Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit.
Speaker 1: So this is a short stuff that we can begin now.
Speaker 2: That's right, Josh, let me set the stage. It's seventeen
Speaker 2: ninety nine. Founding Father George Washington is on his deathbed.
Speaker 2: He calls over his secretary Tobias Lear and says.
Speaker 3: I am just going have me decently buried, but do
Speaker 3: not let my body be put into the vault in
Speaker 3: less than three days after I'm dead, because you never know.
Speaker 4: That is the last part, But that's basically what he
Speaker 4: was saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, yeah, and that was a great George Washington,
Speaker 1: especially dying George Washington.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 1: The reason why he said that is because at the time,
Speaker 1: there was a there was a chance, let's call it
Speaker 1: a non zero chance to get nerdy, yeah, that you
Speaker 1: you might be buried alive accidentally. There's all sorts of
Speaker 1: different conditions and stuff that we understand. Now, if you
Speaker 1: hook somebody up to like a EKG or EEG or
Speaker 1: some sort of g, you'd be able to detect their
Speaker 1: heartbeat that you wouldn't be able to, say, like palpitating
Speaker 1: it with your fingers or like watching somebody to see
Speaker 1: if they're actually breathing. You might not even have a
Speaker 1: decent doctor around at the time, and you may end
Speaker 1: up being buried alive, in which case you are ft. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I wonder when they started checking pulses.
Speaker 1: I don't know, let's say, eighteen hundred on the dot.
Speaker 2: I did a quick, rare look up, and if we
Speaker 2: trust the AI overview.
Speaker 1: I do not.
Speaker 4: All right, National Institutes of Health.
Speaker 2: Sure they're talking like four thousand plus years they've been
Speaker 2: checking pulses.
Speaker 1: Okay, wellparently some people were better at it than others,
Speaker 1: because there do seem to be documented accounts of people
Speaker 1: who are found like entombed who had like scratch marks
Speaker 1: on their coffin, or they were actually out of their
Speaker 1: coffin in a tomb that seemed to have been buried alive,
Speaker 1: came to and then actually did die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like they said, I feel betja and they got
Speaker 2: up and so you know, let's say it didn't happen
Speaker 2: that much, because it probably didn't happen enough to the
Speaker 2: level of which people were scared of it.
Speaker 1: Sure, like a plane crash, Yeah, it seems.
Speaker 2: To be an outsized fear back then of being buried alive.
Speaker 2: That is an actual phobia. It's called taphaphobia. T a
Speaker 2: p h e is Greek for burial. And you know,
Speaker 2: because where we're going with all this, and we may
Speaker 2: have mentioned this briefly in our Coffins episode, I know
Speaker 2: we have, we had to it, but this is a
Speaker 2: deeper dive into what was known as a security coffin
Speaker 2: or a safety coffin, which was you know, for a
Speaker 2: while there a lot of people got patents to build
Speaker 2: coffins that had all these little kind of ingenious ways
Speaker 2: to either get you out of there or alert people
Speaker 2: above ground that hey, I'm feeling better.
Speaker 1: Right, come get me, I got some life left in me, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: These patents date back to the seventeen nineties. I think
Speaker 1: in Central Europe at least. There's a guy in this
Speaker 1: House Stuff Works article that they interviewed named Adam Bisno,
Speaker 1: who's a historian at the US Patent and Trademark Office,
Speaker 1: and so he would know about patents, even ones in
Speaker 1: Central Europe from the eighteenth century and at this time.
Speaker 1: The argument that's made for the kind of sudden appearance
Speaker 1: for them is that this coincides with the popularity of romanticism,
Speaker 1: which kind of came as a backlash to the rationalism
Speaker 1: of enlightenment. The Enlightenment and romanticism is like, no, there's
Speaker 1: stuff beyond this life that we can't see. There's there's
Speaker 1: beauty in nature, there's like all of the stuff that
Speaker 1: you can't just think your way out of or think
Speaker 1: you're like things that you can't see that actually do exist,
Speaker 1: and there's probably some sort of afterlife, and who knows
Speaker 1: whether the people are fully gone. This eventually led to
Speaker 1: the rise of mediums and spiritualism, and there was just
Speaker 1: this kind of zeitgeist that the dead could conceivably still
Speaker 1: be in some sort of contact or communication, which doesn't
Speaker 1: directly go to taphophobia, but if you're already thinking, like
Speaker 1: I don't want to be buried alive, this would probably
Speaker 1: goose you into potentially buying a safety coffin.
Speaker 4: Yeah for sure. I Mean.
Speaker 2: The sort of a popular idea at the time was
Speaker 2: that there the veil is very thin between life and death. Ah, yes,
Speaker 2: and like how thin could it be? Like maybe so
Speaker 2: thin where you bury me by accident?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like poor Bill Pullman and Serpent in the Rainbow.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, or.
Speaker 2: Keefer Sutherland's wife in that movie, which was a remake
Speaker 2: of a foreign film.
Speaker 1: So good, both of them were. It was one of
Speaker 1: those rare films where the American adaptation was just as
Speaker 1: good as the European original. Both of them are worth seeing.
Speaker 4: What were those calls? Yeah vanishing?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so yeah. And then also that poor guy
Speaker 1: who almost got buried in the Twilight Zone, but he
Speaker 1: started crying because he was so sad and scared, and
Speaker 1: some nurse, one of the nurses noticed his tear was like, doctor,
Speaker 1: he's still alive right before. I think they did an
Speaker 1: autopsy on him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or like Uma Thurman and kill Bill.
Speaker 1: That's a great one too, sure, I think Also, Barnabas Collins,
Speaker 1: you can make a case for in Dark Shadows, the
Speaker 1: TV show, not the terrible, terrible, terrible movie.
Speaker 4: I didn't see that.
Speaker 1: I saw twenty minutes of it. I was like, oh, boy,
Speaker 1: like these people should be individually shamed for this.
Speaker 4: It was Tim Burton, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, So we're going to
Speaker 2: take a break and call Tim Burton, tell him to
Speaker 2: think about what he's done, and we'll be right back
Speaker 2: with safety Coffins soffy jaws. All right, So more than
Speaker 2: one hundred security coffin patents were granted in the United
Speaker 2: States alone in the nineteenth century, and they got a
Speaker 2: little wacky, like each one had its own sort of
Speaker 2: spin on the best way to either get someone out
Speaker 2: or to alert people above ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One way was like you could just do something
Speaker 1: as simple as a bell to basically and put the
Speaker 1: cord in the person's hand and they could just like
Speaker 1: pull the bell. It's pretty simple and straightforward. There are
Speaker 1: others that had, like I guess they would put a
Speaker 1: tube in that led and connected to the coffin and
Speaker 1: then buried the person buried around that stuff, so if
Speaker 1: the person came to they could actually crawl use the
Speaker 1: ladder to crawl out of their own grave. Which talk
Speaker 1: about a story to tell at parties.
Speaker 4: It's like, you guys aren't gonna believe this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are you the guy who crumb climbed out of
Speaker 1: his crave?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know that starts at the dinner party
Speaker 2: when anyone's like, I've been really lucky. I haven't lost
Speaker 2: a lot of close friends. Like has anyone ever lost
Speaker 2: like close friends and had to like preside over their
Speaker 2: funeral and the guy just puts his napkin.
Speaker 4: In his lap.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a life preserving coffin, I believe, is what the
Speaker 2: patent file was in eighteen forty three from Christian Eisenbront
Speaker 2: of Baltimore, Maryland. And this had a spring loaded lid
Speaker 2: where if you the quote was, the slightest motion of
Speaker 2: either the head or the hand would spring this thing up.
Speaker 4: Of course, that's no.
Speaker 2: Good if you're buried under six feet of dirt. So
Speaker 2: his suggestion is like, hey, if this coffin only works
Speaker 2: if you're in a tomb like an above ground vault,
Speaker 2: and you got to leave a key on the inside
Speaker 2: of that thing. So if you pop out of the
Speaker 2: coffin and you're still locked in the tomb, that's no
Speaker 2: good either.
Speaker 1: Can't you see a loved one like sitting up in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night like I forgot to leave
Speaker 1: the key. Yeah, there's another problem with that too, if
Speaker 1: this thing sprung open at the slightest movement of the
Speaker 1: of the person. Corpses move and shift around during decomposition,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure that that has accounted. Like I think
Speaker 1: there's accounts of corpses flipping over and being found face down.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that that accounts for a lot of the
Speaker 1: stories of people being found and suspected to have been
Speaker 1: buried alive. But I don't think corpses like leave claw
Speaker 1: marks on there their coffins, So there seemed to be
Speaker 1: some that are legit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: Edgar Allan Poe didn't help things much when in eighteen
Speaker 2: forty four he wrote a short story called The Premature Burial,
Speaker 2: where in it he says, to be buried alive is
Speaker 2: beyond question the most terrific of those these extremes, which
Speaker 2: has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality that
Speaker 2: it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be
Speaker 2: denied by those who think. And then he talks about
Speaker 2: the boundaries between life and death being shadowy and vague,
Speaker 2: kind of playing into that he was writing of the times,
Speaker 2: you know, because that's like we talked about, that's kind
Speaker 2: of how people thought of things. So after that, I
Speaker 2: think there were even more people coming out with these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There was a guy named Franz Vester who in
Speaker 1: New Jersey, I guess it's where he was from. He
Speaker 1: had an improved burial case and you could essentially climb
Speaker 1: out of it. I think this was the one that
Speaker 1: had the tube with the ladder. Yeah, and if you
Speaker 1: were two weak you could pull on a bell. So
Speaker 1: this was like, you know, I had a fail safe.
Speaker 1: And he gave demonstrations of his coffin where he would
Speaker 1: be buried under like four feet of dirt and would
Speaker 1: make his way out of the coffin back above ground.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's not the only one. It seems like the
Speaker 2: big showman because this was sort of around the snake
Speaker 2: oil time where you would put on a big show
Speaker 2: to try and talk people into buying your thing. Sure,
Speaker 2: and in the nineteenth century there was a guy, Count
Speaker 2: de Michele de Carnice Carniki, such a great name. He
Speaker 2: dubbed himself as the Chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia.
Speaker 2: Whatever that means.
Speaker 1: It's the high ranking manager of a royal household.
Speaker 4: Oh okay. So he was like, yeah, like a.
Speaker 1: Butler essentially, but he was in charge of everybody, like
Speaker 1: the head butler, yeah, I guess sure, or the chamberlain.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, hey, I'm not trying to degrade him. Because
Speaker 2: he was quite the showman. He would travel through the
Speaker 2: Europe and the United States trying to sell his unit
Speaker 2: called the Carnice. And there was an article from the
Speaker 2: Chicago Tribune in eighteen ninety nine that they would read
Speaker 2: before his big show where at the Academy of Medicine
Speaker 2: in New York City, doctor Henry J.
Speaker 4: How would you pronounce that one?
Speaker 2: Gregus Gerragus where he startled his fellow members with the
Speaker 2: assertion that one of every two hundred people buried in
Speaker 2: the US was actually in a lethargic state and is
Speaker 2: buried alive. So very dubious numbers, obviously, but he would
Speaker 2: use that as prelude to take the stage and do
Speaker 2: his own demonstration where he would bury somebody alive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and La Carnice had an own had like a bell. Again,
Speaker 1: this is pretty low hanging fruit, and it makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense. But he also put in a tube
Speaker 1: that you could breathe through. You could also talk through it, yeah,
Speaker 1: and be like, what's what's been going on in the
Speaker 1: last few days? Now you wait for help? And he didn't.
Speaker 1: He wasn't himself buried alive like Frank Franz Vestor. He
Speaker 1: would get volunteers to do it. And there's a guy
Speaker 1: named Faropo Lorenzo, who is Italian, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: and he volunteered to be buried alive in this this
Speaker 1: La Carnice casket and he stayed there for nine days
Speaker 1: back in eighteen ninety eight, which is currently still the
Speaker 1: record for being buried alive.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think at one point on day like seven, he
Speaker 2: spoke through the tube and he was like, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: put my mouth around the tube now and just drop
Speaker 2: a couple of tic.
Speaker 1: TACs, right, Yeah. And then the next day he shouted,
Speaker 1: I got a poop through the through the tube. Nine days, chuck,
Speaker 1: let's think about that.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, that's a long time and that seems verified.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's one other thing too that we can't mentioned.
Speaker 1: We've definitely mentioned him before, but I find it so fascinating.
Speaker 1: Timothy Clark Smith, who's grave in New Haven, Vermont, not Connecticut,
Speaker 1: back in I think eighteen ninety three, was fitted out
Speaker 1: with a window that looked down the six feet to
Speaker 1: his face. Oh that was exposed so that passer's bike
Speaker 1: can't check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: And it's still there today, except you just can't see
Speaker 1: very far. Because the windows kind of well, it's more
Speaker 1: than one hundred years old.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's too bad.
Speaker 1: You got anything else?
Speaker 4: Man, I got nothing else?
Speaker 1: And say it.
Speaker 2: Then I guess short stuff is out.
Speaker 4: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: You listen to your favorite shows.