Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And what's up. It's October. H If you
Speaker 1: are a listener of our other podcast, Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, you already know that we have a tradition
Speaker 1: on that show of devoting the entire month of October
Speaker 1: two subjects of a spooky, ghostly or monstrous variety. That's
Speaker 1: kind of our bag, and so we thought we'd give
Speaker 1: it a try on this podcast too, because why the
Speaker 1: heck not. Yeah, yeah, So, you know, we're thinking of
Speaker 1: things to cover, and some of these, some of these
Speaker 1: are topics we might may very well cover in the
Speaker 1: future without We could do chainsaws, we could do uh
Speaker 1: booby traps, you know. But of course the most obvious
Speaker 1: one is to consider something about the casket, the coffin, uh,
Speaker 1: the you know, something about the containers in which we
Speaker 1: entomb the dead, the vessels of our dead. That's right,
Speaker 1: And there is more surprising interesting in vation in the
Speaker 1: history of this invention genre then you might expect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because it's a pretty basic concept, right, a
Speaker 1: box into which one puts the dead, and then you
Speaker 1: put that box any number of places, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: usually it's not going to be something that you're gonna
Speaker 1: have to, I don't know, revisit, do anything with after
Speaker 1: a certain period of time. So it doesn't need to
Speaker 1: be a complicated box either, Right, It's just like you're
Speaker 1: gonna bury it. So what kind of features does it
Speaker 1: need to have? But in that you touched on the
Speaker 1: basic human problem here. Like death itself is a pretty simple,
Speaker 1: laid out process, it becomes complicated or more complicated through
Speaker 1: our human ideas. And therefore even something as simple as
Speaker 1: a casket is fine and simple, except people keep thinking
Speaker 1: about it, they keep worrying about it and what it represents,
Speaker 1: and they pour all of these anxieties into new innovations. Right,
Speaker 1: And so I would say this is gonna be one
Speaker 1: where the mother of invention is some embination of necessity
Speaker 1: and paranoid fantasy. Yes, um, basically the fear of death
Speaker 1: overwhelming um necessity and invention, or paradoxically, the fear of
Speaker 1: being alive will come back to that. Uh, you know what,
Speaker 1: I learned a wonderful phrase while we were preparing for
Speaker 1: this episode that I don't think I knew before, and
Speaker 1: it's the the disposal of human remains has a sort
Speaker 1: of industry term, and that term is final disposition. Be
Speaker 1: a great movie franchise, right, I mean, it makes it
Speaker 1: sound like this is you reached your final form, like
Speaker 1: this is this is the ultimate you. So of course
Speaker 1: you want to put a lot of money into how
Speaker 1: how you look and what you are poured into. Right.
Speaker 1: But also I think of disposition as something kind of
Speaker 1: like mood, uh, somewhere between like mood and character trait.
Speaker 1: So you could be of like a surly disposition, but
Speaker 1: I guess in finality you are of a dead disposition
Speaker 1: or you know, just peaceful. You know, it's like I
Speaker 1: think they're asleep, right, yeah, now, you know, we always
Speaker 1: like to ask the question what came before? So if
Speaker 1: we're talking about containers or vessels for the dead, coffins, caskets,
Speaker 1: burial vaults, all that kind of thing, asking what came
Speaker 1: before is probably gonna be looking at the practice of
Speaker 1: human burial before we were using these uh, these containers
Speaker 1: or vessels to put people in, and human burial is
Speaker 1: actually and archaeologically and anthropologically significant practice in the timeline
Speaker 1: of our species because it's I mean, this is one
Speaker 1: of those things where it's hard to know for sure,
Speaker 1: but it's often taken as a sign of the earliest
Speaker 1: archaeologically detectable indications of something like human religion. Yeah, Burial
Speaker 1: sites are often a key means of gazing into the
Speaker 1: past for starters like this is a way where you
Speaker 1: might find a very well, you know, comparatively preserved body
Speaker 1: of the deceased, and you can learn things about their anatomy,
Speaker 1: how they died, how they lived, what they ate, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But then also burial customs frequently involved
Speaker 1: bearing the individual with artifacts, and those artifacts maybe you know,
Speaker 1: more religious in in uh in their scope and may
Speaker 1: reveal things about what these people believed. But then they
Speaker 1: also might well be artifacts from their daily life tools
Speaker 1: they used, weapons they used, etcetera. It's extremely common throughout
Speaker 1: human history to bury people with personal effects, as if
Speaker 1: they would need these things wherever they were going next.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of an indication that, again we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly how or when religious beliefs first took shape
Speaker 1: and human beings. But when you see, for example, people
Speaker 1: putting a bow or or a you know, a grooming
Speaker 1: device like a comb or something in a grave with
Speaker 1: a person. You can't know for sure what that means,
Speaker 1: but it seems to be a sign that the people
Speaker 1: of this ancient time and place may have imagined their
Speaker 1: loved ones are living on somehow surviving the death of
Speaker 1: the physical body, and in some way they might need
Speaker 1: this thing again. Right, yeah, and and certainly certainly that
Speaker 1: that does become an aspect of many different belief systems,
Speaker 1: the idea that there isn't after there is another world
Speaker 1: beyond death. I wonder too, how much of it is
Speaker 1: just through tool use. You know, when we use a tool,
Speaker 1: it becomes a part of our body, you know, it
Speaker 1: it updates our body schema, It becomes an extension of
Speaker 1: the you know, the barriers between our self and the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. And therefore this kind of like
Speaker 1: perhaps this is innate idea that the tool that this
Speaker 1: individual used every day is not nearly a tool, it
Speaker 1: is a part of them. And as they go into
Speaker 1: the earth and perhaps into another realm, of course they
Speaker 1: have to bring their tools with them exactly, but whatever
Speaker 1: is going on there, I mean, when you see humans
Speaker 1: from the ancient world from the Stone Age being buried
Speaker 1: with tools that they're they're definitely not going to be
Speaker 1: physically using anymore. You've got to think that there's there's
Speaker 1: something happening in the brains of the people who are
Speaker 1: still alive there, whether it's religious or not. Maybe you
Speaker 1: could even frame it to some kind of secular sentimentality.
Speaker 1: You know, they want to think about the person there,
Speaker 1: you know, resting in peace with these items that they used.
Speaker 1: Whatever it is, it's it's something that's transcending the mere
Speaker 1: utility value of tools, right. It's because like if somebody
Speaker 1: dies and they had a favorite comb, and you're just
Speaker 1: thinking about pure utilitarian value, you might as well like
Speaker 1: keep the comb. You could use it yourself, or you
Speaker 1: could trade it for something. Leaving it with a dead
Speaker 1: person suggests a sort of second order way of thinking
Speaker 1: about life and death. Now, humans and hominance have been
Speaker 1: burying they're dead for a long time, of burying with
Speaker 1: grave goods for a long time, like tools and clothing
Speaker 1: and ornaments, and the Neanderthals buried they're dead with with belongings. Uh.
Speaker 1: The date of the earliest known human burials is disputed.
Speaker 1: I've seen it estimated that burial of the dead goes
Speaker 1: back roughly at least a hundred thousand years or so UM.
Speaker 1: But there's so many interesting examples of practices regarding final
Speaker 1: disposition in the ancient world that are different than what
Speaker 1: we're used to in many of our cultures today, but
Speaker 1: are also you can kind of see the through lines
Speaker 1: from ancient history until now. One example I want to
Speaker 1: think of is the burial practices of the ancient Proto
Speaker 1: city of Chattel Hoyak, which was that it was this
Speaker 1: early proto city from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Anatolia.
Speaker 1: It flourished around seven thousand BC, around nine thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: This would be in modern day Turkey. So to to
Speaker 1: picture this ancient proto city, you picture all these homes
Speaker 1: grouped together, which are each like a boxy pit where
Speaker 1: you would the roof would be covered and you'd enter
Speaker 1: and leave through a hole in the roof via a ladder.
Speaker 1: And then when you're walking around the city, you just
Speaker 1: be walking around this flat area on top of the
Speaker 1: houses which are all crammed right up in against each other,
Speaker 1: instead of having streets between the houses. Yeah, I believe
Speaker 1: that this uh, this location has come up on the
Speaker 1: show before Yeah, it's a fascinating site. We could do
Speaker 1: whole sections. Probably, probably we could do a whole series
Speaker 1: on stuff to blow your mind just about Chattel Hoyak,
Speaker 1: because there's so much interesting stuff to learn and about
Speaker 1: their culture. It's one of the oldest, you know, settlements
Speaker 1: of this size that we know about. But the really
Speaker 1: interesting thing about the city is that the city itself
Speaker 1: and these houses that people dwelled in, it doubles as
Speaker 1: a graveyard because it appears that people in the city
Speaker 1: of Chadlehoyak would bury their loved ones under the floor
Speaker 1: in the houses where they lived, but they would also
Speaker 1: sometimes keep parts of the bodies of their loved ones
Speaker 1: in the homes with them as like decorative items for
Speaker 1: a period of time. For example, some of the remains
Speaker 1: from Chaddlehoya show that people would cut the head off
Speaker 1: of a dead person's body, presumably again a family member member,
Speaker 1: or somebody that you knew or loved, and then they
Speaker 1: would cover the head in plaster and use ochre to
Speaker 1: paint a face or some other design on the plaster
Speaker 1: mask over the real dead person's head and keep that
Speaker 1: with them in the house as a decorative ritual item. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the body would be buried in the floor, under the
Speaker 1: hearth or under the bed, and sometimes bodies here would
Speaker 1: be placed in some kind of container, maybe like a basket,
Speaker 1: a woven basket, or wrapping of reed mats. And of
Speaker 1: course this uh, this civilization, they didn't leave behind any
Speaker 1: texts or anything. We don't have a holy book from them.
Speaker 1: We don't know what they believed, what they believed about
Speaker 1: life and death and what happened after death. But it's
Speaker 1: so interesting to try to just try to understand from
Speaker 1: the physical remains that they left behind. Yeah, because you
Speaker 1: can go in various directions there, right, I mean, on
Speaker 1: one hand, you can you can face a vision in
Speaker 1: which the dead are presumed to still be alive in
Speaker 1: some fashion, that the remains still have some sort of
Speaker 1: life to them. Perhaps they're still speaking to the people
Speaker 1: in some way, shape or form, or it's believed that
Speaker 1: they speak to the people, or is it something more
Speaker 1: removed where they they know that this is the head
Speaker 1: of someone who is no longer alive, but you are
Speaker 1: able to to make a testament to that person out
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, it's a truly fascinatingness story. And and
Speaker 1: the tidbits that are there are so interesting, so we
Speaker 1: should absolutely come back to Chadlahoyac. But this is just
Speaker 1: one example of tons of different burial traditions from around
Speaker 1: the world that established early on a precedent that respectable
Speaker 1: burial was not one in which a body was just
Speaker 1: like thrown naked in the soil or left out for
Speaker 1: scavenging animals. So there are some cultures in which a
Speaker 1: respectable burial is to be left out for scavenging animals.
Speaker 1: An example of that would be the sky burial practices. Yeah,
Speaker 1: particularly I'm in Tibet, Yeah, where the the ideas of
Speaker 1: the body is. Uh, there are a few different modes
Speaker 1: of burial in in Tibet, but but this particular mode
Speaker 1: would be the ritual um dissection of the body and
Speaker 1: then those pieces of the body were then made available
Speaker 1: to scavenging vultures buzzards that within consume it. And it's
Speaker 1: it's like and it ties into also like the older
Speaker 1: animist religion of Tibet. You know, it's the idea that
Speaker 1: that your flesh is returning to to these divine creatures,
Speaker 1: these creatures of the sky, which I have long found
Speaker 1: rather beautiful, right though even though it doesn't line up
Speaker 1: with a whole lot of traditions throughout the world that
Speaker 1: would say that what what you should do for respect
Speaker 1: with the dead body is to sort of hide it,
Speaker 1: to inter it, to cover it up, and specifically to
Speaker 1: place it inside some kind of container, whether that be
Speaker 1: a wrapping of some kind or a special box, right,
Speaker 1: which isn't always a possibility in some parts of the world,
Speaker 1: particularly if you're in a high rocky region such as Tibet,
Speaker 1: where there may not be a lot of soil in
Speaker 1: which to bury things. Where there may not be a
Speaker 1: lot of uh, you know, a freely available would to
Speaker 1: burn uh in order to reduce a body to ash. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there are also some environmental concerns taken to account to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting point to consider to how like the
Speaker 1: bioecology of the region contributes to these cultural practices. But
Speaker 1: I mean, I wonder why it's so calm men to
Speaker 1: believe that a dead body, again this is not universal,
Speaker 1: but why it's so common to believe a dead body
Speaker 1: should be placed in some kind of container. Uh. We
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what the reason for that is. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's pure speculation on my part, but I kind of
Speaker 1: wonder if it has to do with a learned cultural
Speaker 1: association from daily life in technological societies where items of
Speaker 1: value are generally not left out in the open, but
Speaker 1: they are stored inside containers. And initially this would probably
Speaker 1: be for practical reasons, like to protect valuable objects and
Speaker 1: substances from the elements from thieves, from scavenging animals in
Speaker 1: the case of foods, like in a grain bin. And
Speaker 1: thus you learn over time that, uh, when something is
Speaker 1: of value, you protect it inside a container. And this
Speaker 1: when you go to buryer deceased relative, you follow that
Speaker 1: practical precedent and show that they're a valuable thing by
Speaker 1: placing them inside a container. Yeah, I mean a container
Speaker 1: is control. It is it is exercise eis in control
Speaker 1: um over and against the rest of the world. Be
Speaker 1: that container something you put your bread in or your grain,
Speaker 1: or be at the container that you put your family
Speaker 1: in that you you call your house. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: when when death enters into our lives, like that is
Speaker 1: a situation where people often feel completely without control. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes sense that you would turn to this technology
Speaker 1: of the container to help, you know, put firm boundaries
Speaker 1: on what is occurring. Yeah, and you know, I can't
Speaker 1: help but notice how often objects of religious value are
Speaker 1: placed inside containers as well, or even over time, the
Speaker 1: sacred objects are the containers and on the ark of
Speaker 1: the covenant, yeah, exactly, or mythic items like Pandora's box.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. I don't know how much you've seen of
Speaker 1: like the preparations for the process of Catholic mass, but
Speaker 1: there's a heck of a lot of opening and closing
Speaker 1: of containers. There's things in boxes, containers they get taken out,
Speaker 1: you know. Uh. Yeah, it's like it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: a special old place. Yeah. I mean, all our rituals
Speaker 1: really need a good box. You know, because you have
Speaker 1: a ritual, you probably have paraphernalia. And that paraphernalia just
Speaker 1: can't be left laying around on the coffee table. It
Speaker 1: needs a box. Uh and uh. And so it makes
Speaker 1: sense that you would you would have a box for
Speaker 1: for also the dead as well. Yeah. So of course,
Speaker 1: not all cultures put their dead in containers of some kind,
Speaker 1: but many did, and over time, some cultures developed extremely
Speaker 1: elaborate types of containers for human burial, such as like
Speaker 1: the ornate sarcoph a guy for the mummified remains of
Speaker 1: pharaohs and other wealthy figures in ancient Egypt. This is
Speaker 1: probably the most famous of all the vessels of the dead. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: Egyptian bombing processes, they span roughly three thousand years of
Speaker 1: human history, so it changed a lot during that time.
Speaker 1: In fact, you can look at the history of just
Speaker 1: burial in Egypt and see it's just kind of like
Speaker 1: the evolution of burial in general, because it essentially begins
Speaker 1: as pit burials in the hot sand, in which they
Speaker 1: you know, just the body is placed in the in
Speaker 1: the ground, and then it transforms, and the cosmology that
Speaker 1: informs the practices also transform, uh, and it becomes a
Speaker 1: matter of continuation of the soul. The tomb is not
Speaker 1: just a you know, a receptacle for the body, but
Speaker 1: is kind of a kind of like a spaceship kind
Speaker 1: of a vessel for for for this journey, uh, into
Speaker 1: the afterlife, into the other world. That is. That's you know,
Speaker 1: it is rather different than I think, sort of the
Speaker 1: modern pop culture idea of a heaven or even a
Speaker 1: hell like it was. The the Egyptian afterlife was like
Speaker 1: another realm of adventure and intrigue full of trials, and
Speaker 1: so you had to be prepared and thus all the preparations,
Speaker 1: all these uh uh, these different funeral practices, um, you know.
Speaker 1: But but the evolution of ancient Egyptian funeral practices, you know,
Speaker 1: puts an increasing demand on the preservation of the biological
Speaker 1: body after death, something that's very much a part of
Speaker 1: modern funeral practices as well. Um, which which is actually
Speaker 1: fairly recent. Yeah, like the modern reintroduction of embalming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would be interesting to perhaps come back to that
Speaker 1: in the future. Now. As far as mummification itself, which
Speaker 1: of course, you know, just the drying out of the body,
Speaker 1: which can occur either through natural or artificial means. Like
Speaker 1: there are examples of of bodies that have been mummifized
Speaker 1: just purely because of the environment in which they were left,
Speaker 1: or perhaps buried bog bodies and that sort of thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But as as far as the earliest artificially created mummies, uh,
Speaker 1: they seem to date back to around six thousand BC
Speaker 1: in the Atacama Desert region of South America, sandwich between
Speaker 1: Chile and Peru. And I know you said that it's
Speaker 1: artificial mummification. There but that that, of course is like
Speaker 1: an ideal type of environment for preservation, like mummification, because
Speaker 1: it's what dry and right. Yeah, all right, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break. When we come back, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about confidence. Alright, we're back, all right. Now, we
Speaker 1: don't know exactly when humans started using coffins. Some of
Speaker 1: the earliest evidence appears to be of like solid wooden
Speaker 1: coffins appears to come from different sites in ancient China.
Speaker 1: That seems to be something that happened. They're a good bit.
Speaker 1: But of course there were sarcopher guy in boxes in
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt. Two. Yeah, the Egyptians seemed to have turned
Speaker 1: to wrappings, but then baskets and then ultimately wooden caskets
Speaker 1: during the pre Dynastic period, and that would have been
Speaker 1: u Now a question I have long wondered about, but
Speaker 1: I've never asked until now. What's the difference between a
Speaker 1: coffin and a casket? I don't know, Joe, what's the
Speaker 1: difference between a cock and a casket? With that punch line, Oh,
Speaker 1: you expect there to be a good punch line, it's
Speaker 1: not a good punch line. The difference is shape, basically, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's shape and design. So as used today, these terms
Speaker 1: mean that a casket is basically a rectangular box. Now
Speaker 1: that just means roughly rectangular. It can have round to
Speaker 1: edges or you know, like angled off edges or whatever,
Speaker 1: but it's basically a big rectangle, whereas coffins are more
Speaker 1: like that classic Dracula box that you see. It's angled
Speaker 1: to be widest at the shoulders and then to taper
Speaker 1: off at the head and the feet, so it's got
Speaker 1: six sides rather than four. And by doing this you
Speaker 1: can actually use less wood to create your coffin, meaning
Speaker 1: that the coffin is often cheaper than a casket. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it certainly has become iconic. I remember my my
Speaker 1: dad made me one out of probably like balsa wood
Speaker 1: or something when I was a kid. Life size, No,
Speaker 1: not life size. It's large enough for a Gi Joe
Speaker 1: figure the small kind excited but but it was pretty cool,
Speaker 1: painted it and everything. Wait, I'm sorry, which one a
Speaker 1: coffin or a casket? Uh? It was a coffin Okay,
Speaker 1: so wider at the shoulders and wider at the shoulders
Speaker 1: to fit a g I Joe. Yea, even though the
Speaker 1: g I Joe would mean one size fits all with
Speaker 1: a g I joe, they would have have probably been
Speaker 1: better off going into a casket. Now, caskets and coffins
Speaker 1: are often made of wood, which of course will collapse
Speaker 1: over time due to decomposition and break through under the ground.
Speaker 1: So another thing that you'll often see and actually you
Speaker 1: can see this going way back to ancient Egypt and stuff,
Speaker 1: but it's a modern practice as well. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is the idea of burial vaults or grave liners that
Speaker 1: are basically the coffin or the casket goes inside these
Speaker 1: and they will go under the ground and they hold
Speaker 1: the ground up better so you don't get the sunken
Speaker 1: grave effect in the cemetery. Yeah. I do love a
Speaker 1: good sunken grave effect though, because growing up in really
Speaker 1: rural uh Tennessee, we would encounter these. Uh. The region
Speaker 1: we were in it was near Kentucky Lake, so a
Speaker 1: lot of the people that lived there had had to
Speaker 1: leave so that they could flood the area. And so
Speaker 1: you found the remnants of old homesteads in the woods
Speaker 1: and sometimes they're there there, their graves were there, and
Speaker 1: they were almost always sunken. You would find these sunken
Speaker 1: graves and these uh and also these uh, these these
Speaker 1: twin rows of buttercups that still came up, uh lining
Speaker 1: what used to be like a walkway to a front porch.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, yeah, that's spooky man. Yeah, hey, it's Halloween.
Speaker 1: But certainly, yeah, if you have some sort of more
Speaker 1: reinforced container around your wooden your wooden coffin or casket,
Speaker 1: you don't have to worry about about the the weight
Speaker 1: of the soil pressing down into the rotten casketer or
Speaker 1: coffin and creating that sunken effect. Now here's a question, Robert,
Speaker 1: while wandering among the buttercups in the sunken areas, did
Speaker 1: you ever hear a tiny voice somewhere saying help, No, no, no,
Speaker 1: all those voices that had ceased. You gotta admit that
Speaker 1: that'd be even spookier, I get, I mean I would, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be spooky because I mean they would raise
Speaker 1: a lot of questions about the whole burial process for sure. Well, right,
Speaker 1: but this actually is not a completely unfounded scenario. This
Speaker 1: has happened at various times in human history, and however
Speaker 1: often it actually happens. People have been obsessed with things
Speaker 1: like this happening since you know, for a long time,
Speaker 1: especially at certain periods in history, were for some reason
Speaker 1: burial alive literature just skyrocketed in popularity, and people got
Speaker 1: their mind that like, they couldn't stop thinking about it. Right.
Speaker 1: One of the main areas we're gonna look at is
Speaker 1: the Victorian era and uh and and there's plenty to
Speaker 1: point to there. But we can also go back to
Speaker 1: um to really like the first century. See to see
Speaker 1: some other examples um consider the first century. See Greek
Speaker 1: novel uh Calo by a Cheriton of Aphrodisseus, which Bernard
Speaker 1: Laying describes as sort of a Romeo and Juliet tale,
Speaker 1: except the two starcross lovers end up marrying each other
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the novel, and then he apparently
Speaker 1: kills her in a jealous rah. Okay, this is more
Speaker 1: of a Greek thing. Yeah, but here's the things that
Speaker 1: she's not dead when when pirates bust into her tomb
Speaker 1: to rob her grave, they find her alive, and so
Speaker 1: they take her back to the ship. They sell her
Speaker 1: into slavery. But at the end of the book the
Speaker 1: two lovers are reunited, and I guess they forgive that
Speaker 1: whole attempted murder thing. But but still it is essentially
Speaker 1: a story of premature burial um. And of course there
Speaker 1: were there were other um, you know, treatments of similar
Speaker 1: things going on at the time. You know, uh, you
Speaker 1: know touching, you know, the touching on this idea of
Speaker 1: a of a living individual emerging from a tomb um.
Speaker 1: I think you can you can look to accounts like this,
Speaker 1: and even biblical accounts, so say a Lazarus resurrection, the
Speaker 1: primary focus of Bernard Lang's paper, the Baptismal Raising of Lazarus.
Speaker 1: You can you can kind of look at these stories
Speaker 1: and myths and tales, I think in four different ways.
Speaker 1: So on one hand, it could be an account of
Speaker 1: someone that was thought dead and buried prematurely. The other
Speaker 1: is that it's a ritual of death and resurrection, a
Speaker 1: symbolic death and rebirth. One these examples of this in
Speaker 1: various cultures, including some traditions of First Nations tribes in
Speaker 1: the Pacific Northwest. I think we've talked about that a
Speaker 1: little bit on stuff to blow your mind in the past,
Speaker 1: and Lane describes traditions from the time of Taraton being
Speaker 1: about a symbolic death that one emerges from immune to
Speaker 1: or fearless of death, and even baptism itself, the Christian
Speaker 1: right of baptism is essentially a symbolic death. I believe
Speaker 1: George R. Martin was probably playing with this idea when
Speaker 1: he wrote about the devotion to the drowned God Um
Speaker 1: in his Song of Ice and Fire books, where they're
Speaker 1: essentially doing a baptism, but there's kind of a drowning,
Speaker 1: an actual drowning element to it, and you arise, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, stronger than before. It's popular story for a reason, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so in that we get into also probably the
Speaker 1: purely uh mythical folkloreic supernatural resurrections, where the idea is, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: this person died or this god died and then they
Speaker 1: came back. And then another way of looking at it
Speaker 1: is well, a misinterpretation was made of post mortem movements.
Speaker 1: And we'll get more into that later. Okay, So that
Speaker 1: would not be a mistaken death that where somebody was
Speaker 1: actually still alive, but a real death where they were
Speaker 1: mistaken for actually still being alive, yes, or or getting
Speaker 1: into that weird case where like, oh we thought they
Speaker 1: were alive and then we saw signs that they were
Speaker 1: still alive, but then they were dead. Oh and then
Speaker 1: of course they were the necromongers and chronicles where there's
Speaker 1: this whole right where they essentially or at least the
Speaker 1: Grand the Grand Marshal, the Lord Marshall will will venture
Speaker 1: into the realms of death and return with supernatural powers.
Speaker 1: You'll have no idea the kind of chronicles of Riddeck
Speaker 1: Lord that Robert commands. I wouldn't say, let's say that
Speaker 1: he is a powerful Riddick universe lor Master. I've probably
Speaker 1: seen that that movie more than I should have, uh
Speaker 1: put it that way. But but anyway, back to these
Speaker 1: just different category worries. I think they do kind of
Speaker 1: present all together this idea of the grave as being
Speaker 1: this place of ultimately of mystery. You know, it's of ambiguity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's basically uh you know it's it's Strodinger's cat,
Speaker 1: right Strodinger's casket, Well you should. Yeah. It's funny because
Speaker 1: we often think of the grave is like the ultimate finality.
Speaker 1: It's like the you know, the thing above all other things.
Speaker 1: It is the state in which all questions are closed. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: nowadays we we tend to have more certainty in this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But yeah, you go back, even just
Speaker 1: a few centuries to a time where not everything was
Speaker 1: understood about about how the human body is, you know,
Speaker 1: reacting to different illnesses and injuries. Um, maybe they weren't
Speaker 1: very good at checking for a pulse, right, And then
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of essentially supernatural ideas of what
Speaker 1: death means and how one might come back to it
Speaker 1: you have to contend with and what might one might
Speaker 1: come back as right now. We mentioned earlier that there
Speaker 1: were some periods in places in history where fear being
Speaker 1: buried alive seemed to be especially supercharged. And one clear
Speaker 1: case here is Europe in the United States during the
Speaker 1: Victorian period is like especially I get the feeling in
Speaker 1: the English speaking world during the Victorian period, so roughly
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, people were obsessed with the idea of
Speaker 1: being buried alive. I think a good case in point
Speaker 1: is the works of Edgar Allan Poe uh live burial
Speaker 1: or immurement, of course, which means like being sealed up
Speaker 1: inside a wall. A similar concept appears in not just one.
Speaker 1: I mean you're you're probably thinking of the one work
Speaker 1: by Poe, right, the Cask of a monte ado where
Speaker 1: the guy the two guys are hanging out and one
Speaker 1: leads another guy down into his basement to try some
Speaker 1: of the fame demonte ado and then he ends up
Speaker 1: walling him inside a room. I think the story never
Speaker 1: even even explains what the guy did to deserve it.
Speaker 1: There's just some vague reference to some kind of insult
Speaker 1: or slight and it really I think it kind of
Speaker 1: works better that way. He just leads it to your
Speaker 1: imagination and and you know it could be something very
Speaker 1: small or something very large, and both both are you know,
Speaker 1: our good choices? Uh? For the the horror storyteller, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just he cries out for God's sake montresor and
Speaker 1: then nothing else. Um. But so there's not just that
Speaker 1: he references immurement or being buried alive or or grave
Speaker 1: robbing in multiple stories, just a lot of concerns about
Speaker 1: what can happen once you're dead and buried. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so I wanted to refer to a story that I
Speaker 1: actually hadn't read before we were preparing for this episode.
Speaker 1: It's an Edgar Allan post story called The Premature Burial.
Speaker 1: Have you read this one? Robert? I don't think I have.
Speaker 1: Uh so, I feel like it's kind of anticlimactic, but
Speaker 1: the beginning is actually pretty funny. Poe begins the story
Speaker 1: by talking about how Quote, there are certain themes of
Speaker 1: which the interest is all absorbing, but which are too
Speaker 1: entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. So you
Speaker 1: leg goes on to point out how it's only because
Speaker 1: these horrible events are true that they're worthy of exploring
Speaker 1: and writing. Um, so, what's this horrible true thing the
Speaker 1: narrator is going to tell us about? Quote? To be
Speaker 1: buried while alive is beyond question, the most terrific of
Speaker 1: these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of
Speaker 1: mere mortality, that it is frequently, very frequently so fallen,
Speaker 1: will scarcely be denied by those who think the boundaries
Speaker 1: which divide life from death or at best shadowy and vague.
Speaker 1: Who shall say where the one ends and where the
Speaker 1: other begins? We know that there are diseases in which
Speaker 1: occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality,
Speaker 1: and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly
Speaker 1: so called, they are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism,
Speaker 1: a certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again
Speaker 1: sets in motion the magic unions and the wizard wheels.
Speaker 1: The silver cord was not forever loosed, nor the Golden
Speaker 1: Bowl irreparably broken, But where meantime was the soul. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's really good, because it's really I feel like he's
Speaker 1: he's summing up a lot of the ideas and the
Speaker 1: the discoveries and the mysteries that were, uh like, we're
Speaker 1: at the center of the zeitgeist in that time. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: these questions of vitality, what is the difference between life
Speaker 1: and death? Later on he so he starts from here
Speaker 1: to get into a bunch of different stories of basically
Speaker 1: of people being buried alive and in coming to horrible
Speaker 1: ends or being you know, saved at the last minute.
Speaker 1: He also gets into some Frankenstein's territory. He tells a
Speaker 1: totally true story of a guy who is dead and
Speaker 1: then has resurrected from the dead by a galvanic battery.
Speaker 1: So one of the stories he tells, just to give
Speaker 1: you a kind of flavor of these stories he recounts
Speaker 1: throughout here, is a supposedly true case from the city
Speaker 1: of Baltimore about a woman who was the wife of
Speaker 1: one the most respectable citizens, a lawyer of imminence and
Speaker 1: a member of Congress. So this lady here, she gets
Speaker 1: a sudden illness. To all observers, she appears to die, right,
Speaker 1: so everybody's like, all right, she's dead. And he tries
Speaker 1: to hammer at home by saying, yeah, her face looked dead,
Speaker 1: her lips looked dead, they had marble pallor, her eyes
Speaker 1: were lusterless. There was no warmth in her body, pulsation
Speaker 1: had ceased. And they leave her out for three days, unburied,
Speaker 1: and she's just dead, right, nothing. But then he says, quote,
Speaker 1: the lady was deposited in her family vault, which for
Speaker 1: three subsequent years was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term,
Speaker 1: it was open for the reception of a sarcophagus. But
Speaker 1: alas how fearful, a shock awaited the husband, who personally
Speaker 1: threw open the door. As its portal swung outwardly back,
Speaker 1: some white apparelled object fell, rattling within his arms. It
Speaker 1: was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmolded shroud.
Speaker 1: A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived
Speaker 1: within two days after her entombment, that her struggles within
Speaker 1: the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge
Speaker 1: or shelf to the floor, where it was so broken
Speaker 1: as to permit her escape. A lamp, which had been
Speaker 1: accidentally left full of oil within the tomb, was found empty.
Speaker 1: It might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation on the
Speaker 1: Uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread
Speaker 1: chamber was the large fragment of the coffin, with which
Speaker 1: it seemed that she had endeavored to arrest attention by
Speaker 1: striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swooned
Speaker 1: or possibly died through sheer terror, and in falling her
Speaker 1: shroud became entangled in some iron work which projected interiorly.
Speaker 1: Thus she remained, and thus she rotted erect Man, He
Speaker 1: really paints a horrifying scene there. But you can also,
Speaker 1: I don't know if throughout this whole story you can
Speaker 1: just tell Poe is getting a thrill about this idea,
Speaker 1: like he maybe kind of really wants to be buried alive. Well,
Speaker 1: there's also kind of like some a lot of the
Speaker 1: burials that are you know, dealt with They're not like
Speaker 1: the commoners grave, right, They're the grave of of of
Speaker 1: of higher uh levels of society. And I guess there
Speaker 1: is kind of a thrill in uh in in that
Speaker 1: in that sort of demise, you know, where it's like
Speaker 1: you can afford the more stately version of death, but
Speaker 1: even your stately version of death becomes this uh, you know,
Speaker 1: this this tragic and ridiculous uh situation. Yeah. Well, I
Speaker 1: would say there's probably also just a practical reason they're
Speaker 1: for for including the rich people's tombs, because they would
Speaker 1: be rich enough to have a crypt which you would
Speaker 1: have reason to return to later, unlike a normal just burial. Right.
Speaker 1: But I also agree that, yeah, you're you're onto something
Speaker 1: about like the class dimensions of imagining this kind of thing,
Speaker 1: because it also, like you know it, death kind of
Speaker 1: levels everything, right, um. And he tells a bunch of
Speaker 1: other stories within this short story. Eventually the narrator reveals
Speaker 1: that he is obsessed with the topic and that he's
Speaker 1: terrified of himself being buried alive and has gone to
Speaker 1: all these great links to prevent being buried alive. And
Speaker 1: then there's this kind of anticlimactic ending where the narrator
Speaker 1: wakes up in a dark, confined place and he thinks
Speaker 1: he's been buried alive. Then he discovers he hasn't, and
Speaker 1: this helps him get over his fear. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: come on, Poe, you can do That's not a great ending.
Speaker 1: You can do better like that. The ending needs to
Speaker 1: be that that helped me. I've been buried alive. I
Speaker 1: feel like that'd be better. I don't know the ending
Speaker 1: where he's just like, oh no, I wasn't buried alive
Speaker 1: and I'm better now. Yeah, I guess how do you landed? Though,
Speaker 1: especially if you're it's written in the age where there's
Speaker 1: got to be this uh this you know, presumed means
Speaker 1: by which the manuscript makes its way into your hand.
Speaker 1: So it's like you would have to write like I
Speaker 1: have been buried alive. I am. I am writing this
Speaker 1: by candle light in my casket. I do not know
Speaker 1: how long the light will last. I will um, I like,
Speaker 1: And then how does he get it up to the surface.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Burning a candle in your casket is
Speaker 1: a terrible idea. You're using up your oxygen. How's he writing?
Speaker 1: There is so many quests, see this is exactly why
Speaker 1: post said, Okay, I was just I just woke up
Speaker 1: in a dark round. It's fine. It was the plausibility, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So one thing Poe is really dead set on is
Speaker 1: that this kind of thing happens all the time. I
Speaker 1: think he might be overstating the frequency with which live
Speaker 1: burial actually happened at the time, but it does appear
Speaker 1: to be at least a real and we'll explore that
Speaker 1: in a minute later, maybe reasons why people thought it
Speaker 1: happened more often than it did, but it does absolutely
Speaker 1: appear to be a real, terrifying obsession for lots of
Speaker 1: people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, I
Speaker 1: came across the story of the Polish pianist and composer
Speaker 1: Frederic Chapan. He was apparently so terrified of being buried
Speaker 1: alive that he took precautions that ended up making his
Speaker 1: body an object of later science. So I was reading
Speaker 1: about this in a news fe teacher from the journal
Speaker 1: Nature from seventeen about research that revealed that Chapin's death
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty nine was caused by complications due to tuberculosis,
Speaker 1: and this was detected from kind of like a swelling
Speaker 1: around the heart. How did we figure that out? Well,
Speaker 1: we figured it out because Polish researchers had access to
Speaker 1: Japan's heart pickled in a jar. I mean, he's going
Speaker 1: old school here. This is like the ancient Egyptians with
Speaker 1: the you know, putting their uh, their organs into jars.
Speaker 1: Oh totally yeah, um and well, so apparently what happened
Speaker 1: is that Japan's last words on his deathbed, delivered to
Speaker 1: his sister, were swear to make them cut me open
Speaker 1: so that I won't be buried alive. And his sister
Speaker 1: did as she was requested. She ordered an autopsy in
Speaker 1: which Japan's heart was removed and pickled in a jar
Speaker 1: of brandy. Well, that's one way to be sure, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's he's saying like, I'd rather I'd rather
Speaker 1: you cut my heart out than me be buried alive.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this reminds me of the thing that
Speaker 1: I've read about before that's been declared the world's funniest joke,
Speaker 1: as determined by the psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University
Speaker 1: of Hertford. Yeah, he's got this website laugh Lab where
Speaker 1: he was using like an online rating system to try
Speaker 1: to discover the joke that had the widest appeal across
Speaker 1: different cultures, and according to him, this was the funniest
Speaker 1: joke across different cultures. Two hunters are out in the
Speaker 1: woods and one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy
Speaker 1: whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps,
Speaker 1: my friend is dead. What can I do? The operator says,
Speaker 1: calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.
Speaker 1: There's a silence, then a shot has heard back on
Speaker 1: the phone. The guy says, Okay, now what which obviously?
Speaker 1: I mean, we've both heard it before, so we're not laughing.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I do think that's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: It's it is. It is a good joke. It is
Speaker 1: a solid joke. And to make a joke better by
Speaker 1: explaining why it's funny, I mean, it's the same in
Speaker 1: going on with Japan, there is like make sure he's dead,
Speaker 1: so he would prefer to have his heart cut out
Speaker 1: or be shot, I guess, as opposed to being mistaken
Speaker 1: for dead. Yeah. I read of some other similar efforts
Speaker 1: that were made to ensure that the body was dead
Speaker 1: prior to uh to aternament hands. Christian Anderson and Alfred
Speaker 1: Nobel both apparently requested that their veins be opened prior
Speaker 1: to burial. Uh be better to bleed to death than
Speaker 1: to be buried alive, I guess. And you know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting how modern embalming procedures tend to remove the fear
Speaker 1: of this occurring, because essentially, if you're gonna undergo modern embalming,
Speaker 1: a lot of terrible things are going to be done
Speaker 1: to your body that if you're still alive. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: they're probably going to kill you. I mean they are
Speaker 1: going to kill you. You prefer they not happen, right,
Speaker 1: So it is interesting that Stephen King wrote a short
Speaker 1: story about this occurring, not a premature burial, but a
Speaker 1: premature um uh in palming, premature autopsy, titled Autopsy Room four. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's uh. I read it several years back. It's
Speaker 1: it's pretty good. It really gives you, it really makes
Speaker 1: your skin crawl. Uh. Though I also feel like King,
Speaker 1: I think this was a this is maybe this is
Speaker 1: written in the late nineties. Uh, younger King would have
Speaker 1: probably gone much grizzlier on this. But but this in
Speaker 1: this one, he kind of pulls back a little bit
Speaker 1: in the same way that Poe does, where it's not
Speaker 1: quite as grizzly and dark as it could have been.
Speaker 1: There's a story with a somewhat similar premise, though it
Speaker 1: goes in another weird direction by Stephen Graham Jones. I
Speaker 1: think it's called Welcome to the Reptile House. But it's
Speaker 1: one of these things where I guess all horror writers
Speaker 1: are going to eventually write that story. And that's what
Speaker 1: Stephen King says. He's quoted as saying, at some point,
Speaker 1: I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle
Speaker 1: the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems
Speaker 1: to be such a pervasive fear. Yeah, it certainly is
Speaker 1: a pervasive fear. You know what. I was reading another thing.
Speaker 1: I was reading a history dot com article I writer
Speaker 1: named Becky Little and just as another addition about a
Speaker 1: person who in history feared premature burial, George Washington. Apparently
Speaker 1: he was terrified of being buried alive and requested that
Speaker 1: his body be laid out for three days after his
Speaker 1: death just to be sure. Even though that wasn't good
Speaker 1: enough for the lady in the post story, right, they
Speaker 1: laid her out for a few days, and still she
Speaker 1: wrotted erect um. So oh, hey, fun bit of vocabulary.
Speaker 1: Do you know what the fear of being buried alive
Speaker 1: is called? No? What is it called? I didn't know
Speaker 1: this either. It is the word tafo phobia. This is
Speaker 1: from the Greek tafos, which means like tomb or grave
Speaker 1: uh and related. The science of taffonomy is quote the
Speaker 1: study of processes such as burial, decay, and preservation that
Speaker 1: affect animal and plant remains as they become fossilized, so
Speaker 1: basically fossilization and decomposition in the ground. Now, I think
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier that we think maybe people of the
Speaker 1: Victory rein period, posed time and all that who were
Speaker 1: obsessed with premature burial but probably believed that it happened
Speaker 1: more often than it actually did. And a very likely
Speaker 1: reason for this is that back then a lot of
Speaker 1: times when bodies were exhumed, some natural features of decomposition
Speaker 1: would be mistaken for signs that a person had been
Speaker 1: alive after burial. Yeah. Common examples of this include the
Speaker 1: appearance of nails or even teeth having continued to grow um,
Speaker 1: the release of gas from inside the body, which can
Speaker 1: even produce sounds and uh quite recently, a researcher at
Speaker 1: an Australian corpse farm. Corpse farms are, of course, so
Speaker 1: places where bodies are left in various uh uh you know,
Speaker 1: natural states, so that they're uh, their decomposition can be
Speaker 1: observed and studied and chronicled, uh generally to better aid
Speaker 1: you know, forensics. You know, if you know, like the
Speaker 1: timeline of human decomposition, that gives you an enormous advantage
Speaker 1: in figuring out like, uh, when a body would have died,
Speaker 1: if you find a body out in the woods, etcetera,
Speaker 1: or in the water or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 1: Exactly so anyway, this particular researcher used time laps to
Speaker 1: reveal that a human corpse continues to move significantly for
Speaker 1: more than a year after death. What. Yeah, some of
Speaker 1: the post imortem movements were expected, but the longer term
Speaker 1: movements were a surprise. So what just like a spontaneous
Speaker 1: I don't know, like firing or accumulation of salts or
Speaker 1: something in the muscles caused twitching or yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: they described as especially like the limbs, limbs kind of
Speaker 1: moving around you know. And again this is revealed in
Speaker 1: time laps, so it's not like a constant, year long
Speaker 1: flapping of the corpse. I don't know that it could
Speaker 1: produce a scenario like pole uh laid out, where like
Speaker 1: the casket is knocked off of the ledge and it
Speaker 1: breaks open, and then the the the old woman is
Speaker 1: running around and gets her her clo grave clothes, you know,
Speaker 1: tangled up around something. I don't think that would necessarily happen,
Speaker 1: but uh, it's another example. How Yeah, if you were
Speaker 1: going into a grave or a tomb and you were
Speaker 1: at all looking for signs that the body had moved,
Speaker 1: you might well find them. Yeah, exactly, and often on
Speaker 1: theme for this month. Often some of these same signs
Speaker 1: that some uh, some people took as uh evidence that
Speaker 1: people had been buried alive or also sometimes taken as
Speaker 1: evidence of vampirism and other types of undead beliefs, like
Speaker 1: the body is larger now it is bloated. How did
Speaker 1: it become bloated now? Of course, the real answer has
Speaker 1: to do with the decomposition and bacteria breaking down things
Speaker 1: inside the body and gas and so forth, but one
Speaker 1: explanation could be put forward well clearly, this body has
Speaker 1: been leaving the tomb at night and it's been drinking blood. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh So while clearly we think that this probably people
Speaker 1: of the time probably thought it happened more than it
Speaker 1: actually did, it did sometimes happen. There are plenty of
Speaker 1: documented cases of premature burial where people were alive, they
Speaker 1: got buried, and then later sometimes somehow people found out.
Speaker 1: A few cases are mentioned by that in that article
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier by Becky Little One is that uh
Speaker 1: and and this stuck out at me a case of
Speaker 1: an American woman named see Dunbar. Dunbar lived in South
Speaker 1: Carolina and in nineteen fifteen she experienced an epileptic seizure
Speaker 1: and lost consciousness, after which she was declared dead. They
Speaker 1: put her in a coffin. They lowered her into the grave.
Speaker 1: Apparently her sister arrived late to the to the funeral
Speaker 1: and asked to see her sister one last time. So
Speaker 1: they brought her back up out of the grave, opened
Speaker 1: the coffin, unscrewed the lid, and then sc Dunbar sat
Speaker 1: up and smiled at her sister, and of course funeral
Speaker 1: attendees freaked out and they fled, but she was not undead.
Speaker 1: She was just gillar Old alive, and she lived. This
Speaker 1: was in nineteen fifteen. She lived until nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 1: She lived forty more years after this, and it apparently
Speaker 1: even still happens occasionally today that people wake up in
Speaker 1: morgues or in funeral homes having having been like mistakenly
Speaker 1: declared dead. Inteen, there was a case of a seventy
Speaker 1: eight year old man in Mississippi named Walter Williams who
Speaker 1: was found dead at his home. He had no detectible pulse.
Speaker 1: He was taken to a funeral home, and then while
Speaker 1: he was awaiting embalming, he started kicking inside his body bag,
Speaker 1: and so they took him to a hospital and he
Speaker 1: was okay. He survived the incident. Uh The coroner in
Speaker 1: the case believed, or at least told the ap that
Speaker 1: what had probably happened is that Williams pacemaker had stopped
Speaker 1: working and then it started working again. There's even one
Speaker 1: really crazy story I came across, though the accuracy of
Speaker 1: this account is disputed, but with that caveat, it is
Speaker 1: a story of a seventeenth century English woman named Alice
Speaker 1: Blunden who was buried alive twice Basically, the story goes
Speaker 1: that one night in sixteen seventy four, she drank a
Speaker 1: bunch of poppy tea and then fell into a deep sleep,
Speaker 1: and everybody believed that she had died. She was buried
Speaker 1: quickly and and she stayed buried until a couple of
Speaker 1: days later. Children playing near the graveyard heard voices from underground,
Speaker 1: and they dug her up, and they found signs that
Speaker 1: she had been struggling inside the coffin, but once she
Speaker 1: was exhumed, there were no further signs of life. So
Speaker 1: they thought, well, we accidentally buried her alive. She struggled
Speaker 1: inside the coffin, but then she died, so they lowered
Speaker 1: her back down into the grave. Then the next day,
Speaker 1: I think the coroner returned or somebody returned to examine
Speaker 1: the body, and they found signs that she had continued
Speaker 1: to struggle and escape, tried to escape a second time,
Speaker 1: but had died again and was actually dead this time.
Speaker 1: But the details of the story are in dispute either way. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like they say, bury me alive once,
Speaker 1: shame on you, bury me alive twice, shame on me.
Speaker 1: I would say, if you think you may have accidentally
Speaker 1: buried somebody alive once, don't put him back in. I mean,
Speaker 1: give it, give it a while. I also like how
Speaker 1: this story kind of implies that the children dug up
Speaker 1: the body, Like I'm just imagined just wild children and
Speaker 1: they're out playing and they're like, hey, I think I
Speaker 1: heard a heard a voice from the grave. Dig it up.
Speaker 1: I think I think the stories they went to get adults.
Speaker 1: But that would be great too, I mean, that makes
Speaker 1: a great game, right, But I think it's time to
Speaker 1: get to it's okay. So clearly we're faced with this
Speaker 1: big problem of people being terrified of being buried alive.
Speaker 1: So we've got to get to the invention that solves
Speaker 1: this problem. Right, If you are a some Victorian dandy
Speaker 1: with a paralyzing fear of being buried alive, what are
Speaker 1: you to do apart from just insist that they make
Speaker 1: sure you're dead by maybe like stabbing you a bunch
Speaker 1: of times before they bury you. Or because we've established
Speaker 1: the necessity here, now, to what extent is a true
Speaker 1: necessity or just any necessity? Um, you know, we'll leave
Speaker 1: that for everyone to decide. But ultimately it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's so there there are plenty of of
Speaker 1: inventions that are made. There are plenty of of devices
Speaker 1: and uh, and products that are rolled out that aren't
Speaker 1: really speaking to a true necessity but a perceived necessity,
Speaker 1: and that's enough to to move some product. Of course.
Speaker 1: Uh So, I guess we should talk about inventions that
Speaker 1: I would say amount to an escape pod from the grave,
Speaker 1: kind of like a rocket from the crypt. Right. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: before we get into that, we're gonna take a quick
Speaker 1: break up, but we'll be right back. Alright, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we're going to look at some of the inventions
Speaker 1: that were rolled out to deal with this maddening fear
Speaker 1: of premature burial, right, and there were quite a number
Speaker 1: of these things. For example, if you want to see
Speaker 1: some really great illustrations, there's a Vox article from by
Speaker 1: Phil Edwards you can look up that collects examples with
Speaker 1: illustrations of patents for these are generally called safety coffins,
Speaker 1: their coffins that were designed to prevent premature burial. And
Speaker 1: so if you look at that article that they even
Speaker 1: enhanced a lot of these old patent diagrams with color.
Speaker 1: Yeah they're really cool because yeah, they basically took what
Speaker 1: was probably just a little sketch, like a black and
Speaker 1: white sketch, and they've they've they brought it more to life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's look at a few examples from history. Uh,
Speaker 1: this one is mentioned in that box article, so if
Speaker 1: you want to look it up, you can see the illustration. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is one that is patented August sixty eight. The
Speaker 1: patent awarded one Franz Vestor and it is basically a
Speaker 1: coffin with an escape tunnel an escape hatch. So the
Speaker 1: details are that you'd be partially buried with a tunnel
Speaker 1: connecting the coffin to the surface, complete with air holes.
Speaker 1: And I guess the idea is that earth would be
Speaker 1: filled in around the coffin, but not covering the breathing holes.
Speaker 1: And if you wake up inside, you've got a few options.
Speaker 1: You can pull a lever to ring a bell on
Speaker 1: the surface, alerting people to your presence, or you pull
Speaker 1: a lever to open a hatch at the top of
Speaker 1: this little tunnel, and then you can simply climb out yourself.
Speaker 1: The tunnel actually had a ladder inside, and this is
Speaker 1: not the only model in which you could ring a
Speaker 1: bell to save your life. Actually quite a few safety
Speaker 1: coffin patents were equipped with strings or levers that would
Speaker 1: operate some kind of sonic alarm, usually a bell that
Speaker 1: would ring on the surface above. And I guess presumably
Speaker 1: with this one, if you know, you were there for
Speaker 1: a few days and nothing happened, then finally they could
Speaker 1: like fill it in, cover up the air holes, or
Speaker 1: maybe take the hatch off and use it on some
Speaker 1: other coffin. Yeah, I mean the degree to which this
Speaker 1: was actually a threat, you know, this is actually a
Speaker 1: possibility aside, you know, this is a pretty clear cut solution.
Speaker 1: All right. If the problem is I might be very
Speaker 1: long still alive, well, let's just make sure there's a
Speaker 1: way of communicating that knowledge to the surface world should
Speaker 1: that occur. Sure. Uh So. Another safety coffin I was
Speaker 1: reading about is Le Carnie. This is from eight seven.
Speaker 1: It was a safety coffin created by Count Michel de
Speaker 1: Carnis Carnikie, who was in the court of the Russians.
Speaker 1: Are Nicholas the second and this again, this debut in
Speaker 1: eighteen seven. There's a great twenty sixteen article about this
Speaker 1: in Mental Flaws by the writer Claire Voon. If you
Speaker 1: want to look that up and read more about this thing.
Speaker 1: But Robert, I've got an image of it attached for
Speaker 1: you here. Uh So, basically, you've got a standard coffin below,
Speaker 1: but it's augmented with some devices that go up from
Speaker 1: the coffin. Uh So, your coffin is connected via a
Speaker 1: pipe to the surface and then up on the surface
Speaker 1: the pipe attaches to a spring loaded iron container. Now
Speaker 1: inside the coffin below, there is a glass ball dangling
Speaker 1: by a string or a chain just over the chest
Speaker 1: of the body inside. So if the body moves, the
Speaker 1: ball gets nutt and any nudge of the ball triggers
Speaker 1: the springloaded contraption above, which opens the container to the
Speaker 1: outside air, and this allows fresh air to get in
Speaker 1: and get down into the coffin via the pipe. But
Speaker 1: it's better than that. So the springloaded device, if set off,
Speaker 1: not only lets air in, but it also automatically raises
Speaker 1: a flag over the grave and commences the clanging of
Speaker 1: an alarm bell. Uh And at the very least, the
Speaker 1: opening of the container and the presence of the tube
Speaker 1: would allow the person in the coffin to scream for help. Wow,
Speaker 1: So this one really has all the bells and whistles. Um.
Speaker 1: If anyone out if you've had the experience of shopping
Speaker 1: for a casket, uh and uh and I have, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it is kind of like shopping for a car,
Speaker 1: where that we're generally the salesperson will be there to
Speaker 1: up sail you on other features and models. Um, which
Speaker 1: can be a little you know, needs to say, be
Speaker 1: a little uncomfortable. But I can well imagine a scenario
Speaker 1: where you're in a room not just normal caskets and coffins,
Speaker 1: but safety coffins and caskets, so that you're being up
Speaker 1: sold on these features, like, well, you could go with
Speaker 1: this model that is our standard model has a bell inside,
Speaker 1: but to be really sure, wouldn't you prefer to have
Speaker 1: a flag that emerges? And uh? And also this uh,
Speaker 1: this powered ventilation system. Well, yeah, this has more practical
Speaker 1: plausibility I think than the standard casket up selling, which
Speaker 1: is like it is a kind of weird thing, the
Speaker 1: idea of them than trying to sell you better coffins
Speaker 1: or caskets. I think with the implication right that, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, if you really want to be respectful to
Speaker 1: your loved one, you'll buy this more expensive thing, which
Speaker 1: is sis kind of gross or what what would they
Speaker 1: have wanted? You know, it's generally the way of of
Speaker 1: of getting into that. And you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: This is one of the problems about or one of
Speaker 1: the challenges about any kind of funeral practice, right, is
Speaker 1: that one does it for the dead, But it's not
Speaker 1: about the dead, right, The dead, except in these rare
Speaker 1: scenarios where they're prematurely buried, they're really not affected by
Speaker 1: the process anymore. It's all about the living exactly. That's
Speaker 1: my point. With the safety casket, then it really is
Speaker 1: about the dead. It's like or it's about the the
Speaker 1: person in the casket. I guessed it to be clear.
Speaker 1: But other than that, yeah, it's generally just the domain
Speaker 1: of the the individuals above ground. Yeah. Uh. Now. Another
Speaker 1: thing I wonder about though, with Lick Carnice is like,
Speaker 1: why did the top container have to be sealed at
Speaker 1: all to begin with? I don't know for sure, but
Speaker 1: I assume the reason is it's to prevent foul smelling
Speaker 1: gases that result from decomposition from wafting up uncontrollably into
Speaker 1: the cemetery. So it's like sealed to begin with, But
Speaker 1: then if you trigger the ball, then it opens up
Speaker 1: and the stuff goes on. Now, of course, this contraption
Speaker 1: it instantly attracted attention and positive press. When it was
Speaker 1: debuted in eighteen seven, it became known as Lake Carnice.
Speaker 1: Carnice Carniki marketed the device in Europe and the United
Speaker 1: States to an initially pretty warm reception, and it was
Speaker 1: considered affordable even though it's got all this stuff. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: the price tag was not crazy. Uh, it was considered practical,
Speaker 1: especially since the above ground parts of the event invention
Speaker 1: could be reused after a period of course to make
Speaker 1: sure that the person was like really definitely dead. And
Speaker 1: Carney's Carnegie's representatives and assistance would go around doing live
Speaker 1: demonstrations with him, where like they'd be placed inside the
Speaker 1: device and then trigger it to signal, you know, to
Speaker 1: signal escape. His representative Emil Cami, speaking to the Medical
Speaker 1: Legal Society of New York, UH was hyping this thing
Speaker 1: up and and said in this speech quote, according to
Speaker 1: the declarations made by grave diggers the great cities of
Speaker 1: all countries, when at the end of five years the
Speaker 1: dead or removed from the common grave, they find in
Speaker 1: the coffins convulsed skeletons with fists clinched, twisted and raised
Speaker 1: the jaws. In every part of the world, there is
Speaker 1: not a community of any importance, town or village where
Speaker 1: some memory is now preserved if people buried alive, and
Speaker 1: this memory remains like a permanent terror through all time.
Speaker 1: So basically just pushing this idea that that we're we're
Speaker 1: mostly prematurely burying people. Yeah, it's like it's just happening
Speaker 1: all the time. It's just that every graveyard, every cemetery
Speaker 1: is just like the muffled screams and whimperings of all
Speaker 1: of the people who have been recently buried. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that is definitely overselling it. Uh and Lake Kearnice,
Speaker 1: even though it got initially good press did experience some setbacks.
Speaker 1: One setback was that apparently during one demonstration and assistant
Speaker 1: got stuck inside was like buried in the device to
Speaker 1: demonstrate it working, but then it didn't work. I think
Speaker 1: the spring loaded mechanism malfunctioned, and I think the assistant
Speaker 1: was okay, they got dug out, but obviously this was
Speaker 1: not good for press, and so they were actually burying
Speaker 1: the individual in the in the in the device, I
Speaker 1: think so, at least partially, yeah, because they were I mean,
Speaker 1: they wanted to show off how good it was. But
Speaker 1: they were also concern earns about false positives because of
Speaker 1: the sensitivity of the device. It was pointed out that
Speaker 1: it's normal for corpses to swell during decomposition, and such
Speaker 1: swelling could nudge the glass ball and trigger unnecessary exhumations, right,
Speaker 1: which would be even more traumatic, right right, Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure more traumatic than a false negative. I
Speaker 1: think a false negative would be worse than a false positive,
Speaker 1: but they're both bad. Yeah. Well, I mean if if
Speaker 1: if you if you learn O, I've prematurely buried somebody,
Speaker 1: and then you dig them up, you definitely want them
Speaker 1: to still be alive, right, I mean, it would be terrible,
Speaker 1: but hey, at least at least we get we can
Speaker 1: we can move forward. But if you just dig them
Speaker 1: up thinking they're alive and oh no, they're just they're
Speaker 1: not only are they dead, but they're even grosser looking
Speaker 1: now right, Uh yeah, And that's a funny thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were dual fears about death at the time, right.
Speaker 1: If people had these fears of being buried alive, but
Speaker 1: people also feared sort of feared being seen in a
Speaker 1: state of natural decomposition, you know, like that that's a
Speaker 1: sort of like acquired cultural fear that like that it's
Speaker 1: bad to decompose, and you don't want people seeing you decompose,
Speaker 1: the sort of a mummification mentality. Yeah, And that's a
Speaker 1: complicated issue under itself, right, I mean, and it is
Speaker 1: the natural process. Uh. And it is the sort of
Speaker 1: thing that is going to happen to the body. It's
Speaker 1: something the body does. Um. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, even even those of us, you know, who
Speaker 1: have probably a pretty liberal idea of how they want
Speaker 1: their body maintained, we probably don't, you know, probably not
Speaker 1: thinking like public decomposition. We've we're probably imagining something a
Speaker 1: little more private and something that is even you know,
Speaker 1: even if it's a very green burial or decomposition, we
Speaker 1: we want it to be you know, private. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: the worms may be invited to play pinnuckle on our scalp,
Speaker 1: but only the worms. You know. This is just making
Speaker 1: me think back to that statement by Emile Cammi is
Speaker 1: talking about all the the premature burials as this special
Speaker 1: knowledge that's in the realm of grave diggers. So it's
Speaker 1: like the grave diggers are like the people, this community
Speaker 1: of people who know about all of the premature burials
Speaker 1: and like they've got all of the grave and decomposition secrets. Yeah. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's there's something to that. You know, as
Speaker 1: a as a culture removes itself from the physical realities
Speaker 1: of death and generally you know, relegates those duties to
Speaker 1: a certain class or certain professions. Um, I mean, it
Speaker 1: really creates more room for superstitious ideas and and and
Speaker 1: just general supernaturalism in general. Like i've i've I think
Speaker 1: there is there is a finality to seeing the dead.
Speaker 1: And my view is that when we prevent ourselves from
Speaker 1: seeing the dead, from having that that physical experience of death,
Speaker 1: like we often don't have a certainty that it occurred.
Speaker 1: You know, there's always this room for even like not
Speaker 1: even like a a sensible doubt, uh or even a
Speaker 1: conscious doubt, but there is this idea that the person
Speaker 1: did not quite die, as they just suddenly were no
Speaker 1: longer in my life, you know. Uh, So I don't
Speaker 1: know the asen downs to having a you know, a
Speaker 1: robust funerary custom. I imagine ultimately, I guess we should
Speaker 1: say finishing up Lake Arnie. It was never really successful.
Speaker 1: It never really was employed at wide scale, right, So
Speaker 1: it means that the the fear of premature burial never
Speaker 1: reached like a real fever pitched where it was actually
Speaker 1: resulting in the sale of these devices and on a
Speaker 1: large scale. Well, it certainly didn't overcome the negative press
Speaker 1: that the device that has had gotten for, you know,
Speaker 1: for those drawback reasons. But there were other safety coffin models,
Speaker 1: and people did employe actual safety coffins of various kinds.
Speaker 1: Um you know, many again had these bells and stuff
Speaker 1: that could be operated via a string or via lever's.
Speaker 1: Other safety coffin models were operated with levers that were
Speaker 1: triggered by the head or the mouth. I think it
Speaker 1: was often assumed there that maybe you wouldn't be you know,
Speaker 1: you might be in some state where you couldn't use
Speaker 1: your hands or something. One really great model invented around
Speaker 1: your nineteen hundred is in a patent awarded to one W. J.
Speaker 1: McKnight for quote electric device for indicating the awakening of
Speaker 1: persons buried alive. Uh So, what goes on in this
Speaker 1: pattern here is the person wakes up, they close an
Speaker 1: electrical circuit which electrically opens an oxygen tank for breathing
Speaker 1: and sends an s O S signal through a connection
Speaker 1: to a wire service. It's just what instantly emolates them
Speaker 1: in their their casket, emolates them. What do you mean?
Speaker 1: I mean like we have what like oxygen and then
Speaker 1: a spark, hopefully those sparks. I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's like a you know, like diving bell kind
Speaker 1: of oxygen rich environment. Okay, but still it seems like
Speaker 1: I've been through a lot. I've been prematurely buried, and
Speaker 1: now you're gonna you're gonna, you're gonna blast me with
Speaker 1: air and shock me. So well, it's good. It's sending
Speaker 1: out the message to you know, whoever is listening. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure exactly what where the wire went though, I
Speaker 1: do think about Simpson's episode where they they use the
Speaker 1: Morse code to send for s O S and then
Speaker 1: it connects to a Morse code exhibit in the museum.
Speaker 1: But you know, you mentioned like a diving bell, like
Speaker 1: the bathmosphere, and this does sound a lot like a bathosphere, right.
Speaker 1: It's sure, it's tiny container and you're you're lowered down, uh,
Speaker 1: somewhere beneath the surface, and then there's there's air, and
Speaker 1: then there's an electrical wire for communication. Right, all right, well,
Speaker 1: I think we need to call part one there, but
Speaker 1: we are not done talking about vessels for the dead.
Speaker 1: That's right. We will return next week and with the
Speaker 1: next episode of Invention, and we will roll out some
Speaker 1: more caskets in the meantime. If you want to support
Speaker 1: the show, the best thing you can do is rate
Speaker 1: and review it and make sure you have subscribed. You
Speaker 1: can also get it an invention pod dot com. Uh.
Speaker 1: And hey, if if you're if you are listening to Invention,
Speaker 1: you are not listening to Stuff to Blow your Mind,
Speaker 1: go check out Stuff to Blow your Mind. Because all
Speaker 1: October it's spooky Halloween themed episodes. We always put a
Speaker 1: lot of effort into putting out some really solid Halloween offerings.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Speaker 1: Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
Speaker 1: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
Speaker 1: say hello, you can email us at contact at invention
Speaker 1: pod dot com. Invention is production of I heart Radio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from my heart radio, because the iHeart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows,