There are three reasons people are typically buried alive. The first is a tragic accident: a person who seems to be dead but is not gets buried and awakens in the claustrophobic horror of a casket. The second is a criminal act: someone is purposely buried alive as torture or as a very slow and hideous method of execution. The final reason people are buried alive is the reason humans do most things: for fun and the ability to show off.
None of these reasons are good, just for the record.
Accidental burial is often rumored, in history and fiction, but only rarely documented. The New York Times reported in 1885 that a man named Jenkins who was disinterred a year after burial, found upside down in a coffin filled with scratch marks, most of his hair pulled out. In 1955, young Essie Dunbar was presumed dead following an epileptic seizure and nearly buried. Her sister asked to see her body one last time at the final moment, and Essie was saved. She lived another 47 years. In 1792, Duke Ferdinand of Braunschweig was so afraid of being buried alive that he commissioned the world’s first “safety coffin,” featuring holes for light and air to enter, and being fit with a lock instead of nailed shut. The keys to escape were buried with the duke, in the pockets of his robes. This is not, however, just a kooky idea that belongs in the past. In Macedonia in 2014, a woman was presumed dead of asphyxia and buried alive and only rescued because children playing near the cemetery could hear her screams.
Also among the accidentally buried, we must include the unknown and untold numbers of people buried by natural disasters: flood, landslide, and tsunamis have brought people to this terrible end at a rate even the most negligent funeral directors could never match.
Purposeful vivisepulture has been recorded historically as a means of punishment or a type of warfare in ancient China, Germany, England, Persia, Sweden, Denmark, and Rome. In the Netherlands during the centuries-long feuds between Catholic and Protestant dynasties, live burial was used to torture people on the wrong side of the Christian fence into converting, or to kill them if they refused. Aside from state violence, interpersonal behavior can sometimes culminate in live burial. Jessica Lunsford was nine years old in Florida when a sex offender raped her and buried her alive. Ashley Piccirilli of Massachusetts was in the wrong place at the wrong time, buried by a construction crew moving earth nearby where she had picnicked. (Hard to say this one is an accident, exactly. They meant to move that earth, she meant to be there.) Without supports or a structured trench, her odds of survival were quite low. Piccirilli said she survived because she didn’t think she could die. That’s mind over quite a lot of matter.
In the matter of being buried alive on purpose, Harry Houdini is the most famous case. An established escape artist who had made his name escaping chains and cages, he elected to be buried alive in 1919, to amaze his audience via his escape. The attempt was nearly fatal, and he had to be rescued. In 1990, California magician Joe Burrus decided to replicate the original Houdini attempt and have himself buried seven feet deep in a Plexiglass coffin. Tragically, Burrus instructed helpers to pour concrete into the hole, adding nearly seven tons of weight to the burial and destroying the coffin, killing him inside. Not to be outdone, stunt man Bill Shirk of Indiana replicated the deadly stunt one more time in 1992, on the same date that both Houdini and Burrus had attempted it. After previous escapist stunts involving interment with a python and tarantulas, Shirk must have figured that there was no place to go but down. In another Plexiglass coffin, Shirk was buried at the same depth and with the same dangerous choice of wet concrete poured into his grave. Like Burrus, Shirk suffered the splintering of his coffin and found himself in mortal dangers. Unlike Burrus, like Houdini decades before, Shirk survived thanks to quick intervention.
Despite a lot of high-profile stories to send shivers down our spines, most people buried alive will remain forever unknown to us. They died deep in culverts and the ditches beside highways, in basements and root cellars, in featureless patches of desert and deep in the woods. Many of them remain on lists of the missing, and many will never be found. We often assume a careful demeanor when walking in a graveyard, taking care to speak softly and show respect. But if you think about it too long, you might realize you should behave that way almost everywhere. The unmarked dead can be beneath our feet at any time—and some of them went that way with their eyes wide open.
