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SYMHC Live: Not Dead Yet – Safety Coffins and Waiting Mortuaries | STUFF YOU MISSED IN HISTORY CLASS
For the west coast tour, Holly and Tracy talked about the fear of being buried, which reached a fever pitch in Europe and the U.S. from the 18th to the early 20th century. That fear led to some very interesting inventions as humans tried to ensure they wouldn’t end up interred before their time.
Original Air Date: November 1, 2018
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Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from hous storks.com Hello and welcome to the podcast I’m Holly fry I’m Tracy V Wilson and we recently finished the West Coast leg of our tour uh that had a different show than the East Coast dates which has already aired which was about an Royal uh and since we were traveling to
Seattle Portland Los Angeles and San Francisco in October my favorite month we decided to make it a creepy episode and that is actually how we’re closing out our Halloween programming for the year sort of uh we recorded one about a classic horror actor which has become our tradition that’s going to come out
In November for logistical calendar reasons and also because it turned out it was not really that Halloweeny yeah when we when we had our unexpected Switcheroo in the calendar I we went through it and I said okay of these Halloween episodes already recorded this is the one that’s not tied to a specific
Date and is slightly less Halloweeny so you can look forward to that in November and without further Ado here is one of the shows we recorded during this tour hello and welcome to the podcast I am Holly fry and I’m Tracy V Wilson and you guys already win the
Prize for best tour audience so far I that was like I don’t know if anybody listens to sawbones that was a Sydney maoy level of cheering you’re so good so the idea of premature burial and our Collective fear of it has of course been written about for
Centuries and the fear of being buried alive is called taffia in case you did not know uh which for some reason makes me think about the Bob’s Bergers episode where um Louise makes a friend out of a manmade made of Taffy I don’t it’s a whole different thing but taphophobia is
Alive and well today but there was a period from the 18th and into the 20th century where it reached this fever pitch in Europe and the United States so we’re going to break down today a little bit where that phobia really came from at least in terms of of that period of
Time and how people tried to deal with it uh and really just how real a possibility of a live burial actually was or was not that there’s a lot of emphasis on the was not part just as a spoiler uh Theologian John dun scotus the first
Of many delightful names we have in this episode was said to have been buried alive in 1308 so according to a pretty widely accepted story he had experienced some kind of an attack that left him completely unresponsive he was buried in Cologne and then when his servant who
Had been away when this all happened came back he insisted that the body be exuded and so when the tomb opened dun Scot’s hands were bloodied and worn down indicating that he had been trying to fight his way out of the tomb which is horrifying however uh that account did
Not actually show up until Francis bin wrote about it in Historia Vite at moris and that’s the history of life and death and he wrote that in the early 17th century so 300 years after dun scotus died and it is completely unclear we have no idea where he got this
Information because it didn’t seem to exist before then I have an idea he made it up his fevered imagination uh when he first put out the story though it didn’t really cause any kind of a panic but by the late 18th century leading right through the Victorian era Europe and the United
States in particular were just fascinated with and terrified of the thought of live burial and there were a lot of factors that contributed to this huge cultural anxiety so for one thing there was this thesis that was written in 1740 by um a danish-born anatomist whose name was uh yakob Benin Winslow
And it was titled morte and C siga or death uncertainty standards so it really sounds like a page Turner um and in it he wrote about the pitfalls of how the medical community was applying its methodology to determine that someone was or was not in fact Dead uh and he
Refer as an example this John dun Scottish story as though it were a verified fact I like how I pronounced his name totally different from you I don’t I don’t i’ never found a a consistent pronunciation so if we have horrified anyone sorry uh just that’s
Just a bonus so uh Winslow’s ideas were pretty sound though he thought that a lack of a pulse and the appearance that respiration had ceased he thought that was probably not enough to conclusively and confidently declare someone to be dead which that’s pretty reasonable conclusion but for him the only way he
Thought to be sure was to wait and see if the body started decomposing which like that’s an abundance of caution yes I feel like if Winslow were watching modern TV and film he would be that guy in the audience going that’s not how you’re do it at all because all they do
Is look at him for like a second do the eye close and they’re out of there um and that would not be nearly enough for him but then another physician Jean jaac buer dablan he was French y’all um he took Winslow’s writing and he kind of ran with it because Winslow’s thesis had
Been written in Latin and so bruer translated it into French and to kind of illustrate the points that were being made he added in anecdotes of people who had been buried alive as a sort of commentary and he published this as a two volume work and the first volume was
Published in 1742 it was titled or the uncertainty of signs of death so I said it badly his translation didn’t rely on any kind of verified information when it came to adding in these anecdotes he relied on folklore and rumor and Legend to fill out this whole version of his book and that
Really sensationalized adaptation of Winslow’s earlier work became incredibly successful it was translated and republished in Europe and in the United States and then some of these translations then added their own flourish with all kinds of other stories uh that beyond what had been supplied so to lay people this came
Off as incredibly credible it was written by a doctor two doctors depending on the attribution and the translation I’m not going to name any names I feel like there’s still a doctor out there who saying stuff and people are believing it because he’s a doctor um but of course if doctor said that
Premature burial was a real and common danger that must be true so he made a lot of money off of this work yeah they all wanted to be ready and understand this whole situation and even though other medical professionals eventually wrote their own critiques of breuer’s
Work uh pointing out how much of it was really speculative and in fact quite fful the damage was already done in so many ways people had already latched on to it and so many people had grown terrified that they were going to be misidentified as Dead uh that there was
Absolutely no walking back this belief it’s kind of like that thing where once you believe it even when credible evidence is presented you just think it’s a conspiracy right you’re like no it’s real and you’re hiding it you’re working for big coffin um so so there
Was no way that was going to get fixed um but on the plus side this book and its popularity and the public Consciousness about the possibility of live burial did make Physicians a lot more careful about declaring their patients dead this is like the opposite of Virginia apgar needing to look at the
Babies um so the case of Hannah bwick is this clear indicator of How Deeply people were starting to fear being buried alive in the second half of the 18th century Hannah was a wealthy woman she was unmarried and because her brother had allegedly been almost buried alive she was really really completely
Terrified of premature burial so much so that she made a deal with her Manchester Doctor Charles White to keep her body from burial indefinitely an even bigger abundance of caution for the sum of 20,000 guines so some retellings say that he inherited the entirety of her Fortune others say
That he merely had this one lump sum payout but the important thing is that he really did keep her from being buried for a very long time so after Miss bewick died in 1758 Dr White embalmed her uh he kept her in his home for years
And years and years he would check on her annually uh with a witness standing by to make sure everything was cool and that she was in fact well preserved um I read one thing that said that he eventually moved her from like kind of an out in the open thing to like putting
Her in a clock but I’m not sure if that’s true what is that not where you keep your bodies I don’t I got a house full of grandfather clocks I got to open once a year um I don’t really don’t anybody come for me I so expect police at my hotel later
Um so he totally kept his promise and and went through with what this deal had entailed but then when Dr White died in 1813 the executive the executors of her of his estate were like I don’t know what do I want to do with his dead body
Uh so they gave it to the Museum of the Manchester Society of natural history and she went on display there just probably not what she had in mind um she was finally buried in 1868 and that was 100 years after she died so this led to rumors that that had been
The timeline that was specified with her doctor but I don’t think that’s actually the case uh and while she was on display at the Museum she took on the nickname the Manchester mummy if I had a time machine in our series of ridiculous things we would do with time machines I
Would I would go back in time and reassure her honey once once they embalm you if you weren’t dead before you are super dead definitely are now in 1817 a man named John snort this is g to get better published a book called thesaurus of horror yeah in which he recount counted
A number of incidents of alleged live burials and one such story reads quote about 40 years ago a man well known about the Streets of London and its environs as an itinerant vendor of handkerchiefs Etc was not only supposed dead but partly buried alive however he was happily rescued from the above horrible
Fate by some providential accident of delay in totally filling up the grave and before the grave diggers had left the spot he was heard to groan and was instantaneously relieved from his perilous situation the particulars of where it happened have escaped the author’s recollection but the awful substance is
Not obliterated in the least so snart described this man I know that name dude change it up um described this man as quote a living witness of the horrible tarity of premature interment and he wrote that while this nameless handkerchief vendor went on to live a really long life uh it
Wasn’t a great life because he was taunted and made fun of for being the dude that got buried alive um and this whole tale though I mean you guys are smart you heard it it has all of the trademarks of a tall tale that is told
To stir up fear and probably sell books in the process um so it’s very convenient that the man in question who has no name also has no ties to anyone else and any sort of Records he’s just an itinerate salesman y’all we don’t know um but he lived through this
Horrible near burial and then suffered the jokes of insensitive jerks for the rest of his life so it’s kind of this double whammy of sad stories and we all love those so that’s why it sold a lot of books yeah so snart went on to suggest that for every near Miss like
That a thousand other people were buried before their time he was not alone in this totally madeup statistic numerous writers were publishing their opinions and their warnings on the matter of being buried alive with a whole array of unsubstantiated and very scary statistics everything from one false
Burial a week to two out of every 100 burials being premature were reported yeah and that was completely made up there was like some of these uh would describe like how they came to those figures but it was always based on like weird supposition and not not really anything scientifically sound and that
Topic of this potential to be buried alive remained really popular uh with readers throughout the 1800s as you said it sold a lot of books in 1890 more than 70 years after snart’s publication Dr Moore Russell Fletcher wrote a book titled our home doctor domestic and Botanical remedies simplified and
Explained for family treatment with A Treatise upon suspended animation the danger of burying alive and directions for restoration um which I kind of love I mean you want the antidote right uh and it ran with a secondary title of 1,000 persons Buried Alive by their best friends so text your best friend after
The show and be like check on me make sure it doesn’t happen as the 1800s went on a number of other influences raised more cultural anxiety about premature burial and one of those was the fiction of the time in July of 1844 edgert Allen Poe the premature burial was published in dollar newspaper
And this story in case you haven’t read it features a narrator who has catalepsy and that is a medical condition in which the person falls into a deathlike state of unconsciousness I think we talked about it in that episode we did on narcolepsy um and because of it the
Narrator of the story is afraid for his whole life of being buried alive uh and we won’t give the whole plot away in case you haven’t read it it’s a really lovely Discovery because that poke kind of knew what he was doing uh but the narrator cites examples in the book of
Premature burials to give his concerns Credence and he describes all of the many many ways in which he has carefully prepared his own tomb to escape from in case he suffers the quote true wretchedness of being buried alive and this story was of course Sensational and
It prayed on this idea and fear that was already really taking hold in the culture at the time he’d also already touched on premature burial in his short story barones which was published in the southern literary messenger in 1835 and POS story Cas of am monato also
Played on the fear of live burial in a Revenge plot but I remember that one from school a premature I lost my place on my paper I think it’s because I left a word out of this paragraph because that’s what I like to do to Tracy to Jack with her a
Little bit you know keep her on her toes it’s fine premature burial figured into the 1939 Burton’s gentleman’s magazine debut of The Fall of the House of Usher another thing we read in school we read a lot of po po really good um so was certainly fascinated with this idea of
Being buried alive which is probably not a surprise to anybody and also recognize the potentially lucrative nature of these tales that prayed on the reader fears I feel like I should have an aside and go I know we talked about Poe a lot but I am a woman with a framed portrait
Of edar alen Poe in her dining room so clearly I have a little bit of a focus situation there used to apparently be a lot more a PO in this outline and then it it was pulled back there was a whole lot more po because I just want to talk
About his work all the time CU I love it uh and all of these stories though about premature burial that he wrote came before his really rapid rise to Fame in 1845 with the publication of the Raven but once he became popular and the Raven became popular his other stories were
Reprinted to capitalize on that Fame and so his work continued to gain new readers and become more famous and build on the already common fear of Awakening in a tomb or grave that had just been you know already kind of bubbling up in the US and Europe so keep in mind that
While embalming had been practiced all the way back to ancient Egypt it really wasn’t all that common in the United States or Europe at this point embalming isn’t necessary a lot of cultures and religions look on it as a defacement of the body and it really became more
Popular during the United States Civil War when Dr Thomas Holmes started embodying embalming bodies so that there would be some time to ship the bodies of soldiers who had been killed in the battle home to their families Holmes had been experimenting with embalming practices before that he claimed to have
Embalmed more than 4,000 bodies during the war making himself a whole lot of money in that process and then after that embalming became a business that was offered to the general population and it gave funeral professionals a way to give grieving families more time to make their their funeral arrangements
Rather than needing to bury the body pretty much immediately yeah that fourth th000 bodies number gets really big when you consider that at the time he was apparently charging $100 per body so during the Civil War that was a load of cash that seems like a huge amount of
Money uh and as the 20th century approached discussion of premature burial became even more common in public discourse and we’re going to get into that a little bit but right now we’re going to Pause so in 1896 a British businessman and activist named William teb formed the London Association for the prevention of premature burial he wanted to ensure I mean they had a mission he wanted to make sure that steps were taken to minimize the likelihood of anyone suffering this fate
And he worked with doctors and survivals of near burial to develop the ideas that the the group formed together so in 1905 TB TB published a book it was titled premature burial and how it may prevented with special reference to trans catalepsy and other forms of suspended animation and this book had a
Bunch of different methods building on the work of the writers that came before that the medical community would uh be able to be very very certain that a person was really dead before declaring them to be dead these are not pleasant methods no just to warn you brace if
You’re squeamish um these included holding fire to their hands um and applying Hot Irons to the body and injecting them with various substances some of which would have killed them um but the idea here was that people in trans-like states that were causing these false death declarations could perhaps be jolted to
Consciousness by some form of shock to the body um like they I guess slapping was too nice I don’t know what that’s about why they’re like let’s burn them um but this book also offered up some really pretty cool new ideas for the time so uh it mentioned attempts at
Resuscitation through electric shock or artificial respiration and this is a very new idea uh chest compression was super new at this point it had been discussed and practiced in some form or another although not commonly for about 10 years and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was still 50 years off so
In that regard it was really ahead of its time so you may have noticed that trans states have come up a lot and you might wonder why were there so many people in comas and transes during this time that seems odd uh there were a couple of things going on and one big
Problem was chalera and in the 19th century chalera pandemics were pretty common and global trade was helping to carry contaminated food and water basically everywhere uh but one of the advanced states of the illness uh was a coma that presented very much like death and there were cases where per person
Was determined to be deceased when they were in fact not additionally uh just knowing that it was possible to get so sick that you looked dead even to a physician really helped spread a public sense of fear that that might happen another problem was what came to be called Lucid hysterical
Lethargy or more casually death trance I continue to be really curious about what was really going going on here but there were numerous cases in the 19th century of people who confronted with certain topics or S situations would experience this highly elevated heart rate followed by a drop
Into a death a death trance and it was actually uh Dr George G de tette tette I’m gonna say that really not the way anyone should say this word how does this go Holly uh Dr George J de tette that guy for whom Tourette syndrome is named
Uh who came to this conclusion that it was a mental disorder and not a contagion or a medical issue yeah that’s one of those things that um it sometimes gets written off under the category of hysterical women um but there were actually instances where they were recording this like they were taking
These people’s pulses and they were Rising rapidly and then dropping to almost nothing so if that was a case of someone kind of working thems into it like their body was definitely responding to their mental state yeah I’m just like what was it though I don’t it was fashionable um
Yeah maybe but here’s the thing that kept all of this panic and hysteria going there absolutely have been people who were buried prematurely um which stinks but there were a lot more that were mistakenly identified as having buried uh having been buried prematurely and because of the improved Communications that were happening in
The late 19th century industry was causing great communication advances these horror stories would get picked up and spread like wildfire and they were largely the result of people not understanding science and how the human body decomposed for example a lot of these stories hinged on this evidence in air
Quotes that the person was heard to cry out after having been buried but this is actually a phenomenon that’s known as Toten L which is German for dead loud and it refers to the way that the gases build up in the body during decomposition and they eventually cause
The throat to open and the air rushes like it would if you were speaking it causes some kind of cry for help it’s not a cry for help it’s a cry made by gas in your decomposing body you just have gas um yeah there’s a lot of it’s
Just gas just gas though ever since I was doing this research and I told it to my husband every time we in the house we go tote and L we think we’re hilarious that is the best new euphemism oh my tote and loud’s acting up uh so similarly some of the most
Shocking and Brace because it’s kind of gross uh upsetting stories of premature burial are attributed to women who died while pregnant and then for some reason or another were later exhumed to discover what appeared to have been an in coffin delivery um it’s super gross I
Know very sad but it’s not quite the the people would presume that oh my gosh she woke up and gave birth to her baby in a cof that’s not what happened at all uh there is always a German word for everything uh and this phenomenon is called sagaert which simply means coffin
Birth so discoveries of coffin births and histories which like they continue to happen when we’re doing our Unearthed episodes at the end of the year sometimes there are you know somebody that did an archaeological dig and here’s is another one right there but uh it could lead to really steep penalties
And punishments for the doctors who were involved when it’s something that was discovered pretty quickly the doctors would be accused of neglect but once again the real culprit here is just decomposition and gas like gas filling the abdominal cavity creating pressure like that’s it’s not it’s not at all
That the person was still living in some way um a thing that that is not uh is not noted here but that like I heard about in this in my team tween fascination with death years um was people thinking that people’s hair and nails were continuing to grow yeah and
Um like some of it was people thought that people’s hair and nails continued to grow after they died which they don’t or they were like oh they must have been buried alive because their hair is so much longer no it’s just that like your skin recedes I’m going to tell you
Something scary uh oh um there was one thing that came up in some of the research I was doing that no one’s been able to explain which is that uh in cases where bodies have been exed there have been times where they have found clutches of hair in clenched hands and they can’t
Explain that uh we don’t know if like as part of decomposition you try to comb your hair so you look pretty I don’t I don’t know what happens but that’s a scary thing that came up and because there’s no explanation I was like this one’s running long well it also that
Doesn’t seem like a something that a a person might do if they really did regain Consciousness in the coffin oh the first thing I would do is just okay that’s the first thing I would do I’d be like where’s my lipstick I don’t uh I would turn into Beck’s kiddo
And start punching the think in front of me uh okay so all of this yeah uh all of this concern about being trapped in an early grave naturally sparked human Innovation uh and starting in the late 18th century people started coming up with some pretty fantastic coffins that
Would help ease their fears of waking up 6 feet under with no means of Escape thus the so-called safety coffin was born so Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick is usually cited as the first person to commission a safety coffin and that was a project he initiated in the early
1790s so in the early years of all of this happening this was a custombuilt coffin and he had a window installed there was a tube so that if he W if he awoken if he awoke in tuned he could still breathe and then importantly the coffin had a locking lid and it wasn’t
Supposed to be nailed in place the lock could be opened from inside so he also had a special set of keys made this just gets more complicated he had these keys that were tucked into a pocket in his Death Shroud so if by some Misfortune he
Had been buried alive when he woke up he could use those keys to open up his coffin and then open the family tomb from inside if I woke up in a coffin I would not have my wits about me I would not other than the lipstick which I
Would totally do um but then I’d be like I don’t I would do the Beatrix kiddo thing like and really hurt myself before I was like hey I had some keys made I forgot about those keys but here’s the thing right not everybody had a family tomb so you couldn’t just give yourself
A set of keys most folks were buried in the ground with no way to see themselves out uh so a few years after Duke ferdinand’s idea a German priest named PJ peser came up with an idea that every coffin should have a cord installed that could be pulled from the inside and
Should the person wake up inside and pull said chord the local church bells would ring so that everyone would know that the recently buried person was in fact Alive gota come dig them up in the 1820s inventor and showman Adolf gsmith put his own spin onto this whole idea of a
Safety coffin his coffin features included the ones in the other models at the time so there was anir tube and an alarm but the tube on his design was big enough that if the person inside woke up food could be sent down to Give Them Enough sustenance uh while the whole
Digging up process happened so gsmith himself tested his in his inventions a lot of times and on one occasion he ate a full meal of sausages and soup and washed it all down with beer all while Buried one in inside one of his coffins that I’m just I’m sorry this seems like
A very gassy plan for your test it also seems like a restaurant concept that is going to take off like you know someone’s going to hear this and be like I’m going to call investors in a minute I need 22 coffins um and tubes full of sausage um I just
Had to say I got to admire eating a sausage in a tube uh and I wonder if the tube got greasy on the way I have many questions well I have questions like you don’t really have a lot of room to sit up in a closed coffin so I’m like are
How are you drinking your is it I would die because I would open my mouth to be ready and the food would go in and I would choke okay that’s how that would play out and they’d be like H leave her there Um I’m trying to think how you have the second funeral at that point um a really complex and fairly thorough approach was devised in 1829 by Dr Johan gotfried tabberer and this German inventor designed again a system of strings to attach to the probably deceased Slims uh which ran to an above
Ground Bell and to avoid any false alarms the Bell had its own little housing uh to prevent it from being triggered by the element so if it got rained on or if wind came it wouldn’t go off and should the bell ring a Watchman was trained to spr into action and
Insert a tube into a specific slot so that breathable air could be pumped down to the undeceased uh in 1868 fron Vester of Newark New Jersey filed a patent for an improved burial case I had a book with this exact patent drawing when I was a teen and
This I don’t I it wasn’t even like I was particularly gothy or anything I was just like really fascinated by I could see you being super into it from the scientific angle yeah whereas I was like oh yeah gothy yeah what kind of lining is in
That coffin yeah that’s where I was at can can it receive [Laughter] sausages uh so the patent application described how this would all work quote the supposed corpse being laid in the body a of the coffin and the cord K placed in the hand of the corpse the
Cord is next drawn through the tube C and attached to the bell I and the tube C is placed in the base D on the lid of the coffin the coffin is now lowered into the grave and the grave filled up to the air inlets F now should the
Person laid in the coffin on returning to life desire to ascend from the coffin and the grave to the surface he can do so by means of the latter H but if twoo we we to ascend by the ladder he can pull the cord in his hand
And ring the bell I giving the desired alarm for help I like that he’s like if you want to get out just if he doesn’t want to lay there fine maybe you’re cozy maybe it had a good lining um so France’s coffin design would be buried
Only up to a certain point as Tracy said so the air inlets would still let air come in uh and oxygen to the maybe deceased and then after a certain period of time had passed without the coffin’s passenger which was the only word I could come up with there um making any
Moves to leave then the burial could be completed this I imagine um uh grav diggers in the like found this very irritating as a concept like thanks for doubling my workload J you’re really making the job of an already very labor intensive job harder yes so then in 1885
Inventors Charles seber and Frederick H Bourn Trier of waterl Illinois came up with a casket that offered quote certain new and useful Improvement and lifeguard signals for people buried in a trance and this invention had an above ground Bell that could be rung from the person
Buried in the coffin as others before it had but it also had a mechanism that could activate a blast of air into the coffin uh once again from above ground to avoid Suffocation it was fancy yeah uh in 1893 when Vermont do Timothy Clark Smith died he was not or he was rather
Interred in a grave that he had designed specifically for himself to saave off the likelihood of accidentally dying underground so he first arranged for the space next to his plot to also be his and he had a set of stairs built into it um and he rigged his own breathing tube
And Bell System to alert anyone in case he awoke in tuned but he also added another touch and this is a window above ground that sees down today you can still see the window over his face in ever Green Cemetery uh in New Haven Vermont but the glass which
Was intended to give passers by or uh someone who was maybe concerned a chance to just check in on him and see like hey are you actually deceased or are you um maybe waking up um that has unfortunately become clouded so if you are feeling a little bit morbid and you
Want to go look you won’t see anything gross but you can say that you went and looked at a corpse through a window yeah I don’t know if that’s unfortunate I think that might be a blessing uh Count Michelle de Carnes Kiki came up with his own solution to this whole
Premature burial problem in 1897 he was a Chamberlain to Zar Nicholas II of Russia and he presented this idea at a conference organized by the French society of hygiene at the sorban there were doctors and diplomats and the press the Zar had given him the leeway in his duties to focus exclusively on
Developing the idea for this coffin and he had put all the bells and whistles into it so he called his device like our niece after himself like you would uh and like similar inventions it was intended to alert someone if the person in the coffin was alive this version was also intended to
Give even an unconscious but alive person a shot at being rescued so you’ll notice some of those others involved like you got to wake up and pull a string and do a thing but this uh had a glass ball that hung over the chest of the probably dead person and if the ball
Was in any way Disturbed it would trigger this spring-loaded mechanism that opened a container that sat above the grave and when the container opened air would rush into the coffin via a tube these people love their tubes um a chime would sound and a flag would deploy so it was like wo I’m
Alive um I feel like if this were a real functioning type thing Little Richard had this um and this air tube also allowed light into the coffin because he thought like if you had been buried and you woke up you might want to actually have some
Daylight and it also had a tiny electric light inside the coffin as a backup solution in case you woke up on an overcast day or at night so this was incredibly well received somehow it was affordable uh it had been developed over the years of research and it probably
Helped that it had the Russian Zar behind it that was a lot of clout the Press raved that it had solved the problem of premature burial the London Association for the prevention of premature burial endorsed it and soon he took this thing on tour to promote it uh
It didn’t didn’t go well it didn’t go as bad as you’re thinking but there was a problem so on tour the count would stand there and extol the virtues of this invention while an assistant who was buried in larnes would provide a very real demonstration of just how well it
Worked but on one of the stops on the tour the Bell failed to sound and the flag did not deploy and time was going by and the audience started getting progressively more concerned uh and so did Carnes car Nikki and so the inventor then got several men and was kind of
Like he called it and uh they all started digging very quickly and they were very happy when the assistant turned out to be alive he had triggered the device and it worked enough to get air to him but those arm systems did not work um and the Press actually skewed
Lock Carnes after this it was a big public failure it was super embarrassing and even the favor that it had briefly enjoyed from the medical professionals and high-profile enthusiasts that had initially embraced it quickly retracted so cares Cari continued to Market his device in an effort to try to regain the
Public’s lost trust and a man named farao Lorenzo who was 78 demonstrated the device for the count in tourin Italy he was buried in it for nine days before being dug up again he wrote uh Carnes carnik wrote in promotional material hyping up how real the danger of
Premature burial was and trying to counteract all of his critics and he took his safety coffin to the United States where it was once again really well received but not well enough that he ever managed to really sell many of them yeah allegedly it sat in like
Showrooms at funeral homes and it was like you could have this and people would be like that’s okay I don’t think so I’m not Little Richard um there were at least two designs for safety coffins that I really like they really simplified this whole concept of alerting people that you might need out
Um Hubert devau of New York came up with his version in 1894 and then Marie constant hippolyte Nicole of France came up with hers in 1899 and both of these made use of natural movement to set the cycle in motion to alert someone above ground and get air pumped into the
Coffin both of them realized that rather than having a cord that somebody had to remember to pull upon waking it would uh be a lot more elegant to just have a lever above the head of the body so the first thing a person would do upon
Waking up in a coffin would probably be to raise their head so both of these designs were triggered by that motion of sitting up in the coffin but what happened after the trigger was a little different so in Devo’s design the raising of the head would raise and open
A valve above ground that would admit air into the coffin and that valve as per Devo’s patent write up quote should be made of some bright color so that it could be readily seen and so it would alert grave Watchers that movement was underway in the coffin that was buried
Below Nicole’s design featured an elaborate hook and counterweight apparatus that broke a glass when the person lifted their head which let air come in and then the noise of the glass breaking was supposed to provide the alert to the outside world that something was a Miss uh but as the
Inventor wrote quote I can also by the breaking of the glass set in motion any convenient apparatus for sounding an alarm so this particular design was intended for coffins that would be kept above ground until the living were completely certain that the person in it was dead and then the window area would
Be sealed up with some kind of plate and then the coffin would be buried yeah I have to wonder these designs that feature Buy in from other people like you can buy the coffin but you also got to find someone willing to either only bury you partway or hang out and wait
Till they’re sure you’re dead and seal this thing up before it goes in like I mean how do you approach a friend with that um hi I love you and I need to talk about my final Arrangements um eventually electricity actually made its way into some of these safety coffin
Designs in 1900 Walter J mcnight of Buffalo New York filed a patent for an electric device for indicating The Awakening of persons buried alive and in MC’s design movement within the coffin would close a circuit like he had all these levers that were metal and they
Would close circuits if you moved uh and it was attached to an electric signal above ground and one section of his design even included an arm similar to that glass ball we talked about earlier that just sat above the chest of the person that was probably deceased so
That even if they breathed and were not conscious it would close that circuit and start the whole process so these are all novel and creative ideas that does not though make them good and we are going to discuss why that is in just a moment but first uh we will leave a
Place for an ad for listeners at home later On there is of course some pretty flawed logic in most of these safety coffin design designs that we’ve been talking about so as we mentioned in the first segment uh corpses twist and turn a lot in a lot of bizarre ways as they decompose so almost all of these designs
That featured some movement in the coffin setting them off were open to the possibility of false positive alarms being activated the obvious solution at least if you asked uh fron Vestor in 1868 was to include a viewing tube so that again it’s a tu tube so that other
People could then just like peek in on the recently buried and see if they were trying to get help or if they were just decomposing and setting the alarm off yeah so in addition to that unless the provided Air Supply were being pumped in continually the person inside
Would really still only be able to survive for a very brief amount of time maybe even as little as an hour so the idea of waking up and then activating the air tube so like that this was just not really a work solution but even though uh the fields
Of medicine and preparation of the Dead have both evolved there is still an ongoing fear of uh being buried alive that persists today uh because some religions we mentioned this earlier forgo embalming or require that a body be put in the ground very quickly there is still this possibility in the minds
Of some people that this could actually be a real concern and so um I as I was digging through the patent office listings of safety coffins the most recent one that I found was actually designed in 2014 um and it is called a portable alarm system for coffins um and it was
Uh it featured quote a signal transmitting structure removably secured in the coffin or tomb so if someone were to wake up inside this coffin they could press a button a visual signal above the ground would be triggered and then the whole thing here’s the part that I really like it’s designed with
Conservation in mind because when it’s determined that enough time time has gone by that the person within is really and truly deceased then this whole device can be removed and used again on another coffin is kind of cool it’s recycling yeah uh so even before safety coffins
Really became so popular another way to avoid premature burial had a brief Heyday and that was the waiting Mortuary this was basically a place where bodies could be placed and observed for a period of time to make sure they were really definitely truly dead before being interred and the composition was
The only Benchmark for determining that the death was real with any kind of confidence so Breuer that fear-mongering Doctor Who stirred up all this panic over waking up in a tumor grave had actually proposed this concept way back in the 1740s but it didn’t manage to gain traction initially there were some
Um heads of Royal houses who were like we should do that and then the funding never happened happened um because probably they realized uh um but the idea came up again in the late 1780s because a number of other doctors at that point who had read breuer’s work started reiterating it and
Rewriting their own ideas about this and saying that this is really something we should consider so obviously it would be optimal to keep somebody who appeared to be dead somewhere that if they did wake up they could just be seen to by physician immediately and given whatever
Care they needed to continue to not be dead but it’s hard to tell people to keep their deceased loved ones around their houses for prolonged periods just in case they happen to wake up yeah I know you’re dealing with grieving and some other stuff but could you just hang
On to this for a few days uh it’s not cool so Germany in particular picked up this idea that special facilities should be built to house the newly probably Dead uh where they could be looked after and checked on in an environment that was specially prepared for any surprise
Awakenings uh one of the proponents of this idea was a physician named Kristoff vilhelm hufeland who wrote very plainly about the corpse house that he was building in 1791 huon did not embellish or tell frightening stories to support this writing he wasn’t uh you know prone to
Try to like stir up fervor about it he was really matter of fact and he described all of these functions very simply and very clearly in huan’s lyen house which was named the Asylum for doubtful life yeah the names in this are so good uh there were eight beds or stretchers
For the corpses and then an attendant kept an eye on all the charges and this was at the time normally a woman but hfon thought that women were too flighty and stupid to do a really good job so he thought that this should become a train profession for young men thanks dude uh
Glad to have your confidence there were also Porters to keep the place running basically like a home keeping fires going and seeing to the general tidiness of the place and a doctor was on call at all hours and huon’s waiting morchary was built in viar but before long
Similar facilities had popped up in Berlin Frankfurt Augsburg and a lot of other cities throughout Germany it’s sort of like the saying nature finds a way uh you could also say that free enterprise does as well uh because one lyen house in Munich figured out a way
To make extra cash and that was that this establishment charged a visitors fee that once paid entitled the guests to just explore the facility they were welcome to see all of the beautiful lounges and waiting rooms but they all just wanted to go walk in the corpse
Room um and the lyen house in Frankfurt also started taking visitors who wanted to indulge their macob curiosity this is like a prec cursor to the Mutter Museum kind of so that Munich facility had some other problems in terms of how it was run the staff as a matter of procedure
Tied strings to the extremities of the patients which if they moved would trigger a harmonium which is a pump organ and the harmonium was played once a day to make sure that it still worked it was in good working order but as we mentioned in the case of the safety confins dead people
Move uh a lot it’s pretty common and this was basically just a constant false alarm situation I can’t imagine being the person whose job it is to sit with the dead bodies to make sure they’re really dead and they’re constantly moving and making noise but it’s a harmonium it’s a harmonium
Noise uh that harmonium is poorly tuned don’t don’t be like me harmonium uh waiting mortuaries persisted well into the 19th century there were even a few in the 20th century uh that had not yet get shut down and Proprietors started to hope that they could mold this into a luxury
Industry by building progressively more ornamental and fashionable homes for these businesses they look like beautiful houses but they didn’t last forever um because despite the fancier ones being built people just started to think of them as really gross places and like they kind of were they just were
Like and also let’s say my loved one wakes up I don’t want them to wake up in a room full of corpses uh so so so they kind of started to fall out of favor people started to question what it would be like for somebody falsely assumed to
Be dead to wake up wake up in a place like this just surrounded by these decomposing bodies and they just didn’t want that and then there was this very tricky fact there’s no record of anyone ever waking up in one uh that cast doubt on the entire idea of premature burial
As this you know total scourge of living people and then as people started to realize that it was really pretty unusual to be buried alive it became apparent that there was not need for a service like this and waiting Mor mortuaries slowly died out I’m so sorry I wrote that pun and I
Don’t even like puns I promise I punched myself in the face I’m the person who named of an episode of our show a brief history of air conditioning no wait a condensed history of air conditioning and I don’t like puns either but I was like I can’t
Call it anything be besides that yeah I’m not a fan of the puns I don’t know why I can’t say it wrong in front of a live audience it’s okay it’s okay everything’s cool uh if you have listened to our other live shows and as Tracy mentioned earlier we uh have a no
Bummer policy for them and you might know that so uh We’ve talking about really morbid and sometimes gross things here so in the interest of ending in a bit of a happier place I had this goofy idea uh that I would write a silly poem about the final wishes of the famous
Historical people that were designed to make sure that they did not go to their graves before their time this is probably the best thing that has ever happened on our show don’t oversell it cuz now I’m going to choke um so I called this how to make sure you won’t
Be buried alive or weird advice from famous people okay there’s a buyin you have to do with me here there is a moment where I’m going to say the word veins and what I mean is the word arteries but the word arteries takes up a lot of syllables and it’s hard to
Rhyme in a rhyming couplet so um please do not pedant this poem so I know it’s arteries but here we go George Washington asked to be held for three days before he was placed in his Mount Vernon grave Alfred Nobel bed please open my veins Hans Christian Anderson
Wanted the same Frederick chopan wished his body cut open schopenhauer for putrefaction to set in AUST renoir’s dearest wish simply said whatever happen happens my son please just make sure I’m dead that is that we want to thank so many people for making our first tour a delight on both
Coasts uh from all of the venue staff that took great care of us and made the shows happen to all of the people that came out to see us you were all amazing and we are so so grateful for your support and your warmth and for chatting
With us and just making it a really delightful time and we hope everybody who celebrates Halloween has a wonderful and safe time and I actually have a little bit of listener mail uh which is related to one of our Halloween episodes uh it’s actually two pieces of mail
Because they are related they are both about our Charles Adams episodes so the first one is um from our listener Megan I hope she’s a Megan and not a Megan and that I’m not mispronouncing it but either way you know I meant well uh she writes long time listener first time
Writing in thank you both for your lovely and engaging podcast I learn so much with each episode I was even more delighted that a bit of the second part of the Charles Adams story grazed my life if only by a minute fraction I am a
PSU Alum and never knew my alma moer had such a piece of art uh although to be fair the library system for Penn State is huge uh if you recall in that episode we mentioned a piece of art that the library had that was a huge mural 14 by4
Feet that Charles Adams painted uh originally for a seaside resort and she goes on to say the Patty and patno libraries I hope I’m not mispronouncing that are truly lovely buildings and worth touring if any other listener has the opportunity to visit State College uh or or University Park the campus name
The library does allow the public in for viewing and if you are a Pennsylvania resident you may even get a library card for use in any Library within the entire Penn State system across the state uh which is awesome to know and then just in case you were wanted a little more
Backup and reassurance we also got an email about the same thing from uh our listener Ruth who says I’m a regular listener who also have happens to work in patno library first of all thanks for not repeating The Narrative of someone discovered it in our library about that
Piece of art uh since it had been hanging just outside our news library for more than a decade although people had gotten kind of used to seeing it she wrote second as we serve the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania our library is open to the public and folks are
Welcome to come in and look at all of our art the architecture of our buildings and use our materials anytime we’re open if you come in the entrance on curtain Road and turn left at the welcome desk you will see a sign for Starbucks go through that to the lounge
And the picture is up on the far side uh so now you have reassurance also from a library employee that it is perfectly okay to go check out that Charles Adams Painting if you wish as well as handy directions thank you Ruth that was great uh thank you Megan for writing and
Telling us uh about it as well I hope many people go check it out because it’s really incredibly uh lovely and like I said it’s it’s that ghoulish charm that I love Charles Adams for if you would like to write to us you can do so at History podcast at house upworks.com you
Can also find us everywhere on social media as missed inhistory you can find us at mised inh his.com on uh our website where we have every episode that has ever existed of the show as well as show notes for the ones that Tracy and I have worked on and occasional other
Goodies and odds and ends uh if you would like to subscribe you could do so at Apple podcast or on the iHeart Radio App or wherever you listen to Podcasts for more on this and thousands of other topics visit hous Staffworks Outcom