that's known as total loud, which is German
for dead loud. And it were first to the way
that the gas is built up in the body during
decomposition and they eventually cause the throat to open and
the air rushes like it would if you were speaking.

(24:10):
It causes some kind of cry for help. It's not
a cry for help, it's a cry made by gas
in your decomposing body. You just have gas. Um, yeah,
there's a lot of it's just gas. It's just gas. Though,
Ever since I was doing this research and I told
it to my husband, every time we belch in the house,
we go total loud. We think we're high hilarious. That

(24:33):
is the best new euphemism. Oh my total louds acting up. Uh. So. Similarly,
some of the most shocking and brace because it's kind
of gross upsetting stories of premature burial are attributed to
women who died while pregnant and then, for some reason
or another, we're later exhumed to discover what appeared to

(24:53):
have been an in coffin delivery. Um, it's super gross
and it's very sad, but it's not quite the that's
not what was. People would presume that, oh, my gosh,
she woke up and gave birth to her baby in
a coffin. That's not what happened at all. Uh. There
is always a German word for everything. Uh. And this
phenomenon is called saga birch, which simply means coffin birth.

(25:15):
So discoveries of coffin births and histories, which like they
continue to happen when we're doing our Unearthed episodes at
the end of the year. Sometimes there are you know,
somebody that did an archaeological dig and here's it is
another one right there. But it could lead to really
steep penalties and punishments for the doctors who were involved.
When it's something that was discovered pretty quickly, the doctors

(25:35):
would be accused of neglect. But once again, the real
culprit here is just decomposition and gas like gas filling
the abdominal cavity creating pressure like that's it's not it's
not at all that the person was still living in
some way. Um, a thing that that is not is
not noted here, but that like I heard about in

(25:56):
this in my teen tween fascination with death years, UM,
was people thinking that people's hair and nails were continuing
to grow, and um, like some of it was people
thought that people's hair and nails continued to grow after
they died, which they don't, or they were like, oh,
they must have been buried alive because their hair is
so much longer. No, it's just that, like your skin recedes.
I'm gonna tell you something scary. Um. There was one

(26:21):
thing that came up in some of the research I
was doing that no one's been able to explain, which
is that in cases where bodies have been exhumed, there
have been times where they have found clutches of hair
in clinched hands, and they can't explain that. We don't
know if, like, as part of decomposition, you try to
comb your hair so you look pretty. I don't. I

(26:41):
don't know what happens. But that's a scary thing that
came up. And because there's no explanation, I was like, man,
this one's running long. That doesn't seem like something that
a person might do if they really did regain consciousness
in the coffin. Oh, the first thing I would do. Okay,
that's the first thing I would do. Where's my lipstick?

(27:01):
And I would turn into Beatrix kiddo and start punching
the tank it from me. Okay, yeah. All of this
concern about being trapped in an early grave naturally sparked
human innovation, uh, and starting in the late eighteenth century,

(27:23):
people started coming up with some pretty fantastic coffins that
would help ease their fears of waking up six ft
under with no means of escape. Thus, the so called
safety coffin was born. So Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick is
usually cited as the first person to commission a safety coffin,
and that was a project he initiated in the early
seventeen nineties, so in the early years of all of

(27:45):
it's happening. This was a custom built coffin and he
had a window installed. There was a tube so that
if he if he awoke in, if he awoke entombed,
he could still breathe. And then importantly, the coffin had
a locking lid, and it wasn't supposed to be nailed
in place. The lock could be opened from inside. So

(28:07):
he also had a special set of keys made this
is just more complicated, and had these keys that were
tucked into a pocket in his death shroud, so if
by some misfortune, he had been buried alive when he
woke up, he could use those keys to open up
his coffin and then open the family tomb from inside.
If I woke up in a coffin, I would not

(28:27):
have my wits about me. I would not other than
the lipstick, which I would totally do um. But then
I'd be like, I don't know, I would do the
Beatrix kiddo thing like and really hurt myself before I
was like, hey, I had some keys made. I forgot
about those keys. But here's the thing, right, Not everybody
had a family tomb, so you couldn't just give yourself
a set of keys. Most folks were buried in the
ground with no way to see themselves out. Uh So,

(28:50):
a few years after Duke Ferdinand's idea, a German priest
named p J. Pessler came up with an idea that
every coffin should have a ward installed that could be
pulled from the inside, and should the person wake up
inside and pull said cord, the local church bells would
ring so that everyone would know that the recently buried
person was in fact alive. I gotta come dig him

(29:14):
up in the eighteen twenties, inventor and showman at Off
gut Smith put his own spin onto this whole idea
of a safety coffin. His coffin features included the ones
and the other models at the time, so there was
an air tube and an alarm, but the tube on
his design was big enough that if the person inside
woke up, food could be sent down to give them

(29:37):
enough sustenance while the whole digging up process happened. So
gut Smith himself tested his his inventions a lot of times,
and on one occasion he ate a full meal of
sausages and soup and washed it all down with beer,
all while buried one inside one of his coffins that

(29:58):
I'm just I'm sorry, this was like a very gassy
plan for your test. It also seems like a restaurant
concept that is going to take off, Like you know,
someone's gonna hear this and be like, I'm gonna call
investors in a minute. Two coffins um and tubes full
of sausage. Um. I just had to say, I gotta

(30:21):
admire eating a sausage in a tube, and I wonder
if the tube got greasy on the way. I have
many questions. I have questions like you don't really have
a lot of room to sit up in a closed coffin,
so I'm like, are you how are you drinking your?
Is it? I would die because I would open my
mouth to be ready and the food would go in
and I would choke. Okay, that's how that would play in.

(30:43):
They'd be like leave her there, Um trying to think
how you have the second funeral at that point. Um.
A really complex and fairly thorough of coach was devised
in eighteen twenty nine by Dr Johann Gottfried Taverner, and

(31:04):
this German inventor designed again a system of strings to
attach to the probably deceased slims, which ran to an
above ground bell, and to avoid any false alarms, the
bell had its own little housing to prevent it from
being triggered by the elements of it got rained on,
or if wind came, it wouldn't go off, and should
the bell rang, a watchman was trained to spring into

(31:27):
action an insert a tube into a specific slot so
that breathable air could be pumped down to the undeceased UH.
In eighteen sixty eight, Franz vest of Newark, New Jersey
filed a patent for an improved burial case. I had
a book with this exact patent drawing when I was

(31:48):
a team and this I don't It wasn't even like
I was particularly got the or anything. I was just
like really fascinated by I could see you being super
into it from the scientific angle, whereas I was like, oh, couthy, Yeah,
what kind of lining is in that coffin? Yeah, That's
what I was at. Can it receives sausages? Uh? So.

(32:15):
The patent application described how this would all work. Quote
the supposed corpse being laid in the body A of
the coffin and the cord K placed in the hand
of the corpse. The cord is next drawn through the
tube C and attached to the bell I, and the
tube C is placed in the base D on the

(32:36):
lid of the coffin. The coffin is now lowered into
the grave and the grave filled up to the air
inlets F. Now, should the person laid in the coffin,
on returning to life, desire to ascend from the coffin
and the grave to the surface, he can do so
by means of the ladder H. But if too weak

(32:57):
to ascend by the ladder. He can pull the cord
in his and and ring the bell I giving the
desired alarm for help. I like that. He's like if
you want to get out, he doesn't want to lay there.
Maybe cozy, Maybe it had a good lining. UM. So
Franz's coffin design would be buried only up to a
certain point, as Tracy said, so the air inlets would

(33:17):
still let air come in uh an oxygen to the
may be deceased, and then after a certain period of
time had passed without the coffin's passenger which was the
only word I could come up with, their um making
any moves to leave, then the burial could be completed.
This I imagine um. Grave diggers in the like found
this very irritating as a concept, like thanks for double

(33:39):
in my workload. You're really making the job of an
already very labor intensive job harder. So then in five
inventors Charles Sieber and Frederick H. Bornon Trigger of Waterloo,
Illinois came up with a casket that offered quote certain
new and useful improvement and lifeguards signals for people buried

(33:59):
in a rance. And this invention had an above ground
bell that could be wrung from the person buried in
the coffin, as others before it had, but it also
had a mechanism that could activate a blast of air
into the coffin once again from above ground to avoid suffocation.
Was fancy, yeah. Uh. When Vermont Dr. Timothy Clark Smith died,

(34:23):
he was not or he was rather interred in a
grave that he had designed specifically for himself to stave
off the likelihood of accidentally dying underground. So he first
arranged for the space next to his plot to also
be his, and he had a set of stairs built
into it. UM, and he rigged his own breathing tube
and bell system to alert anyone in case he awoke entombed.

(34:46):
But he also added another touch, and this is a
window above ground that sees down Today. You can still
see the window over his face in Evergreen Cemetery UH
in New Haven, Vermont. But the glass which was intended
to give passers by or uh someone who was maybe
concerned a chance to just check in on him and

(35:07):
see like, hey, are you actually deceased or you um
maybe waking up? UM that has unfortunately become clouded. So
if you are feeling a little bit morbid and you
want to go look. You won't see anything gross, but
you can say that you went and looked at a
corpse through a window. Yeah. I don't know if that's unfortunate.
I think that might be a blessing. Uh. Count Michelle

(35:29):
the Carnis Carnickie came up with his own solution to
this whole premature burial problem. In he was a chamberlain
to Zar Nicholas A second of Russia, and he presented
this idea at a conference organized by the French Society
of Hygiene at the sore Bun. There were doctors and
diplomats and the press. The Czar had given him the

(35:51):
leeway and his duties to focus exclusively on developing the
idea for this coffin, and he had put all the
bells and whistles into it. So he called his device
lock Out nice after himself, like you would uh. And
like similar inventions, it was intended to alert someone if
the person in the coffin was alive. This version was

(36:13):
also intended to give even an unconscious but a live
person a shot at being rescued. So you'll notice some
of those others involved, like you gotta wake up and
pull a string and do a thing. But this had
a glass ball that hung over the chest of the
probably dead person and if the ball was in any
way disturbed, it would trigger this spring loaded mechanism that

(36:34):
opened a container that sat above the grave, and when
the container opened, air would rush into the coffin via
a tube. These people love their tubes. UM. A chime
would sound and a flag would deploy, so it was like,
whoa alive? UM. I feel like if this were a
real functioning type thing. Little Richard had this um and

(36:58):
this air tube also allowed light into the coffin because
he thought like, if you had been buried and you
woke up, you might want to actually have some daylight.
And it also had a tiny electric light inside the
coffin as a backup solution in case you woke up
on an overcast day or at night. So this was
incredibly well received. Somehow it was affordable. Uh, it had

(37:19):
been developed over the years of research, and it probably
helped that it had the Russians are behind it. That
was a lot of clout. The press raved that it
had solved the problem of premature burial. The London Association
for the Prevention of premature burial endorsed it, and soon
he took this thing on tour to promote it. It

(37:41):
didn't didn't go well. It didn't go as bad as
you're thinking, but there was a problem. So on tour
the count would stand there and extol the virtues of
this invention, while an assistant who was buried in Lackarnie's
would provide a very real demonstration of just how well
it worked. But on one of the stops on the tour,
the bell failed to sound and the flag did not deploy,

(38:04):
and time was going by, and the audience started getting
progressively more concerned. Uh, and so did Carney's Carnickie. And
so the inventor then got several men and was kind
of like he called it, and uh, they all started
digging very quickly, and they were very happy when the
assistant turned out to be alive. He had triggered the
device and it worked enough to get air to him.

(38:25):
But those alarm systems did not work. Um, and the
press actually skewered lock Arne's after this. It was a
big public failure. It was super embarrassing, and even the
favor that it had briefly enjoyed from the medical professionals
and high profile enthusiasts that had initially embraced it quickly retracted.
So Karneis Carnickie continued to market his device in an

(38:48):
effort to try to regain the public's lost trust, and
a man named Farappo Lorenzo, who was seventy eight, demonstrated
the device for the count in Turin, Italy. He was
buried in it for nine days before being dug up again,
he wrote Carney's Carneckie wrote in promotional material, hyping up
how real the danger of premature burial was and trying

(39:09):
to counteract all of his critics. And he took his
safety coffin to the United States, where it was once
again really well received, but not well enough that he
ever managed to really sell many of them. Yeah, allegedly
it sat in like showrooms at funeral homes and it
was like you could have this if he would be
like that's okay, I don't think so. I'm not little Richard. Um.

(39:30):
There were at least two designs for safety coffins that
I really like. They really simplified this whole concept of
alerting people that you might need out. Um Hubert Devot
of New York came up with his version in eighteen
ninety four, and then Marie Constant Hippolyte Nicole of France
came up with hers in eight and both of these

(39:51):
made use of natural movement to set the cycle in
motion to alert someone above ground and get air pumped
into the coffin. Both of them realized that rather than
having a cord that somebody had to remember to pull
upon waking, it would be a lot more elegant to
just have a lever above the head of the body.

(40:11):
So the first thing a person would do upon waking
up in a coffin would probably be to raise their head.
So both of these designs were triggered by that motion
of sitting up in the coffin, but what happened after
the trigger was a little different. So in Devot's design,
the raising of the head would raise and open a
valve above ground that would admit air into the coffin,

(40:32):
and that valve, as per Devose patent right up quote,
should be made of some bright color so that it
could be readily seen, and so it would alert grave
watchers that movement was underway in the coffin that was
buried below. Nicole's design featured an elaborate hook and counterweight
apparatus that broke a glass when the person lifted their head,

(40:52):
which let air come in, and then the noise of
the glass breaking was supposed to provide the alert outside
world that something was a this but as the inventor wrote, quote,
I can also buy the breaking of the glass set
in motion any convenient apparatus for sounding an alarm. So
this particular design was intended for coffins that would be
kept above ground until the living were completely certain that

(41:16):
the person in it was dead, and then the window
area would be sealed up with some kind of plate,
and then the coffin would be buried. Yeah. I have
to wonder these designs that feature buy in from other people, Like,
you can buy the coffin, but you also got to
find someone willing to either only bury you part way
or hang out and wait till they're sure you're dead
and seal this thing up before it goes in. Like,

(41:38):
I mean, how do you approach a friend with that? Um? Hi,
I love you and I need to talk about my
final arrangements. Um. Eventually, electricity actually made its way into
some of these safety coffin designs. In nineteen hundred, Walter J.
McKnight of Buffalo, New York, filed a patent for an
electric device for indicating the awakening of persons buried a lie,

(42:00):
And in McKnight's design, movement within the coffin would close
a circuit, like he had all these levers that were
metal when they would close circuits if you moved and
it was attached to an electric signal above ground. And
one section of his design even included an arm similar
to that glass ball we talked about earlier that just
sat above the chest of the person that was probably deceased,

(42:21):
so that even if they breathed and we're not conscious,
it would close that circuit and start the whole process.
So those are all novel and creative ideas. That does not, though,
make them good, and we are going to discuss why
that is in just a moment, but first we will
leave a place for an ad for listeners at home

(42:43):
later on. There is, of course, some pretty flawed logic
in most of these safety coffin designs that we've been
talking about. So, as we mentioned in the first segment,
corpses twist and turn a lot in a lot of
bizarre ways as they decomposed. So almost all of these

(43:06):
designs that featured some movement in the coffin setting them
off were open to the possibility of false positive alarms
being activated. The obvious solution, at least if you asked
uh Fran's Vestore in eighteen sixty eight, was to include
a viewing tube, so that again it's a tube so

(43:26):
that other people could then just like peek in on
the recently buried and see if they were trying to
get help or if they were just decomposing and setting
the alarm off. Yeah. So in addition to that, unless
the provided air supply we're being pumped in continually, the
person inside would really still only be able to survive
for a very brief amount of time, maybe even as

(43:48):
little as an hour. So the idea of waking up
and then activating the air tube so like that this
was just not really a workable solution. But even though
the fields of medicine and preparation of the dead have
both evolved, there is still an ongoing fear of being
buried alive that persists today because some religions we mentioned

(44:10):
this earlier forego embalming or require that a body be
put in the ground very quickly. There is still this
possibility in the minds of some people that this could
actually be a real concern, and so um As I
was digging through the Patent Office listings of safety coffins,
the most recent one that I found was actually designed
in um and it is called a Portable Alarm System

(44:34):
for Coffins UM and it was It featured quote a
signal transmitting structure removably secured in the coffin or tomb.
So if someone were to wake up inside this coffin,
they could press a button, a visual signal above the
ground would be triggered, and then the whole thing. Here's
the part that I really like. It's designed with conservation
in mind, because when it's determined that enough time has

(44:56):
gone by that the person within is really and truly deceased,
then this whole device can be removed and used again
on another coffin, which is kind of cool. Recycling. Yeah.
Uh So, even before safety coffin's really became so popular,
another way to avoid premature burial had a brief heyday,

(45:17):
and that was the waiting mortuary. This was basically a
place where bodies could be placed and observed for a
period of time to make sure they were really, definitely
truly dead before being interred, and the composition was the
only benchmark for determining that the death was real with
any kind of confidence. So Bruier, that fearmongering doctor who

(45:41):
stirred up all this panic over waking up in a
tumor grave, had actually proposed this concept way back in
the seventeen forties, but it didn't manage to gain traction. Initially,
there were some um heads of royal houses who were like,
we should do that, and then the funding never happened,
um because probably they realized uh um. But the idea

(46:03):
came up again in the late seventeen eighties because a
number of other doctors at that point who had read
Bruier's work started reiterating it and rewriting their own ideas
about this and saying that this is really something we
should consider. So obviously it would be optimal to keep
somebody who appeared to be dead somewhere that if they

(46:23):
did wake up, they could just be seen to buy
a physician immediately and given whatever care they needed to
continue to not be dead. But it's hard to tell
people to keep their deceased loved ones around their houses
for prolonged periods, just in case they happen to wake up. Yeah,
I know you're dealing with grieving and some other stuff,
but could you just hang onto this for a few days.

(46:45):
It's not cool. So Germany in particular picked up this
idea that special facility should be built to house the
newly probably did, where they could be looked after and
checked on in an environment that was specially prepared for
any surprise awakenings. One of the proponents of this idea
was a physician named Christoph Wilhelm Ufland, who wrote very

(47:08):
plainly about the corpse house that he was building in
sev Hooflan. Did not embellish or tell frightening stories to
support this writing. He wasn't, uh, you know, prone to
try to like stir up further about it. He was
really matter of fact, and he described all of these
functions very simply and very clearly in Uflan's lin House,

(47:29):
which was named the Asylum for Doubtful Life. Yeah, the
names in this are so good. Uh. There were eight
beds or stretchers for the corpses, and then an attendant
captain I on all the charges. And this was at
the time normally a woman, but Hoofalon thought that women

(47:50):
were too flighty and stupid to do a really good job,
so he thought that this should become a trained profession
for young men. Thanks, dude, glad to have your confident.
There were also quarters to keep the place running basically
like a home, keeping fires going and seeing to the
general tidiness of the place, and a doctor was on
call at all hours. And hoof Alan's waiting mortuary was

(48:12):
built in Weimar, but before long similar facilities had popped
up in Berlin, Frankfort, Augsburg, and a lot of other
cities throughout Germany. It's sort of like the saying nature
finds a way. Uh. You could also say that free
enterprise does as well. Uh. Because one lichinghouse in Munich
figured out a way to make extra cash, and that

(48:34):
was that this establishment charged a visitor's fee that, once paid,
entitled the guests to just explore the facility. They were
welcome to see all of the beautiful lounges and waiting rooms,
but they all just wanted to go walk in the
corpse room. Um. And the lichinghouse in Frankfort also started
taking visitors who wanted to indulge their macab Curiosity was

(48:54):
like a precursor to the Mooder Museum kind of. So
that Munich facility some other problems in terms of how
it was run. The staff, as a matter of procedure,
tied strings to the extremities of the patients, which if
they moved, would trigger a harmonium to the pump organ,
and the harmonium was played once a day to make

(49:15):
sure that it still worked, it was in good working order.
But as we mentioned in the case of the safety comments,
dead people move a lot. It's pretty common, and so
this was basically just a constant false alarm situation. I
can't imagine being the person whose job it is to
sit with the dead bodies to make sure they're really dead,
and they're constantly moving and making noise. But it's a

(49:37):
harmonium and harmonium noise. Uh. That harmonium is poorly tuned.
Don't don't be like me, harmonium. Uh. Waiting for mortuaries
persisted well into the nineteenth century. There were even a
few in the twentieth century that had not yet shut down,
and proprietors started to hope that they could mold this

(49:59):
into a luxury industry by building progressively more ornamental and
fashionable homes for these businesses. They looked like beautiful houses,
but they didn't last forever because despite the fancier ones
being built, people just started to think of them as
really gross places. And like, I mean, they kind of were.
They just were like little And also, let's say my

(50:20):
loved one wakes up, I don't want them to wake
up in a room full of corpses. Uh So, so
they kind of started to fall out of favor. People
started to question what it would be like for somebody
falsely assumed to be dead to wake up, wake up
in a place like this, just surrounded by these decomposing bodies,
and they just didn't want that. And then there was
this very tricky fact there's no record of anyone ever

(50:44):
waking up in one. Uh that cast doubt on the
entire idea of premature burial as this you know, total
scourge of living people. And then as people started to
realize that it was really pretty unusual to be buried alive,
it became apparent that there was not need for a
service like this, and waiting more to mortuaries slowly died out.

(51:09):
I'm so sorry I wrote that pun and I don't
even like puns. I promise I punched myself and the
I'm the person who named an episode of our show
a brief history of air conditioning, no way, a condensed
history of air conditioning. And I don't like puns either,
But I was like, I can't call it anything. Be
up the side that. Yeah, I'm not a fan of
the puns. I don't know why I can't say it

(51:30):
wrong in front of a live audience. Okay, it's okay,
everything's cool. Uh. If you have listened to our other
live shows, and as Tracy mentioned earlier, we have a
no bummer policy for them, and you might know that.
So we're talking about really morbid and sometimes gross things here.
So in the interest of ending in a bit of
a happier place, I had this goofy idea, uh that

(51:52):
I would write a silly poem about the final wishes
of famous historical people that were designed to make sure
that they did not go to their graves but were
their time. Is probably the best thing that ever happened
on our show. Don't over sell it, because now I'm
gonna choke. Um. So I called this how to make
sure you won't be buried alive or weird advice from

(52:12):
famous people. Okay, there's a buy in. You have to
do with me here. There is a moment where I'm
going to say the word veins, and what I mean
is the word arteries. But the word arteries takes up
a lot of syllables and it's hard to rhyme in
a rhyming couplet. So um, please do not pedant this poem.
So I know it's arteries, but here we go. George
Washington asked to be held for three days before he

(52:36):
was placed in his Mount Vernon grave. Alfred Nobel bade,
please open my veins. Hans Christian Anderson wanted the same.
Frederic Chopin wished his body cut open. Schoppenhauer for putrefaction
to set in Auguste Renoir's dearest wish simply said, whatever happens,
my son, please just make sure I'm dead. That is that.

(53:05):
We want to thank so many people for making our
first tour a delight on both coasts. Uh From all
of the venue staff that took great care of us
and made the show's happen, to all of the people
that came out to see us. You were all amazing,
and we are so so grateful for your support and
your warmth and for chatting with us and just making
it a really delightful time. And we hope everybody who

(53:26):
celebrates Halloween has a wonderful and safe time. And I
actually have a little bit of listener mail which is
related to one of our Halloween episodes. It's actually two
pieces of mail because they are related. They are both
about our Charles Adams episode. So the first one is
um from our listener Megan. I hope she's a Megan
and not a Megan, and that I'm not mispronouncing it,
but either way, you know I meant well. Uh, she writes,

(53:48):
longtime listener, first time writing in thank you both for
your lovely and engaging podcast. I learned so much with
each episode. I was even more delighted than a bit
of the second part of the Charles Adam story grazed
my life, if only by a minute fraction. I am
a PSU alum and never knew my alma mater had
such a piece of art. Although to be fair, the
library system for Penn State is huge. If you recall,

(54:11):
in that episode we mentioned a piece of art that
the library had there was a huge mural fourteen by
four feet that Charles Adams painted originally for a seaside resort,
and she goes on to say the Patty and Paternal Libraries,
I hope I'm not mispronouncing that are truly lovely buildings
and worth touring. If any other listener has the opportunity
to visit state college or or university park the campus name.

(54:33):
The library does allow the public in for viewing, and
if you are a Pennsylvania resident, you may even get
a library card for use in any library within the
entire penn State system across the state, which is awesome
to know. And then, just in case you were wanted
a little more backup and reassurance, we also got an
email about the same thing from our listener Ruth, who
says I'm a regular listener who also happens to work

(54:55):
in Paternal Library. First of all, thanks for not repeating
the narrative of someone discovered it in our library about
that piece of art, since it had been hanging just
outside our news library for more than a decade, although
people had gotten kind of used to seeing it, she wrote. Second,
as we serve the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, our library is
open to the public and folks are welcome to come

(55:16):
in and look at all of our art, the architecture
of our buildings, and use our materials anytime we're open.
If you come in the entrance on Curtain Road and
turn left at the welcome desk, you will see a
sign for Starbucks. Go through that to the lounge and
the picture is up on the far side. Uh So,
now you have reassurance also from a library employee that
it is perfectly okay to go check out that Charles

(55:36):
Adams painting if you wish, as well as handy directions.
Thank you, Ruth. That was great. Uh thank you Megan
for writing and telling us about it as well. I
hope many people go check it out because it's really
incredibly uh lovely and like I said, it's it's that
googlesh charm that I love Charles Adams for. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. You can

(55:56):
also find us everywhere on social media as Missed in History.
You can find us at missed in History dot com
on our website, where we have every episode that has
ever existed of the show, as well as show notes
for the ones that Tracy and I have worked on,
and occasional other goodies and odds and ends. Uh. If
you would like to subscribe, you could do so at
Apple Podcasts or on the I Heart Radio app, or

(56:18):
wherever you listen to podcasts. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com
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