Imagine waking up to find out you've been buried alive in a coffin. You knock and kick and cry and vomit. No one would hear you. You struggle to escape the coffin then remember that even if you open the coffin, you have 6 feet of sand and debris to fight with. If you manage to come up from all that ton of earth, you now have to face the cement which has been used to seal off the grave and their lies your Waterloo. You cannot go further than that. You scream, wail, sleep, then slowly die of hypothermia, asphyxiation, dehydration and of course starvation.
Suicide is not an option because there is nothing to use and kill yourself in that coffin. So you wait it out. 4 days, 9 days, 11 days, till death becomes a mercy and takes you away.
If like me you are afraid of being buried alive, you have taphephobia. One of the commonest phobias.
Last night I was telling Cece about the Spanish Influenza in 1918 that infected over 500 million people and killed over 50 million. Some victims of the plague were unconscious not dead but they had so many sick people and dead bodies that they were all thought dead and buried.
Few of them woke up inside the coffins, found out they had been buried alive, started scratching the insides of the coffin and yelling but since there was no one to hear them, they later died inside the coffins. When they were later exhumed for study and to know what strain of virus caused the epidemic, scratch marks were seen on the insides of the coffin, some victims pulled out their hair and some actually broke the coffin and slid an arm outside but could not escape the 6 feet quantity of sand.
Apart from the flu epidemic, there have been so many records of people being buried alive unintentionally.
John Dun Scotus, a great philosopher who was later beatified by Pope John Paul II was unintentionally buried alive in a tomb.
{A tomb/crypt/mausoleum is different from a grave in the sense that it is a small building/vault with a door where the remains of the deceased are deposited. It is locked from outside and there is no need for 6 feet of earth. Remember Jesus' and Lazarus' tombs.}
Now back to the philosopher. His tomb was reopened and John was found outside his coffin with his hands torn and bloody after attempting to escape.
Thomas A Kempis died in 1471 and was denied canonization TWICE because splinters were found embedded under his nails. Anyone aspiring to be a saint would not fight death if he found himself buried alive.
Of recent there are still cases of people being buried alive.
In 2014 in Peraia, Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, Greece, a 45 year old woman was buried alive 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 and afterwards her family was considering suing the private hospital.
In 2015 again in that same Greek city, 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 the coffin and found out that it was the medicines given to her by her doctors for her cancer that caused her to be declared clinically dead and buried alive.
When the Les Innocents cemetery in Paris was moved from the center of the city to the suburbs, the number of skeletons found face down convinced the people and several doctors that premature burial was very common.
There are also cases of sentient corpses. A sentient corpse is someone who is aware of their surroundings but can do nothing to alert people to what is going on. This is an interesting phenomenon and has been known to occur during autopsies. The person isn't dead, but can do nothing as they are lowered into the ground and buried or cut open during autopsy.
At a time, people started burying their deceased relations with shovels and crowbars just in case they woke up in the coffin. People also started shooting or staking the dead bodies of their loved ones to ensure they were adequately dead before burial. That was much better than waking up 2 days later to find out you've been buried alive.
A safety coffin was invented and patented in 1884 but only rich folks could afford it. It had a bell and periscope the deceased could use to alert people if he woke up.
The London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial was founded in 1896 because of how prevalent it was.
Nowadays, it is less likely that one would be buried alive because of the legal requirements needed for preparing a dead body, (apart from those who bury their dead right away like the Muslims).
PS: This post is about UNINTENTIONALLY burying someone alive because some people INTENTIONALLY bury people alive mostly as a form of capital punishment for a crime. Previously in Japan, Belgium, Rome, Germany, Denmark, Ukraine and so many other countries, live burial was a standard punishment for some crimes.
In pre-colonial Igbo (a major tribe in Nigeria) culture too, people who did ihe ala so nso were buried alive.
Ijeoma Chinonyerem