Hey YouTube, Jim here! Welcome to Top 10 Archive! Despite rarely ever happening, being buried alive
is one of the most common phobias. It's for good reason though - all throughout history,
and even today, people are put into their graves without actually being dead.
Have you ever wondered what innovative ways we've come up with to prevent this from happening?
Here are the top 10 methods used to prevent being buried alive!
10. On Pins and Needles In the 1800s and early 1900s, they used
pin pricking to determine whether a patient had died. They believed that if the patient felt pain,
it would turn red and close, while a cadaver’s body would simply remain an open hole with no
change in color. They’d mainly prick people on their fingertips or soles of the feet,
but sometimes, they’d choose particularly painful places like underneath the fingernail. Surely,
no one would sleep through that, they thought. Several prominent figures of
the time made special requests to make sure they were properly dead before heading to the grave.
Lady Burton, married to Captain Sir Richard Burton, asked that her heart be pierced and her
body be dissected and embalmed. Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas also asked that someone take a long pin
to her heart. It seems that being buried alive was a very prominent worry of the time.
9. A Quick Injection If you didn’t want to be buried alive, would
you consider someone doing their best to really kill you instead? That’s what some thought was
best at the end of the 1800s. One doctor pushed the idea of injecting corpses with Strychnine
before they were buried so if they weren’t dead already, they surely would be by the funeral.
Other doctors thought maybe morphine could be the way, stopping the heart in the case
of an undetected coma. Curiously enough, it was also how euthanasia became a common practice,
injecting those who were almost dead to end their suffering before they were buried.
8. The Old Fingernail Test I know what you’re thinking, can I prevent
being buried alive with a method other than more fingernail pain? The answer is, apparently,
“no.” One of the images most commonly associated with being buried alive
is a scratched-up coffin, suggesting the victim suffocated to death trying to claw their way out.
Miss Ruby Caroline Aykroyd of London heard these stories and thought “not me.” She made a special
request that someone “test” whether she was alive by holding a flame under her fingernails
until they burned. She opted out of being buried entirely and asked to be cremated instead. This
was a part of a wave of newly adopted trends of cremation precisely to avoid being buried alive.
7. The Security Coffin It was only a matter of time before capitalists
stepped in to turn a worry into a profit opportunity. This particular capitalist was an
inventor named Franz Vester, who made a “security coffin” made with a bell that a newly-awakened
person could ring to alert (and alarm) people that they were not, in fact, dead. The coffin comes
with a rope, a ladder, and a bell. Whether or not it actually helped anyone is a little blurry, but
it certainly got a patent and sold units to all those who feared being alive in their own grave.
6. Hi-tech Security Coffin Less than 20 years after the original security
coffin, inventors Charles Sieler and Frederick Borntraeger patented a much more sophisticated
“Burial-Casket”. The improvements were way ahead of their time! It included a fan that
was triggered by motion of the body, an air pipe leading to the surface, a battery-powered alarm,
and even a lamp to lower through the tube to see the face of the body in the coffin.
These two inventors clearly had their finger on the pulse of a whole generation
of fears of being buried alive. 5. Manipulating the Tongue
After realizing that fingernail burning and sticking wasn’t as effective as hoped,
doctors experimented with other methods of “reviving” bodies. One of these methods is
the manipulation of tongues. Dr. J. W. Green of New York recalls seeing a boy who was drowned and
almost declared dead, until a drop of liquor was placed on his tongue and he coughed and came to.
Surely, this also could have been because they put him on his stomach, stripped him, and warmed him,
but the tongue was believed to be the ultimate reviver. They'd try to get the person who was
seemingly dead to respond by pulling, pinching or applying bitter flavor drops to the tongue.
A physician named J. V. Laborde even came up with a “tongue-yanking” machine for mortuaries
to help even the newest assistants at the morgue determine whether a corpse was alive or not.
4. Modern Day Monitors Luckily, if none of the
previous solutions appeal to you, we have much more modern options to prevent being buried alive.
Nowadays, your body is hooked up to machines that monitor your breathing, heartbeat,
and brainwaves to assure whether or not your body has activity,
but also your brain. Even if you can’t breathe on your own, many times machines can keep you
breathing even past the point of losing brain activity. This is why people consider signing
a DNR or “do not resuscitate” form to avoid being put in that state. Others talk to family so that
in the case of being put in that state they can be removed from life support. In modern times,
being kept alive too long is a concern just as serious as being buried prematurely.
3. Keep Your Heart People who believed in this method would have
their heart removed to be entirely sure that there was no way they’d be in a coffin suffocating to
death. It was particularly preferred by the upper class, and surgeons of the 1800s would happily
oblige, even to the requests of some that their family be present for the removal to be completely
sure. Does this fear sound like it’s getting out of hand, time-consuming, and expensive?
2. Waiting For Decay If you're like many people in the 1800s
and fear the pain and, well, death, caused by a lot of these methods, you might be interested in
this one. Most people of the time would simply leave a body out until it started decaying.
This was also a rich-people privilege, as the poor were buried quickly to “prevent disease”.
By 1898, mortuaries started legally enforcing that people leave the dead there instead of out
in their homes to prevent sickness. There, they might also cut an artery to see if blood flowed.
1. Never Get Buried This seems like the most secure
way to avoid this whole situation, doesn’t it? If you’re never buried, you’ll never be buried alive,
right? This was the logic of an 18th-century woman named Hannah Beswick. She told her doctor,
Charles White, that he could inherit her estate under just one condition.
He could never bury her body. Instead, he’d have to check her corpse every single day
until he was absolutely certain that she was dead. At some point, he embalmed her, but would
continue to observe her, with two witnesses, to see if she showed signs of life. Eventually,
he put her in a clock case and moved the once-per-day observations to an annual schedule.
Thanks for watching! What about you? Do you have a fear of being buried alive, even cremated alive?
What would you do to dig yourself out of those situations? Let us know in the comments? Be sure
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