This week: Buried alive! Edited by: Arakun the twisted raccoon  
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Quote for the week: "My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands and two of them were just napping."
Rita Rudner |
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Imagine falling asleep and waking up in a coffin!
The intense fear of being buried alive due to being incorrectly pronounced dead is called taphephobia. In the days before modern medicine, it wasn't always easy even for doctors to determine whether a person was dead or simply unconscious. An unconscious or comatose person might breathe shallowly and have a very faint pulse that is difficult to detect. There are many accounts and legends of people waking up during their funerals, or worse yet, after the coffin has been placed in the ground.
Fear of being buried alive peaked during the cholera epidemics of the 19th century. Cholera patients can be extremely lethargic, with low blood pressure and a thready, weak pulse. Exhausted physicians attempting to care for hundreds of such patients without modern medical monitoring equipment might have easily mistaken some unconscious or sleeping cholera sufferers for dead.
Increased fear of premature burial led to the development of safety coffins. These coffins were equipped with devices that would allow the occupant to communicate with the outside world and stay alive until help arrived. These devices included a cord attached to a bell on the outside, escape hatches, breathing tubes, and flags.
The first recorded safety coffin was ordered by Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick before his death in 1792. The duke's coffin reportedly contained a window, an air tube, and a lid that was locked instead of nailed down. The duke was buried with two keys in a special pocket in his shroud. One key would unlock the coffin and the other would unlock the tomb door.
In a bizarre true event, a college student named Barbara Jane Mackle was buried alive for more than three days as part of a kidnapping for ransom. On December 17, 1968, Barbara and her mother were staying in a hotel in Decatur, Georgia when a man in a police uniform knocked on the door and told Barbara that her fiance had been in an automobile accident. Once inside the room, the man and an accomplice bound and gagged Barbara's mother and forced Barbara outside and into a car at gunpoint. They drove her to an isolated area and buried her in a fiberglass box which contained an air pump, a battery operated light, food, and water laced with sedatives. Two pipes provided outside air. The ransom was paid, but nothing was heard from the kidnappers until December 20, when one of them called the FBI and gave vague directions to the burial site. Hundreds of agents searched the area, and Barbara was eventually found, dehydrated but otherwise unharmed. The kidnappers were caught and Barbara eventually wrote a book about her experience, 83 Hours Till Dawn.
If one of your characters is buried alive, make sure the duration of the burial and other conditions are realistic. For example, a person could survive on the air in a sealed coffin for approximately five hours, but the time would decrease if they panic and hyperventilate.
Something to try: Write a horror story in which a character is buried alive. |
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It all starts when a parakeet is left at their door.
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Horror/Scary: March 30, 2022 Issue [#11285]
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