Saved by the bell — and not the Screech kind

Buried Alive

A weekly dose of macabre history, gently pressed into your hands like a haunted educational pamphlet.

This week’s historical keepsake from hell: safety coffins.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fear of being mistakenly declared dead and buried alive became widespread across Europe.

Medical science was improving, but it had not yet perfected the rather important task of confirming that everyone involved was definitely finished.

So naturally, people began redesigning coffins.

Safety coffins were fitted with bells, flags, breathing tubes, windows, ladders, and various escape mechanisms intended to help the recently deceased announce that reports of their death had been slightly exaggerated.

More than thirty different designs were patented in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century alone. That’s more variations than we have perfumes!

In 1868, inventor Franz Vester patented an “Improved Burial-Case” containing an air inlet, a bell, and a ladder leading toward the surface.

Should you awaken underground, you could ring for assistance.

Ding-a-ling.

Or climb out yourself.

Because apparently being buried alive was not sufficiently stressful enough. We had to add the bells and whistles…

Other inventions used pipes that moved when the occupant’s hands shifted, alarms triggered by body movement, fans to pump fresh air into the coffin, and viewing tubes so cemetery attendants could periodically check whether the corpse had become inconveniently animated.

The fear became so embedded in nineteenth-century culture that Edgar Allan Poe published The Premature Burial in 1844, describing a man who prepared a tomb with air, food, water, springs, and a bell.

Nothing promotes restful sleep quite like an emergency evacuation plan for your own grave.

Was premature burial common?

Probably not.

Did that stop people from installing doorbells in coffins? Nope.

Not written by robots.

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