The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  1. Sheaf of wheat A. Passage from life to heavenly existence

  2. Broken column B. Resurrection

  3. Rooster C. A long and fruitful life

  4. Serpent swallowing its tail D. A life cut short

  5. Raised veil E. Eternity

  6. Pansy F. Remembrance

  Answers: 1-C; 2-D; 3-B; 4-E; 5-A; 6-F

  To be sure, there are a few kinks in the system. Since it operates on sunlight, it won’t work if the gravestone is under a tree or facing west. It also has an estimated life span of fifteen years—considerably shorter than the average carved-in-stone tombstone inscription, which tends to last for, oh, several centuries. Also, it’s catnip for vandals.

  Still, it has one major selling point that no true boomer can resist: it’s really cool!

  Buried Alive

  One of the nice things about being alive today as opposed to, say, anytime prior to the mid-1800s is that doctors have become much better at determining whether someone is actually dead or not. As a result, there are far fewer cases of premature burial than there were in the past.

  Though accounts of overly hasty body disposal date back to antiquity (Pliny the Elder records two instances of supposedly dead Romans who awoke on their flaming funeral pyres), it wasn’t until the mid-eighteenth century that a full-fledged premature-burial panic seized Western Europe. It was precipitated by the publication, in 1746, of a book titled Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort (The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death) by a French physician, Jean-Jacques Bruhier. At a time when a common test for death was placing a feather on someone’s lips to see if it moved, Bruhier believed that doctors needed a more reliable way to tell when their dying patients had truly expired. Since the only surefire sign of death was putrefaction, bodies (so Bruhier argued) should not be consigned to the grave until they started to rot, in order to avoid the horror of living interment.

  Other medical authorities saw some problems with this approach (primarily the sanitary drawback of keeping a corpse around the house until decomposition set in) and offered recommendations of their own, ranging from tickling the patient’s nose with a quill or introducing a crawling insect into his ear to shoving a red-hot poker up his anus—a procedure guaranteed to awaken anyone in even the deepest cataleptic trance. All agreed, however, that—owing to the primitive state of then-current death verification techniques—premature burials had become a common, if not rampant, occurrence.

  Self-declared experts cited the most alarming statistics—one claimed that “at least one-tenth of all human beings were buried before they were dead”—while newspapers both here and abroad trumpeted horror stories like this one from a Pennsylvania weekly:

  Farmer George Hefdecker, who lived at Erie, Pa., died very suddenly two weeks ago, of what is supposed to have been heart failure. The body was buried temporarily four days later in a neighbor’s lot in the Erie cemetery pending the purchase of one by his family. The transfer was made in a few days, and when the casket was opened at the request of his family, a horrifying spectacle was presented. The body had turned round, and the face and interior of the casket bore the traces of a terrible struggle with death in its most awful shape. The distorted and blood-covered features bore evidence of the agony endured. The clothing about the head and neck had been torn to shreds, as was likewise the lining of the coffin. Bloody marks of fingernails on the face, throat, and neck told of the awful despair of the doomed man, who tore his own flesh in his terrible anguish. Several fingers had been entirely bitten off and the hands torn with the teeth until they scarcely resembled those of a human being.

  Accounts like these—along with fear-mongering books such as Joseph Taylor’s The Danger of Premature Interment and William Tebb’s Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented—set off a wave of hysteria that swept through Western Europe and quickly spread to America. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 story “The Premature Burial” might strike the modern reader as the purely fanciful product of his bizarre imagination—something only Poe could dream up. In truth, however, it is an accurate reflection of a widespread fear of the time (albeit rendered in the author’s typically overheated style):

  It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes of the damp earth—the clinging to the death garments—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute Night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms—the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm—these things, with the thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed—that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead—these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth—we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.

  To avoid this “appalling and intolerable horror,” Poe’s contemporaries often resorted to extraordinary measures, directing their family physicians to remove their heads, slit their throats, drive needles under their toe-nails, or puncture their hearts with long metal pins after death. Undertakers did a booming business in “security coffins,” the most popular model of which was the Bateson Life Revival Device—essentially a casket equipped with a miniature belfry that poked out of the ground, so that—should the occupant wake up and discover himself buried alive—he could ring the bell and alert the outside world to his predicament.

  For all the hysteria surrounding the subject, however, modern historians generally agree that Victorian fears of living interment were seriously overblown. To be sure, there undoubtedly were instances of premature burial, particularly during certain epidemics, when victims were often hurried into the grave to minimize the risk of contagion. But much of the evidence cited by nineteenth-century alarmists as proof of premature burial can be attributed to other causes. As the British physician and writer Jan Bondeson explains,

  writers made much of a cadaver found, for example, lying on its side; this position could just as well be consistent with the tilting of a coffin while it was being put into the grave. If the corpse’s face was contorted or the arms and legs drawn up, an imaginative journalist might describe the horrid scuffle in the coffin, but neither of these changes is inconsistent with the natural decomposition of the body after death. A shattered coffin in a vault might, similarly, be due to the swelling of the corpse during putrefaction. Even the gruesome phenomenon of a dead pregnant woman bearing a child could be caused by the highly increased intra-abdominal pressure during decomposition. In several nineteenth-century reports, the prematurely dead individuals are said to have eaten their fingers or even their entire arms; modern textbooks in forensic medicine have demonstrated that such bodies were probably attacked by rodents.

  In short, like today’s media-induced panics over supposedly pervasive (but actually quite negligible) threats like bird flu, serial killers, and poisoned Halloween candy, the Victorian fear of premature burial—though not wholly unfounded—was largely generated by a sensationalizing press.

  Victorian security coffin equipped with breathing tube and signal flag.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  The single best work on this subject—indeed, the only one you’ll really have to read—is Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (Norton, 2001), a book-length elaboration of a chapter in his equally fine collection, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities (Norton, 1999).

  There was a young man at Nunhead

  Who awoke in his coffin of lead.

  “It was cozy enough,”

  He remarked in a huff

  “But I wasn’t aware I was dead.”

  —Victorian limerick

  The Lebe
nswecker:

  If This Doesn’t Wake

  You Up, Nothing Will

  One of the more unusual medical implements available to nineteenth-century physicians was the Lebenswecker (life-awakener). Invented by a German quack named Carl Baunscheidt and marketed in English under the name “Resuscitator,” this ingenious device was essentially a hollow, spring-loaded wand equipped at one end with a cluster of thirty razor-sharp needles. Among its other uses, it was recommended by its inventor as a surefire way to prevent premature burial.

  Here’s how it worked. To make sure that someone was really dead, the doctor placed the business end of the Lebenswecker against the person’s chest and activated the spring—whereupon the needles popped out and punctured the flesh. If the patient remained unresponsive after several attempts, the doctor might apply it elsewhere—to what the instructions delicately described as the “sensitive” parts of the body. (Exactly what that meant was made clear by an accompanying illustration depicting a nude Aphrodite and Adonis with a single fig leaf covering their privates). If that didn’t do the trick, you could be pretty sure that the patient was indeed deceased and suitable for burial.

  DEATH FUN FACT

  Common sense—as well as euphemisms such as “at rest"—suggests that when you’re dead and buried, you basically don’t budge from your supine position. Amazingly enough, however, corpses not only can move but have been known to shift around in the coffin. As a cadaver decomposes, the muscles shrivel and contract, pulling the arms and legs into a contorted position, which can create “the false impression that the corpse has awakened and tried to push up the coffin lid.” The putrefactive gas that builds up in the abdominal cavity can also burst out with enough force to move the whole body around. According to Jan Bondeson in his 2001 book, Buried Alive, these “perfectly natural phenomena” go a long way toward explaining the widespread nineteenth-century fear of premature burial, which “derived from accounts of corpses and skeletons found in unnatural positions upon exhumation of coffins.”

  “One Summer Night”

  During the nineteenth century, when “resurrectionists” earned their keep by digging up freshly interred corpses and peddling them to anatomy schools, the fear of grave robbing was rife both here and abroad. So was the fear of premature burial. It took a particularly diabolical mind, however, to combine those two anxieties into a single nightmarish fantasy. Such a mind belonged to Ambrose Bierce, Gilded Age America’s master of the macabre. In this creepy little yarn from his 1893 collection Can Such Things Be? the famously mordant Bierce concocts a hair-raising (if wildly improbable) scenario that climaxes with a grisly punch line.

  The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit. His posture—flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied with something he easily broke without profitably altering the situation—the strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it without cavil.

  But dead—no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the invalid’s apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he—just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological indifference: the organ that he feared consequences with was torpid. So. With no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry Armstrong.

  But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night, shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying low in the west and portending a storm. These brief, stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the monuments and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.

  Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away; the third was a gigantic Negro known as Jess. For many years Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it was a favorite pleasantry that he knew “every soul in the place.” From the nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the place was not so populous as its register might have shown it to be.

  Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public road, were a horse and light wagon, waiting.

  The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little resistance and was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was of another breed.

  In the gray morning the two students, pallid and haggard from anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously in their blood, met at the medical college.

  “You saw it?” cried one.

  “God! Yes—what are we to do?”

  They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse, attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the dissecting-room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a bench in the obscurity sat the Negro Jess. He rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth.

  “I’m waiting for my pay,” he said.

  DEATH DEFINITION: Thanatomimesis

  A COMBINATION OF THANATO-(MEANING “DEATH,” FROM THE GREEK GOD THANATOS) AND MIMESIS (Meaning “Imitation,” as in mimic), the word thanatomimesis means—you guessed it—the imitation of death. It is used in two basic ways.

  First, it describes the deliberate or instinctive feigning of death, usually as a survival strategy. This behavior is commonly known as “playing possum” since members of that particular species will protect themselves from attack by falling to the ground, growing limp, and assuming a vacant, slack-mouthed appearance. When the enemy loses interest and leaves (why kill something that’s already dead?), the possum will spring up and scamper away. The same ploy has come in handy for humans, especially cowardly ones such as Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who—in accordance with his credo “Discretion is the better part of valor"—plays dead on the battlefield of Shrewsbury and so lives to fight (or rather to avoid fighting) another day.

  The term thanatomimesis can also refer to physical symptoms resembling death, such as those associated with comas, hypothermia, and catalepsy. The last—a trancelike state accompanied by extreme rigidity of the limbs—afflicts an inordinate number of characters in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: they are invariably pronounced dead by their attending physicians, whisked off to the graveyard, and buried alive.

  Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade.

  The Undead:

  Fact or Fiction?

  Apart from the occasional sexual psychopath who takes perverted pleasure from drinking the blood of his victims, vampires don’t really exist. And yet stories about resuscitated corpses who return from the grave to batten on the living are found all over the world. Where do such widespread folk beliefs come from?

  Explanations vary. According to Freudian analysts, vampires—like all other supernatural creatures—are really fantasy projections of unconscious dreads and desires: monsters from the id. Others have put forth a less psychoanalytic theory. Most notable among these is the scholar Paul Barber in his persuasive and highly readable book Vampires, Burial, and Death (Yale University Press, 1988).

  According to Barb
er, the belief in vampires arose among the peasantry of pre-literate cultures who gave superstitious explanations for perfectly natural postmortem phenomena. Following the death of a Serbian peasant named Peter Plogojowitz in 1725, for example, a number of his fellow villagers fell ill and died. Immediately, stories began to spread that Plogojowitz had turned into a vampire and returned from the grave each night to attack his former neighbors in their beds. When Plogojowitz’s corpse was exhumed, witnesses were horrified to discover that his body looked plumper than before; his hair and nails had grown; his skin had sloughed off and been replaced “with a new one;” and his mouth was full of fresh blood. When a stake was driven through his heart, he let out an audible groan.

  To Plogojowitz’s benighted neighbors, all this was incontrovertible proof that he had, indeed, become one of the undead. Modern science teaches us, however, that there is nothing at all unusual about these seemingly supernatural phenomena. When bodies decompose, they bloat; the skin contracts (thereby creating the illusion that the hair and nails have grown) and eventually peels off; and bloody fluid issues from the mouth. As for the groaning, when a death-swollen corpse is punctured, the escaping gases can produce a noise that, to credulous ears, can sound like a cry of pain. The supposedly telltale signs of vampirism in other exhumed corpses—ranging from open eyes to erections to apparent movement in the coffin—can also be explained as the normal (if seriously unpleasant) events that happen when our bodies rot in the grave.

  Pet Cemeteries

  In the view of some people, elaborate pet funerals are just one more vulgar example of American conspicuous consumerism, like diamond-studded cat collars and designer dog apparel. In truth, however, there is nothing either new or uniquely American about the practice.