The 18th and 19th centuries saw a huge surge in the popularity of safety coffins – coffins designed to allow the interred to alert the living in the event of a premature burial – and so great is the fear of being buried alive that even today, with all of our medical technology, patents are still being filed for such devices.

An Italian watchmaker named Fabrizio Caselli, as recently as 1995 (RISK-FREE BURIAL, PEDIATRICS Vol. 98 No. 5 November 1996, pp. 960), patented a coffin that includes a flashlight, oxygen tank, intercom system, heart monitor and, from the looks of the photos, a video camera and flashing lights.

I suspect that we’re a bit more proficient than we were two hundred years ago at determining a persons living-or-dead status, so Caselli’s invention may be better aimed towards those above ground who simply don’t want to let go – or perhaps those that have a strange fetish for watching the dead.

If in fact you are one of those strange fetishists, or simply enjoy visiting bizarre cemetery structures, the 1893 grave of Timothy Clark Smith in New Haven, Vermont might be of interest to you.

Located at the Evergreen Cemetery just off Route 7 (a well-traveled and easy-to-find route), Mr. Smith’s grave features a square capstone into which is fitted a 14” x 14” plate of glass, peering into a six foot deep concrete tube leading to the actual grave, underneath which is situated Mr. Smith’s face (though you’d be hard pressed to actually see it). In addition to the viewing window, he was buried with a bell in his hand to use (in vain?) in the event that he needed to signal for help.

Though on the more simplistic side of the safety coffins introduced during that part of our history, the Timothy Clark Smith grave stands as a wonderfully preserved and extremely accessible example of our centuries-long fear of being buried alive.

For more on safety coffin technology, visit the Wikipedia article on the subject. There you will discover that the first recorded construction of a safety coffin was in 1792 at the request of Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick – which included not only a viewing window but also an air tube (which would be my first request) and keys to the specially prepared locks to the coffin and crypt door.

There’s also a book on the subject entitled Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear.

Though there are “no documented cases of anybody being saved by a safety coffin“, there are plenty of stories of people being buried alive.

As recently as 2001 a 39-year-old Ashland, MA woman - presumed dead - was found gurgling inside her body bag while at a funeral home (okay, maybe we do need those modern safety coffins). She was rushed to the hospital and later released.

In 1993, 40-year-old Coney Island resident Nancy Vitale (wonderfully ironic surname) was declared dead by an incompetent EMS crew, only later to be treated and released from the Coney Island Hospital after a doctor heard - you got it - gurgling noises.

And most remarkably, as late as 1937, Angelo Hays actually made it all the way to full burial for several days before being found alive when insurance inspectors exhumed his body for insurance purposes! He went on to become a minor celebrity in his native France, inventing his own extremely elaborate security coffin and performing for television audiences - though with only 200 to 300 television sets in France as of 1939, I wonder how popular his appearances really were.

The lesson from these stories? When in doubt, gurgle.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the original link to the Vermonter.com article.

For more on premature burial - including even more modern accounts of gurgling - see Just Dying to Get Out

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tags: angelo hays, burial practices, buried alive, cemeteries, coffins, evergreen cemetery, fabrizio caselli, graves, nancy vitale, new haven, premature burial, safety coffin, timothy clark smith, vermont, weird vermont

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at Sep 11, 07 | 6:30 pm and is filed under Just Noumenon Posts, Miscellaneous, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.