Stephen King Archives - Vivian Lawry

Fear of being buried alive is called taphephobia. Also known as live burial, premature burial, and vivisepulture, it’s been around forever—and is with us still! Those buried alive often die of asphyxiation, dehydration, starvation, or hypothermia. If fresh air is available, the buried person can last days.

This guy seems pretty happy about the situation.

Fear of being buried alive reached a peak in 19th century England. More than 120 books in at least five languages were written about it, as well as methods to distinguish life from death. (See below.)

Harry Clarke’s illustration for Premature Burial by Edgar Allen Poe

A Fine Literary Tradition

Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” The Fall of the House of Usher, and Berenice. More recently, Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery includes Paul Sheldon’s Misery’s Return, a book within a book.

Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in Level 6 of the Inferno, painted by Suloni Robertson

Dante’s Inferno references several classes of sinners punished with some form of eternal burial:

The Sullen in Level 5 are kept just below the waters of the River Styx, forever near drowning.
The Heretics in Level 6 are trapped in flaming tombs.
Murderers in Level 7 are covered by a river of boiling blood.
In Level 8 (where all types of fraud are punished)
- Flatterers are encased in human excrement.
- Simonists are buried head-first while flames burn their feet.
- Fraudulent Counselors are encased in flames.
The Treacherous in Level 9 are buried in ice of varying levels depending on their sin.

Accidental or Unintentional Burial

It’s easier to handle if you bring a buddy along.

Reports of being buried alive date back to the fourteenth century. In spite of hype and hysteria, as late as the 1890s patients have been documented as being declared dead and accidentally sent to a morgue or encased in a steel box, only to “come back to life” when the coffin is dropped, the grave is opened by grave robbers, or embalming or dissection has begun.

“Life preserving coffin in doubtful cases of actual dead,” a safety-coffin model by Christian Eisenbrandt

During centuries when embalming wasn’t common practice, coffins were mostly for the rich, and rapid burial was the norm especially during major pestilences such as cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox. In these cases, rapid burial was an attempt to curb the spread of the disease.

Several medical conditions can contribute to the presumption of death: catalepsy, coma, and hypothermia.

How to Know When Someone Is Really Dead

Snoring is a pretty good sign. (This is actually the Fourpence Coffin flophouse, the first homeless shelter in London.)

Jan Bondeson, author of Buried Alive, identified methods of verifying death used by 18th and 19th century physicians. (Personal reaction: shudder!) The methods were any acts the physician thought would rouse the unconscious patient, virtually all imaginatively painful.

Soles of the feet sliced with razors
Needles jammed under toenails
Bugle fanfares and “hideous Shrieks and excessive Noises”
Red hot poke up the rectum
Application of nipple pincers
A bagpipe type invention to administer tobacco enemas
Boiling Spanish wax poured on patients’ foreheads and warm urine poured into the mouth
A crawling insect inserted into patient’s ear
A sharp pencil up the presumed cadaver’s nose
Tongue pulling (manual or mechanical) for at least three hours

The traditional Irish wake was (and is) an occasion for family and friends to celebrate the life of the deceased while watching the body for signs of movement.

Most agreed that the most reliable way to be sure someone was dead was to keep an eye on the body for a while. To that end, waiting at least 72 hours from apparent death to burial was mandated. In the mid-1800s, Munich had ten “waiting mortuaries” where bodies were stored awaiting putrefaction. Each body was rigged to bells to summon an attendant should the corpse come back to life.

Waiting morgues, like this one in Paris, were often left open to the public for macabre entertainment

We presume that modern science has surpassed this sort of mistake, defining death as brain death. Even so, earthquakes and other natural disasters often result in people being accidentally buried alive.

In 2010, 33 miners in Chile were rescued after being buried alive for 69 days by a collapse in the mine.

Victims of the 2018 tsunami in Nepal were not so fortunate.

But Wait: Sometimes People Are Buried Alive on Purpose!

Sometimes live burial is a method of execution. Documented cases exist for China, German tribes, Persia, Rome, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Russia, Netherlands, Ukraine, and Brazil.

Confucian scholars were buried alive while their books were burned in 3rd century BCE

Interestingly, most of the laws demanding live burial as a form of execution were for crimes committed by women. Men convicted of comparable crimes were more likely to be beheaded.

Vestal Virgins were sealed in caves for breaking their vow of chastity, as shown in this painting by Pietro Saja

When death was not enough, often a spike was driven through the body of the person executed by live burial, perhaps as a way to prevent the person from becoming an avenging, undead Wiedergänger.

In some parts of the world, live burial is still practiced as a means of execution. Often, the victim is buried upright with only their head above ground. In these cases, death is very slow and painful, often the result of dehydration or wounds caused by animal scavengers.

And sometimes live burials are another horrific act of war.

Serbian officials buried Bosnian and Bulgarian civilians alive during the Balkan Wars.
During World War II, Japanese soldiers buried Chinese civilians alive. (See Nanking Massacre.)
Also during World War II, live burials were used by the Germans against Jews in Ukraine and Belarus.
During the Vietnam War, live burials were documented in the Massacre at Huê in 1968.
During the Gulf War, American soldiers in tanks knowingly buried Iraqi soldiers alive.
In 2014, ISIS buried Yazidi women and children alive, attempting to annihilate the entire minority group.
There are accounts of Khmer Rouge using live burials in the Killing Fields.
Live burial was a form of execution during Mao Zedong’s regime, particularly during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution..

Codice Casanatense, a Portugese artist, recorded this scene of a Hindu widow being sent alive to her husband’s grave.

Very rarely people willingly arrange to be buried alive, for any number of reasons. Sometimes it is to demonstrate their ability to survive it. The Indian government has made voluntary live burials illegal because the people who try it so often die. In 2010, a Russian man was buried to try to overcome his fear of death, but was crushed to death by the weight of the earth over him.

There are even performances in which people have an opportunity to be buried alive for fifteen or twenty minutes. As a publicity stunt for the opening of the 2010 film Buried, a lottery was held for a few fans to have a very unique viewing experience. Four winners were blindfolded, driven to the middle of nowhere, and buried alive in special coffins equips with screens on which they could watch the film. (A 2003 episode of “Mythbusters” demonstrated that, even if a person buried alive was able to break out of a coffin, they would be crushed or asphyxiated by the resulting dirt fall.)

There is now a monument to Mick Meaney on Kilburne Street.

Irish barman Mick Meaney remained buried under Kilburne Street in London for 61 days in 1968, mostly to win a bet. Tubes to the surface allowed air and food to reach him in his temporary, underground prison.

Parents are often unwillingly volunteered for vivisepulture on the beach.

Bottom line for writers: consider a character being buried alive—or being threatened with it—as a way to up the tension.

Live burial isn’t the only attention-worthy aspect of dead bodies. For more, check out books such as these.

You may recall that in one of my previous blogs, I mentioned talking with writers about writing as one of the best things about a writing workshop at Nimrod. Although not as interactive, there are lots of ways to get inside writers’ heads.

A writing friend sent me this link to a New York Times opinion piece by Stephen King on the question of whether a novelist can be too productive.

His short answer is that how much you write (publish) isn’t a reflection of how well you write. But there are many paragraphs of well-crafted opinion that are well worth reading. Of course, you already know that Stephen King wrote one of my favorite books on writing.

On Writing by Stephen King book cover — Stephen King’s *On Writing*

On Saturday, August 29, NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed Ursula Le Guin on Weekend Edition. Among other things, she talked about the effect of aging on her writing. She is 85. It’s well worth a listen.

If you are a magazine person, there are many places to get insights about and from writers. Two of the most popular are Poets & Writers and Writer’s Digest.

Poets & Writers and Writer's Digest — *Poets & Writers* and *Writer’s Digest*

If you are more of a book person, especially if you are focused on mystery writing, you might consider Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James. (You can also read “Mystery Writing” Lessons on her website.) Or these.

Writing Mysteries edited by Sue Grafton book covers — *Writing Mysteries* edited by Sue Grafton

There are many books by writers about writing, both classic and modern.

classic and modern books on writing — *The Spooky Art* by Norman Mailer, *Aspects of the Novel* by E.M. Forster, *Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing*

One of my favorite bits is one of Elmore Leonard‘s rules: Leave out the parts the reader is going to skip anyway. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Books for Writers: Deborah Tannen

Food and Fiction

What’s in a Character Name?

Dictionary of American Regional English

Writing Life: Exercise Improves Creativity