How Did Safety Coffins Ease Fears of Premature Burial?

When concerns about being accidentally buried alive swept Europe and North America in the 1800s, inventors (and showmen) came up with coffins that could let a living person escape -- or at least alert someone to come dig them up. Learn more in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/afterlife/premature-burial-safety-coffins.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Blauren
Vogelbaum here. When George Washington was on his deathbed in
seventeen ninety nine, he signaled for his secretary and whispered hoarsely,
I am just going have me decently buried, and do
not let my body be put into the vault in

(00:23):
less than three days after I'm dead. Those were Washington's
final words. Careful instructions from a man who wasn't afraid
of death itself, but like many people of his time
and place, was deathly afraid of being buried alive. In
Washington's day and throughout the eighteen hundreds, the specter of

(00:45):
premature burial felt very real. Medical science as we know
it was in its infancy, and death could strike from anywhere,
common illnesses, infected wounds, or fast spreading outbreaks of smallpox.
With so much death happening and so few scientific tools,
even primitive stethoscopes weren't around until the eighteen twenties, it

(01:05):
went unquestioned that a few people were being buried while
not quite dead. The acute fear of being buried alive
dubbed tapaphobia, with Taffa, being Greek for burial, was part
of a larger obsession with death that gripped Europe and
North America in the nineteenth century. One of the wildest

(01:25):
ways that tafaphobia manifested was through the invention of safety
coffins or security coffins, basically tricked out caskets that provided
a way for prematurely buried people to escape from six
feet under. The first patents for safety coffins started appearing
in the seventeen nineties in Central Europe. That timing lines

(01:46):
up with when European intellectuals were swept up by German romanticism.
Romanticism was a response to the cold logic and reason
emphasized by the Enlightenment. Instead, romantic writers and philosophers sought
after true truth and art, emotion and instinct, with a
frequent focus on the natural and the supernatural, and in

(02:07):
areas in between. For the article, this episode is based
on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Adam Bisnow, an historian
at the US Patent and Trademark Office. He explained that
Romanticism looked into quote the unseen and unknown, the gray
areas in our experience, like the gray area between life
and death. A. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein or the Modern

(02:31):
Prometheus in eighteen eighteen, a novel that captured the airs
fixation on that blurry line between life and death. By
the mid eighteen hundreds, seances and psychics offered ways for
the living to communicate with the dead, who seemed to
exist on a spiritual plane just beyond our own. A
business said people were asking, are the dead really gone?

(02:54):
Are they still here with us? The fear of live
burial really tapped into that fascination. It's a figure underground
who was with us and not with us, alive and
not alive, a dead and somehow not dead. Bisino estimates
that more than one hundred security coffin patents were granted
in America by the Patent and Trademark Office during the

(03:15):
eighteen hundreds, with each design offering more bells and whistles
than the last. Literally many of the designs used noise
makers like these to allow a person trapped in the
coffin to alert someone above ground. One of the earliest
American patents for a life preserving coffin was filed in
eighteen forty three by one Christian H. Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, Maryland.

(03:39):
The coffin had a spring loaded lid which would snap
open at the slightest motion of either the head or
the hand. Since that wouldn't do much good if the
coffin were six feet underground, Eisenbrandt suggested leaving the coffin
in an above ground fault, with a key to the
vault door left inside, so that should the person not
really be dead, life may be preserved. Historians found advertisements

(04:03):
for Eisenbrandts Jack in the Box coffin dating from eighteen
forty four, playing up the popular but unfounded belief in
the frequency and danger of premature internment and the necessity
of such a device. We don't know how many were
actually made, but sales might have been helped by Edgar
Allan Poe, who published his harrowing short story The Premature

(04:24):
Burial in the same year. In the story, Poe wrote,
to be buried while alive is beyond question the most
terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the
lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently
so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think

(04:44):
the boundaries which divide life from death are at best
shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and
where the other begins. In eighteen sixty eight, one Franz
Fester of Newark, New Jersey, the patent for his improved
burial case, which featured a narrow tube with a ladder

(05:05):
that allowed a reanimated person to climb to safety. If
the buried individual was too weak to escape on their own,
they could also pull a rope inside the coffin that
rang a bell above ground to alert the living. A
Vester gave demonstrations of his coffin. In eighteen sixty eight.
A reporter for The New York Times chronicled one such demo,

(05:26):
during which Vester was buried under four feet of dirt
and emerged an hour later out of his living grave,
to the applause and congratulations of the crowd. But the
undisputed showman of nineteenth century security coffins was a man
known as Count Michele de Carnice. Carnegie, described as a
chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia who toured Europe and

(05:47):
the United States demonstrating a remarkable coffin contraption that he
called Lee Carnice. In eighteen ninety nine, The Chicago Tribune
reported on a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in
New York City, where one physician startled his fellow members
with the ascertation that one out of every two hundred
people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic

(06:08):
state and is buried alive. That questionable claim served as
an introduction to the Count, who then demonstrated his device.
It improved on other security coffins by triggering a series
of alarms and alerts with any movement of the body.
There was a bell that rang and a shiny ball
that lifted into the air. While waiting for help to arrive,

(06:31):
the trapped individual could breathe and speak through a special tube.
One design flaw of such safety coffins is the morbid
fact that dead bodies do indeed move, though just not voluntarily.
During the process of decomposition, a corpse can shift and
even flip over, which would trigger a false alarm for

(06:51):
most security coffins, but nonetheless, to show its effectiveness, the
count would ask for volunteers to be buried alive. To
this day, the world record of the longest voluntary live
burial is held by an Italian man named Fropo Lorenzo,
who consented to be entombed in Lake Carnice for nine
days in eighteen ninety eight. And despite these entertaining demonstrations,

(07:17):
the count never put Lake Carnice into production. Busino said
people didn't buy it. Funeral directors weren't interested, and the
public wasn't interested either. In fact, none of these inventions
ever caught on. However, that's not to say that such
designs were never implemented. While not exactly a security coffin,

(07:39):
there is a grave with a window in New Haven, Connecticut.
One doctor Timothy Clarksmith, who died in eighteen ninety three,
was so afraid of being buried alive that he constructed
a large underground tomb where his body was laid out
next to a hammer and chisel. The window allowed cemetery
workers and passers by to check and see if that

(08:00):
had returned to life. No signs as of yet. Today's
episode is based on the article how safety coffins eased
grave fears of premature burial on HowStuffWorks dot com, written
by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in
partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by

(08:21):
Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the
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