Buried Alive: the Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

Folklore, Oct, 2002 by Jacqueline Simpson

By Jan Bondeson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 256 pp. 30 Illus. $23.95. ISBN 0-393-04906-X

It is appropriate that this fascinating historical study is brought to us by the same publishers as have, for many years, produced Jan Brunvand's books on contemporary/ urban legends, because to investigate how much truth (if any) lies behind the gruesome allegations that premature burial could and did happen raises problematic issues only too familiar in the latter field. Distinctive story-patterns cropping up repeatedly at different times and places, always claimed to be true; reports that give persuasive details of name and place, yet when checked up on turn out to be baseless; press items that recycle older material as if it were up-to-date; panics that feed on inaccurate "science" and/or paranoid suspicion of scientific experts; writers who exploit the sadistic horror of the theme--these are factors Bondeson's careful analysis must take into account, just as folklorists must.

One story-pattern that he identifies will be familiar to many as a local/historical legend: a woman is buried, and then the grave is reopened by a sexton who wants to steal her rings; he hacks at her finger with a knife, the pain rouses her, and she returns to her initially incredulous husband, living long and bearing children to him. First found in a Greek romance of the first century A.D., famous in a version set in Cologne in 1357, it has half a dozen British variants that were accepted as true and pressed into service in the ongoing debate on how to identify death and avoid the horror of premature burial. There is the tale of the Lecherous Monk, too, and that of the Careless Anatomist ...

Bondeson's main subject, however, is a medical controversy on the signs of death that lasted from the seventeenth century into the twentieth century, peaking at different times in France, Germany, and America; interestingly, some medical advances (notably the ability to resuscitate people seemingly drowned by giving artificial respiration) actually added to the confusion and fear. The practical measures taken to minimise the risk of premature burial make macabre reading: corpses were given electric shocks, gashed with knives, burned with hot pokers; coffins had breathing tubes, bells, lids that would spring open at a touch. In nineteenth-century Germany, many towns had a Leichenhaus, a mortuary where corpses were kept uncovered, on beds equipped with bells that would respond to the slightest movement and summon the attendant who guarded them day and night until putrefaction was obvious. But after many decades of these precautions, German doctors admitted that nobody had ever actually revived in a Leichenhaus. Britain, by and large, remained aloof from all this; our great obsession in funerary matters was to foil body-snatchers.

The book is fully documented, and written in a vigorous style with touches of black humour. I can heartily recommend it.

Jacqueline Simpson, Folklore Society