Premature burial, also known as live burial, burial alive, or vivisepulture, refers to the act of being buried while still alive.
Animals, including humans, may be buried alive accidentally on the mistaken assumption that they are dead, or intentionally as a form of torture, murder, or execution. It may also occur with the consent of the victim as a part of a stunt, with the intention to escape, or a challenge, when the participant is supposed to be dug up after spending some time in the coffin (many YouTubers have successfully completed this challenge). Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, is reported to be among the most common phobias.
Physiology Premature burial can lead to death through asphyxiation, dehydration, starvation, or hypothermia. A person trapped with fresh air to breathe can last a considerable time and burial has been used as a very cruel method of execution.
Types Unintentional Accidental burial According to a popular legend recorded by Joannes Zonaras and George Kedrenos, two 11th-century and 12th-century Byzantine Greek historians, the 5th century Roman emperor Zeno was buried alive in Constantinople after becoming insensible from drinking or an illness.Cedrenus, I; Joannes Zonaras, 14.2.31–35. Cited in Whitby, ibidem. Michael Psellus, 68. For three days cries of "Have pity on me!" could be heard from within his verd antique sarcophagus in the Church of the Holy Apostles, but because of the hatred of his wife and subjects, the empress Ariadne refused to open the tomb. This tale is likely apocryphal, as earlier and contemporary sources do not mention it even though they too were hostile to Zeno's memory.
Revivals of supposed "corpses" have been triggered by dropped coffins, grave robbers, embalming, and attempted dissections.E.g. Folklorist Paul Barber has argued that the incidence of unintentional live burial has been overestimated and that the normal, physical effects of decomposition are sometimes misinterpreted as signs that the person whose remains are being exhumed had revived once in the coffin. Nevertheless, patients have been documented as late as the 1890s as accidentally being sent to the morgue or trapped in a steel box after erroneously being declared dead.
Newspapers have reported cases of exhumed corpses that appear to have been accidentally buried alive. On February 21, 1885, The New York Times gave an account of such a case. The victim was a man from Buncombe County, North Carolina whose name was given as "Jenkins". His body was found turned over onto its front inside the coffin, with much of his hair pulled out. Scratch marks were also visible on all sides of the coffin's interior. His family was reportedly "distressed beyond measure at the criminal carelessness" associated with the case. Another similar story was reported in The Times on January 18, 1886, the victim of this case being described simply as a "girl" named "Collins" from Woodstock, Ontario, Canada. When she was exhumed it was found "Her shroud was torn into shreds, her knees were drawn up to her chin, one of her arms was twisted under her head, and her features bore evidence of dreadful torture."
According to a newspaper story from 1955, Essie Dunbar, an African American woman from South Carolina, was prematurely buried in 1915 at the age of 30 after reportedly suffering a bout of epilepsy, being exhumed a few minutes later after her sister asked to see her body one more time. The shock of her survival reportedly resulted in several ministers falling into her grave and the mourners fleeing in terror.
In 2001, a body bag was delivered to the Matarese Funeral Home in Ashland, Massachusetts with a live occupant. Funeral director John Matarese discovered this, called paramedics, and avoided live embalming or premature burial.
In 2014 in Peraia, Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, Greece, the police discovered that a 45-year-old woman was buried alive and died of asphyxia after being declared clinically dead by a private hospital; she was discovered just shortly after being buried, by children playing near the cemetery who heard screams from inside the earth; her family was reported to be considering suing the hospital which was responsible. In 2015, it was reported that a separate incident also occurred in 2014 in Peraia, Thessaloniki. In Macedonia, Greece, a police investigation concluded that a 49-year-old woman was buried alive after being declared dead due to cancer; her family reported that they could hear her scream from inside the earth at the cemetery shortly after burial, and the investigation revealed that she died of heart failure inside her coffin. Later, it was discovered that medication given to her by her physicians as part of her cancer treatment was what caused her to be mistakenly declared clinically dead.
In 2018, according to some reports, Rosangela Almeida dos Santos was buried alive in Riachão das Neves, Brazil. The woman, who was declared dead in hospital at the age of 37, was soon buried, but visitors to the cemetery heard noises coming from the depths of her grave. After 11 days, the grave was dug up and the woman's mutilated body was discovered. Some say she was buried alive and tried to get out of the coffin. She was already dead at the time of the excavation. It is believed that she may have died not long before. The incident was also recorded on video.
The family of Timesha Beauchamp of Southfield, Michigan called 911 on August 23, 2020, when they found her unresponsive at home. Upon arrival, paramedics found her to be unresponsive and not breathing. After they provided cardiopulmonary resuscitation for 30 minutes, she was pronounced dead by a local emergency department physician based on the medical information provided by the paramedics on the scene. Resuscitation efforts were discontinued, and Beauchamp was taken to Cole funeral home in Detroit. Staff at the funeral home were preparing to embalm her body when they found her to be breathing. She was first taken to Sinai-Grace Hospital then later transferred to Children's Hospital of Michigan, where she died on October 18, 2020.
In 2022, a body bag was delivered to a Shanghai funeral home during the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two of the employees detected life signs in the bag, saved the woman and stopped a premature burial.
Natural disasters Natural disasters (earthquakes, landslides, mudslides, avalanches) have also buried people alive, as have collapsing mines.
Attempts at prevention
According to the history of Nicephorus and perhaps because of the legend of Zeno's premature entombment, or perhaps for other reasons, the Proconnesian marble sarcophagus of the 7th-century emperor Heraclius was left open, on his own instructions, for three days after his interment in the Church of the Holy Apostles' Mausoleum of Justinian.
According to Shane McCorristine, one of the purposes of an Irish wake (which entailed a prolonged waiting period before burial) was to ensure that the person was definitely dead.
Robert Robinson died in Manchester in 1791. A movable glass pane was inserted in his coffin, and the mausoleum had a door for purposes of inspection by a watchman, who was to see if he breathed on the glass. He instructed his relatives to visit his grave periodically to check that he was actually dead.
Safety coffins were devised to prevent premature burial, although there is no evidence that any have ever been successfully used to save an accidentally buried person. On 5 December 1882, J. G. Krichbaum received for his "Device For Life In Buried Persons". It consisted of a movable periscope-like pipe that provided air and, when rotated or pushed by the person interred, indicated to passersby that someone was buried alive. The patent text refers to "that class of devices for indicating life in buried persons", suggesting that such inventions were common at the time.
In 1890, a family designed and built a burial vault at the Wildwood Cemetery in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, with an internal hatch to allow the victim of accidental premature burial to escape. The vault had an air supply and was lined in felt to protect a panic-stricken victim from self-inflicted injury before the escape. Bodies were to be removed from the casket before interment.
The London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial was co-founded in 1896 by William Tebb and Walter Hadwen. Tebb suggested methods such as stethoscopic auscultation of the heart and lungs, application of electric current, and artificial ventilation.
Intentional Execution
The burning of books and burying of scholars () was purportedly carried out by Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China. Books and texts deemed to be subversive were burned and 460 Confucian scholars were reportedly buried alive in 212 BC. Modern scholars doubt these events – Sima Qian, author of the account of these events in the Records of the Grand Historian, was an official of the Han dynasty, which could be expected to portray the previous rulers unfavorably. The single most numerous case of people being buried alive as a way of execution was after the Battle of Changping, where around 200,000 surviving and captured soldiers of the state of Zhao were buried alive.
Tacitus, in his work Germania, records that German tribes practiced two forms of capital punishment; the first where the victim was hanged from a tree, and another where the victim was tied to a wicker frame, pushed face down into the mud and buried. The first was used to make an example of traitors; the second was used for punishment of dishonorable or shameful vices, such as cowardice. According to Tacitus, the Ancient Germans thought that crime should be exposed, whereas infamy should be buried out of sight.
Fleta, a medieval commentary on English common law, specified live burial as the punishment for sodomy, bestiality and those who had dealings with Jews.
Herodotus in his book Histories wrote that burying people alive was an ancient Persian custom, which they practiced in order to be blessed by gods.
In ancient Rome, a Vestal Virgin convicted of violating her vows of celibacy was "buried alive" by being sealed in a cave with a small amount of bread and water, ostensibly so that the goddess Vesta could save her were she truly innocent, essentially making it into a trial by ordeal. Vesta never intervened.Parker, N., Holt, "Why were the Vestals Virgins? Or the Chastity of Women and the safety of the Roman State," American Journal of Philology, 125, (2004) p. 586. See also Staples, Ariadne, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion, Routledge, (1998), p. 133 This practice was, strictly speaking, immurement (being walled up and left to die) rather than premature burial. According to Christian tradition, a number of saints were martyred this way, including Saint Castulus and Saint Vitalis of Milan.
In Denmark, in the Ribe city statute, which was promulgated in 1269, a female thief was to be buried alive, and in the law by Queen Margaret I, adulterous women were to be punished with premature burial, men with beheading.
In old Swedish province laws ("landskapslagarna"), live burial ("kvick i jord", literally "live into earth"), could be stipulated for a variety of crimes, most notably theft of money or goods of more than one mark's value, though only for women; men were instead hanged. Men could be sentenced to be buried alive as a punishment for bestiality.
In 1611, within Sunnerbo härad in Småland, Sweden, a man faced a death sentence from the Sunnerbo district court for committing bestiality with a horse. The court's archives indicate that the prescribed punishment was either burial alive or burning at the stake, along with the animal. However, the final outcome remains unknown, as the sentence required the King's approval and the relevant documents from that period are believed to be lost.