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Victorian Londoners were so terrified of being buried alive they invented coffins that opened from the inside

I was about 12 years old when my stepdad, a doctor, stopped the car outside a funeral home and said he just had to pop in to pronounce somebody dead. He was back moments later, job done - and I had questions.

How could he tell so quickly? But if it was so obvious, couldn’t they have worked it out for themselves? Why would they even take the body to a funeral home if they weren’t even sure they were dead?!

I was surprised when he explained that it’s the law in Britain that a doctor must verify that someone is dead before they can be buried or cremated - yes, even if it’s obvious. Of all the things that may keep us awake at night in 2022 - and there are many - being buried alive is, mercifully, a long way down the list.

If it happens, chances are you’re a character in a show like The Tourist, someone who’s gotten mixed up with organised crime and is having a truly horrendous last day on the job. In short: because of a combination of advances in medical science and the law that required my stepdad stop at a funeral home to state the very obvious, being buried alive is no longer something that happens by accident.

Not so in the 1890s, when the fear of being buried alive - taphephobia - was, even doctors admitted, entirely founded. The truth is, it’s never been that easy to know when someone is dead; even today, there is debate - which organ, by ceasing activity, means we are ‘dead’: the heart or the brain? Lets not decide now - you and I aren’t qualified.

So, imagine how difficult it was before doctors could measure brain activity, or even before the stethoscope - which wasn’t invented until 1816, before which doctors might just have to press their ear against an unconscious person to hear whether their heart was beating.

Consequently, people were terrified of being buried alive. One absolutely horrifying report from the 1890 edition of The Undertaker’s Journal said, “The body of a woman… who was supposed to have died from hysterics, was placed in a vault on Thursday, 3rd July.

“On Saturday evening it was found that the woman had regained consciousness, had torn her grave-clothes in her struggles, had turned completely over in the coffin, and had given birth to a seven-month-old child. Both mother and child were dead when the coffin was opened for the last time.” 

Stories like this one, dovetailed neatly with the population’s unease with advances in medical science - whereas now we don’t think twice about calling a doctor when we’re sick, for centuries people had been calling priests. There were, as with any major societal change, trust issues - and stories of doctors wrongly diagnosing people with death and thereby accidentally condemning them to a horrifying one certainly weren’t helping.

William Tebb, Walter Hadwen and Edward Perry Vollum responded to the issue by co-writing a book called Premature Burial: How it May Be Prevented. The cause was close to all their hearts: William was into social reform - and Edward himself had almost been buried alive.

William and Walter then went on to form the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial (LAPPB), to protect people from what they called, “the horrible doom of being buried alive”. The tactics they recommended were not very different from the ones people had been using for centuries, such as holding a mirror under the person’s nose to see if condensation formed.

It wasn’t a great solution, so another one popped up: the safety coffin. A safety coffin had a release on the door so it could be opened from the inside. 

C. H. Eseinbrandt coffin,© C. H. Eseinbrandt

Graves were fitted with ventilation systems and speaking tubes, and some even had a bell with a string running into the coffin and tied to the deceased’s wrists.

There is no record of anyone actually being saved in this way, nor is there any evidence that the 219 cases of premature burial brought by the LAPPB actually happened - some of the stories even seemed to be at least embellished if not fabricated, such as the claim that “one person was cremated while still alive”, which would be impossible to verify after the fact.

But one advancement that did crop up from the fear that we’ve held onto, aside from making it a rule that doctors must verify that a person is dead, was the mortuary. When it comes to verifying that someone is dead, nothing is as definitive as their body beginning to decompose.

That’s a pretty unpleasant proposal, to just sit and watch and wait for putrefaction, so the mortuary provided a neat solution: a hygienic isolation from the living who don’t want to have to get too close to a decomposing body, but a very easy escape if the person wakes up. There are, as I said, plenty of reasons to lie awake at night in 2022 - but I might take a moment to be profoundly thankful that being buried alive is not one of them. 

Reference: Erica Buist H