Coffin technologies that protect you from being buried alive [Here is Awesome]

Inside the eighteenth century, rumors swirled about people accidentally buried alive once they lapsed into a deathlike state from cholera. Accordingly, the security coffin was invented. Here’s how it worked.

From those eighteen century fears there arose a thriving cottage industry of inventors who promised to offer protection to the seemingly-dead from being prematurely interred . Above you can find some of the more popular sorts of safety coffin, also known as an ” escape vault,” because each grave door was built as a hatch that may be opened from the inside.

You can still see examples of most of these graves today. The only at the end is in Williamsberg, PA, created within the 1930s for Thomas Pursell (who was fearful of being buried alive) and his family . Each grave was felt-lined, and members of the family were buried with boards, tools, and bread, just in case they wakened and needed a snack before breaking out.

Earlier examples of the security coffin were even more elaborate, perhaps reflecting the gadget fetishism of the Victorian era. This coffin, like many safety coffins of the era, was attached to a tube that gravediggers or priests could leaf through and monitor. If they saw movement, or noticed that there was no smell of putrefaction, they were imagined to dig up the grave immediately. The tube can also conduct air into the coffin – an important feature that many safety coffins sadly neglected , despite providing other conveniences akin to feeding tubes. Apparently, one inventor showed off his device by burying himself alive in it and having an assistant feed him sausages and soup throughout the feeding tube.



Coffins from the eighteenth century sometimes came equipped with an elaborate bell system, which supposedly the trapped person could ring if they awoke six feet under. These rarely worked, however, since no matter if the person rang them, nobody was around to hear. Gravediggers were sometimes paid to control these graves and listen for the bells to head off.

Today the protection coffin craze seems to have died out – perhaps because modern medicine allows us to work out whether someone is dead with so much more certainty than in centuries past. But that doesn’t stop people from dreaming about what they’d do if they awoke in their graves. One gadget nerd devised this coffin PC to save lots of the prematurely buried from dying of boredom while they watch for rescue. No word on whether there are data plans that guarantee internet access inside the grave.

And members of the Six Feet Under Club have made a fetish of computerized coffins, staging events where they bury themselves alive with special friends and a webcam that provides voyeurs a live feed of what happens next. It just goes to indicate that one generation’s greatest fear is another generation’s sexual fetish.

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This post is tagged: conveniences, eighteenth century, feeding tube, feeding tubes, gravediggers, members of the family