People come to life in a coffin. What to do if you are buried alive in a coffin? The cemetery is one of the dangerous places; damage is often caused in this place
Legends are associated with him, novels are written about him. It is probably difficult to find any other phenomenon with which so many prejudices and superstitions are associated. You need to have a correct idea of lethargic sleep, if only to broaden your horizons.
Lethargic sleep or lethargy (oblivion, inaction) is a state of pathological (painful) sleep with a more or less pronounced weakening of all manifestations of life, including immobility, a significant decrease in metabolism, weakening or lack of response to sound and pain stimuli, as well as touch. Lethargic sleep occurs during hysteria, general exhaustion, and after severe excitement. The changes that occur in the human body during lethargic sleep have not been studied enough.
Myths about lethargic sleep
Myths about those buried alive, in lethargic sleep, come from time immemorial and have a certain basis. Once upon a time, in crypts and underground, dead people were found with torn shrouds and bloody hands, who were trying to escape from the coffins. Sometimes such people were lucky and were saved by cemetery thieves who dug up graves to rob the deceased, or simply by people passing by who heard noises from the grave (unless, of course, they ran away in horror). In England, there has been a law for many years (it is still in force today) according to which all morgues must have a bell with a rope so that the revived can call for help.
It is known that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was very afraid of being buried alive and therefore asked his loved ones to bury him only when they appeared obvious signs decomposition of the body. However, in May 1931, during the liquidation of the Danilov Monastery cemetery in Moscow, where he was buried great writer, during exhumation it was discovered that Gogol’s skull was turned to one side, and the upholstery of the coffin was torn.
The case with the famous Italian poet of the 14th century Petrarch would have been exactly the same, but it ended happily. At the age of 40, Petrarch became seriously ill and “died,” and when they began to bury him, he woke up and said that he felt great.
What does a person look like in a lethargic sleep?
In severe, rare manifestations of lethargy, there is indeed a picture of imaginary death: the skin is cold and pale, the pupils almost do not react to light, breathing and pulse are difficult to detect, arterial pressure reduced, strong painful stimuli do not cause a reaction. For several days, patients do not drink or eat, the excretion of urine and feces stops, weight loss and dehydration occur.
In mild cases of lethargy, there is immobility, muscle relaxation, even breathing, sometimes fluttering of the eyelids, and rolling of the eyeballs. The ability to swallow remains, and chewing and swallowing movements follow in response to irritation. The perception of the surroundings may be partially preserved.
Bouts of lethargy begin suddenly and end suddenly. There are cases with harbingers of lethargic sleep, as well as with disturbances in well-being and behavior after waking up.
The duration of lethargic sleep ranges from several hours to several days and even weeks. Individual observations of long-term lethargic sleep with preserved ability to eat and perform physiological acts are described. Lethargy does not pose a danger to life.
Lethargic sleep in forensic medicine
In severe cases of lethargy, especially in forensic medical practice, when examining a corpse at the scene of an incident, the question arises of establishing the authenticity of death. In this case, if lethargy is suspected, the patient is immediately sent to the hospital.
The question of the danger of burying alive persons in a state of lethargy has long lost its significance, since burial is usually carried out 1-2 days after death, when reliable cadaveric phenomena (signs of decomposition) are already well expressed.
Along with cases of true lethargy, there are also cases of its simulation (usually in order to hide the crime or its consequences). In this case, the person is monitored in the hospital. It is very difficult to simulate the symptoms of lethargy for a long time.
Help with lethargic sleep
The treatment for lethargic sleep is rest, clean air, and vitamin-rich food. If it is impossible to feed such a patient, food can be administered in liquid and semi-liquid form through a tube. Solutions of salts and glucose can be administered intravenously. A person in a state of lethargic sleep requires careful care, otherwise bedsores will begin on the body after lying for a long time, an infection will develop, and the condition will sharply become more complicated.
It is no coincidence that in almost all countries and among all peoples it is customary to bury the body not immediately after death, but only a few days later. There have been many cases when “dead people” suddenly came to life before the funeral, or, worst of all, right inside the grave...Imaginary death
Lethargy (from the Greek lethe - “oblivion” and argia - “inaction”) is a largely unexplored painful state similar to sleep. Signs of death have always been considered the cessation of heartbeat and lack of breathing. But during lethargic sleep, all life processes also freeze, and to distinguish real death from imaginary (as lethargic sleep is often called) without modern equipment quite difficult. Therefore, earlier cases of burial of people who did not die, but who fell asleep in a lethargic sleep, took place quite often, and sometimes with famous people.
If now burial alive is already a fantasy, then 100-200 years ago cases of burial of living people were not so uncommon. Very often, gravediggers, digging a fresh grave at ancient burial sites, discovered twisted bodies in half-decayed coffins, from which it was clear that they were trying to get out to freedom. They say that in medieval cemeteries every third grave was such an eerie sight.
Fatal sleeping pill
Helena Blavatsky described strange cases of lethargy: “In 1816 in Brussels, a respected citizen fell into deep lethargy on Sunday morning. On Monday, as his companions prepared to hammer nails into the coffin lid, he sat up in the coffin, rubbed his eyes and demanded coffee and a newspaper. In Moscow, the wife of a wealthy businessman lay in a cataleptic state for seventeen days, during which the authorities made several attempts to bury her; but since decomposition did not occur, the family rejected the ceremony, and after the expiration of the mentioned period, the life of the supposedly dead woman was restored. In Bergerac in 1842, a patient took sleeping pills, but... did not wake up. They bled him: he did not wake up. Finally he was declared dead and buried. A few days later they remembered to take sleeping pills and dug up the grave. The body was turned over and bore signs of a struggle.”
It's just small part such cases - lethargic sleep is actually quite common.
Scary awakening
Many people tried to protect themselves from being buried alive. For example, the famous writer Wilkie Collins left a note at his bedside with a list of measures that should be taken before burying him. But the writer was educated person and had the concept of lethargic sleep, while many ordinary people Something like that never even occurred to me.
So, in 1838 in England there was incredible incident. After the funeral of a respected person, a boy was walking through the cemetery and heard an unclear sound from underground. The frightened child called the adults, who dug up the coffin. When the lid was removed, the shocked witnesses saw that a terrible grimace was frozen on the face of the deceased. His arms were freshly bruised and his shroud was torn. But the man was already actually dead - he died a few minutes before being rescued - from a broken heart, unable to withstand such a terrible awakening to reality.
An even more terrible incident occurred in Germany in 1773. A pregnant woman was buried there. When screams began to be heard from underground, the grave was dug up. But it turned out that it was already too late - the woman died, and moreover, the child who had just been born in the same grave died...
Crying Soul
In the fall of 2002, a misfortune happened in the family of Krasnoyarsk resident Irina Andreevna Maletina - her thirty-year-old son Mikhail unexpectedly died. A strong, athletic guy who never complained about his health, died at night in his sleep. The body was autopsied, but the cause of death could not be determined. The doctor who drew up the death report told Irina Andreevna that her son died of sudden cardiac arrest.
As expected, Mikhail was buried on the third day, a wake was celebrated... And suddenly the next night his mother dreamed of her dead son crying. In the afternoon, Irina Andreevna went to church and lit a candle for the repose of the soul of the newly deceased. However, the crying son continued to appear in her dreams for another week. Maletina turned to one of the priests, who, after listening, said disappointing words that the young man might have been buried alive. It took Irina Andreevna incredible efforts to obtain permission to carry out the exhumation. When the coffin was opened, the grief-stricken woman instantly turned gray with horror. Her beloved son was lying on his side. His clothes, ritual blanket and pillow were torn to shreds. There were numerous abrasions and bruises on the hands of the corpse, which were not present during the funeral. All this eloquently indicated that the man woke up in the grave, and then died for a long time and painfully.
A resident of the city of Bereznyaki near Solikamsk, Elena Ivanovna Duzhkina, recalls how once in her childhood she and a group of children saw a coffin floating from nowhere during the spring flood of the Kama. The waves washed him to the shore. The frightened children called the adults. People opened the coffin and saw with horror a yellowish skeleton dressed in rotten rags. The skeleton lay prone, legs tucked under itself. The entire lid of the coffin, darkened by time, was covered with deep scratches from the inside.
Living Gogol
The most famous such case was scary tale, associated with Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. During his life, several times he fell into a strange, absolutely motionless state, reminiscent of death. But the great writer always quickly came to his senses, although he managed to fairly scare those around him. Gogol knew about this peculiarity of his and, more than anything else, he was afraid that one day he would fall into a deep sleep for a long time and be buried alive. He wrote: “Being in the full presence of memory and common sense, I state here my last will. I bequeath my body not to be buried until obvious signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating.”
After the writer’s death, they did not listen to his will and buried him as usual - on the third day...
These terrible words were remembered only in 1931, when Gogol was reburied from the Danilov Monastery on Novodevichy Cemetery. According to eyewitnesses, the lid of the coffin was scratched from the inside, and Gogol's body was in an unnatural position. At the same time, another terrible thing was discovered, which had nothing to do with lethargic dreams and burials alive. Gogol's skeleton was missing... its head. According to rumors, she disappeared in 1909, when the monks of the Danilov Monastery were restoring the writer’s grave. Allegedly, they were persuaded to cut it off for a considerable sum by the collector and rich man Bakhrushin, with whom it remained. This is a wild story, but it is quite possible to believe it, because in 1931, during the excavation of Gogol’s grave, a number of unpleasant events occurred. Famous writers, who were present at the reburial, literally stole from the coffin “as a souvenir,” some a piece of clothing, some shoes, and some Gogol’s rib...
Call from the other world
Interestingly, in order to protect a person from being buried alive, in many Western countries there is still a bell with a rope in morgues. A person thought to be dead can wake up among the dead, stand up and ring the bell. The servants will immediately come running to his call. This bell and the revival of the dead are very often played out in horror films, but such stories almost never happened in reality. But during the autopsy, the “corpses” came to life more than once. In 1964, an autopsy was performed in a New York morgue on a man who died on the street. As soon as the pathologist’s scalpel touched the “dead man’s” stomach, he immediately jumped up. The pathologist himself died of shock and fright on the spot...
Another similar case was described in the Biysk Rabochiy newspaper. An article dated September 1959 told how, during the funeral of an engineer of one of the Biysk factories, while delivering funeral speeches, the deceased suddenly sneezed, opened his eyes, sat up in the coffin and “almost died a second time, seeing the situation in which located". A thorough examination at a local hospital of the man who rose from the grave did not reveal any pathological changes in his body. The same conclusion was given by the Novosibirsk doctors to whom the resurrected engineer was sent.
Ritual burials
However, people do not always find themselves buried alive against their own will. So, among some African tribes and nationalities South America, Siberia and the Far North, there is a ritual in which the tribe’s healer buries a relative alive. A number of nationalities perform this ritual for the initiation of boys. In some tribes they use it to treat certain diseases. In the same way, old people or sick people are prepared for the transition to another world.
The “pseudo-funeral” ritual occupies an important place among ministers of shamanic cults. It is believed that by going to the grave alive, the shaman receives the gift of communication with the spirits of the earth, as well as with the souls of deceased ancestors. It’s as if some channels open in his consciousness through which he communicates with worlds unknown to mere mortals.
Naturalist and ethnographer E.S. Bogdanovsky was lucky in 1915 to witness ritual funeral shaman of one of the Kamchatka tribes. In his memoirs, Bogdanovsky writes that before the burial the shaman fasted for three days and did not even drink water. Then the assistants, using a bone drill, made a hole in the crown of the shaman, which was then sealed with beeswax. After this, the shaman’s body was rubbed with incense, wrapped in a bear skin and, accompanied by ritual singing, lowered into a grave built in the center of the family cemetery. A long reed tube was inserted into the shaman's mouth, which was taken out, and his motionless body was covered with earth. A few days later, during which rituals were continuously performed over the grave, the buried shaman was removed from the ground, washed in three running waters and fumigated with incense. On the same day, the village magnificently celebrated the second birth of a respected fellow tribesman, who, having visited the “kingdom of the dead,” took the top step in the hierarchy of servants of the pagan cult...
IN last years a tradition arose of placing charged Cell phones- suddenly this is not death at all, but a dream, suddenly a dear person comes to his senses and calls his loved ones - I’m alive, dig me back up... But so far such cases have not happened - these days, with advanced diagnostic devices, it is in principle impossible to bury a person alive.
But nevertheless, people do not believe doctors and try to protect themselves from a terrible awakening in the grave. In 2001, a scandalous incident occurred in the United States. Los Angeles resident Joe Barten, terribly afraid of falling into a lethargic sleep, bequeathed ventilation in his coffin, putting food and a telephone in it. And at the same time, his relatives could receive an inheritance only on the condition that they call his grave three times a day. It’s interesting that Barten’s relatives refused to receive the inheritance - they found the process of making calls to the next world too creepy...
Dying is the worst thing that can happen to a person. At least that's what we think. Although, perhaps the worst thing is when you are mistaken for dead, with all the ensuing consequences.
1. A teenager woke up at his own funeral.
The idea of attending own funeral pretty universal, especially in movies when people fake deaths and have fake funerals. Fortunately, most of us have not had this experience. But 17-year-old Indian teenager Kumar Marevad experienced it himself. He had a high fever after being bitten by a dog and stopped breathing. Kumar's family prepared his body, placed him in a coffin and went for cremation. It's good that the guy woke up in time before he became a pile of ashes.
2. Nacy Perez Was Buried Alive, But She Died After She Was Rescued From The Grave
Neysi Perez, a pregnant girl from Honduras, suddenly fell dead and stopped breathing. The family buried Neisi and her unborn child, but the next day, when the girl's mother visited her grave, she heard sounds from inside. Neysi was dug up, and it seemed she was saved! But fate had other plans. A few hours after her release, she actually died and returned again to where she had recently been rescued.
3. Judith Johnson was sent to the morgue without being seen breathing.
Judith Johnson went to the hospital with what she thought was indigestion, but soon went straight from there to the morgue. Unfortunately, what she thought was indigestion was a heart attack, and resuscitation efforts did not help her. She was rescued by a morgue worker who discovered that Judith was still breathing. The poor thing did not die, but her psyche suffered catastrophically as a result. The grave does not let people go so easily.
4. The Miracle of Walter Williams
Walter Williams died in 2014 at the age of 78. The old man's body was taken to the morgue, but when the worker began embalming, Walter began to breathe. The family considered this return to life a miracle. However, science has its own explanation, called Lazarus syndrome, when dead man suddenly it can come to life again. This syndrome is a very rare phenomenon, but sudden resurrection after recorded death is also possible.
5. Eleanor Markham, who was almost buried alive
Eleanor Markham was 22 years old when she died in 1894 in New York. It was July heat, so the inconsolable family mourned the girl and decided to bury her quickly. As the coffin was being carried to the cemetery, sounds were heard from inside. The lid was removed, and then a furious dialogue ensued between the revived Miss Markham and the person accompanying her to last way attending physician. According to a local newspaper report, their conversation went something like this: “Oh my God! – Miss Markham screamed heart-rendingly. “You are burying me alive!” Her doctor calmly replied, “Hush, hush, you’re fine. It's just a mistake that can be easily corrected."
6. Lonely Mildred Clark
Living alone is not scary. It's scary to die alone and be found by your neighbors by their characteristic smell. Such was the case with 86-year-old Mildred Clark, who was discovered by her landlord lying cold and dead on the floor. The old woman was taken to the morgue, where her body awaited its turn to go to the funeral home and then to the cemetery. At the morgue, her frozen legs began to twitch, and the attendant noticed that the deceased was barely breathing. So old and lonely Mildred Clark came back to life.
7. Sipho William "Zombie" Mdletshe
Somehow in South Africa Sipho William Mdletshe, 24, has died. He lay in the morgue for two days, and then woke up in a metal box and began screaming loudly. Luckily, the guy was rescued and he immediately ran to his family and fiancee. However, the girl rejected him, considering the revived groom to be a real zombie.
8. Alice Blunden, the woman buried alive TWICE
Alice Blunden was a fat woman who loved brandy, and one day in 1675 she died and was buried. A few days later the children heard sounds from the grave. The grave was dug up, but Alice was still dead, although it was clear that she was struggling inside and calling for help. They examined the body and decided to bury it again until the forensic expert arrived. When the coroner finally arrived and the grave was reopened, Alice's clothes were torn and her face was bloody. She was buried alive for the second time. Alas, fate did not give her a third chance. The coroner finally pronounced her dead.
It is not customary for many peoples of the world to bury the dead immediately after death - funeral rituals last several days. And this is no coincidence. There are many cases where the dead regained consciousness before burial.
Imaginary death
“Lethargy” is translated from Greek as “oblivion” or “inaction.” Science has studied this state of the human body very superficially. External signs diseases are simultaneously like sleep and death. When lethargy sets in, the normal processes of life stop in the human body.
With the development of technology and the advent of modern equipment, cases of burial alive are almost impossible. However, a century ago during excavations ancient graves Cemetery workers found bodies in rotten coffins that lay in an unnatural position. From the remains it was possible to determine that the person was trying to get out of the coffin.
Unexpected awakening
The religious philosopher and spiritualist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky described unique cases of deep “oblivion.” So, in Sunday morning In 1816, a Brussels resident fell into a lethargic sleep. The next day, the grief-stricken relatives had already prepared everything for the burial. However, the man suddenly woke up, sat up, rubbed his eyes and asked for a book and a cup of coffee.
And the wife of one Moscow businessman remained in lethargy for 17 whole days. The city authorities made several attempts to bury the body, but there were no noticeable signs of decomposition. For this reason, relatives postponed the ceremony. Soon the deceased regained consciousness.
In 1842, in Bergerac, France, a patient took sleeping pills and was unable to wake up. The patient was prescribed a blood transfusion. After some time, doctors declared death. After the funeral, they remembered that he had taken medications, and the grave was opened. The body was turned upside down.
bad morning
In 1838, an amazing case was recorded in one of the cities of England. One boy, walking along the graves in one of the cemeteries, heard sounds uncharacteristic for this quiet place - someone’s voice was coming from underground. The child brought his parents to the scene. One of the graves was opened. When the coffin was opened, it became clear that there was an unusual grin on the face of the corpse. Fresh wounds were also found on the corpse, and the burial shroud was torn. It turned out that the supposedly deceased was alive when he was buried, and his heart stopped before opening the coffin.
A more impressive incident occurred in Germany in 1773. A pregnant girl was buried in one of the cemeteries. Passers-by heard groans coming from her grave. Not only did the woman wake up after a lethargic sleep in a coffin, she also gave birth there, after which she died along with the newborn.
Some people were very afraid of such a fate and tried to foresee the details of their death in advance. So, English writer Wilkie Collins was afraid of being buried alive, so when he went to bed, there was always a note next to his bed. It mentioned point by point measures that must be taken before considering him dead.
Lethargy in Gogol
The great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol also suffered from lethargy. To protect himself from an untimely funeral, he recorded on paper possible incidents that happened to him. “Being in the full presence of memory and common sense, I express my last will. I bequeath my body not to be buried until obvious signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness came over me, my heart and pulse stopped beating,” wrote Gogol.
However, after the death of the writer, they forgot about what he had written, and the burial ceremony was performed, as expected, on the third day. Gogol’s warnings were remembered only in 1931, during his reburial at the Novodevichy Cemetery. Eyewitnesses said that on inside There were noticeable scratches on the coffin lid, the corpse lay in an unusual position, and it also had no head. According to one version, the writer’s skull was stolen by order of the famous collector and theater figure Alexei Bakhrushin by the monks of the St. Danilov Monastery during the restoration of Gogol’s grave in 1909.
Revived Corpse
In 1964, an autopsy was performed in a New York morgue on a man who died on the street. The pathologist, having carried out all the necessary preparations for the procedure, had only just managed to bring the scalpel to the patient when he woke up. The doctor died of fright.
And in the famous newspaper “Beysky Rabochiy” in 1959, a unique incident was described that occurred at the funeral of an engineer. At the moment of pronouncing the funeral speech, the man woke up, sneezed loudly, opened his eyes and almost died a second time when he saw the situation around him.
In order to avoid the burial of living people in many countries, morgues are provided with a bell with a rope. A person thought to be dead can wake up, stand up and ring the bell.
Ritual burial alive
Many peoples of South America, Siberia and the Far North resort to ritual burials of living people. Some peoples perform live burials in order to cure fatal diseases.
In some tribes, shamans themselves strive to go to the grave in order to have the gift of communication with the spirits of the dead. According to ethnographer E. S. Bogdanovsky, the burial ritual was practiced by Kamchatka aborigines. The scientist managed to observe such a terrifying sight. After a three-day fast, the shaman was rubbed with incense, a hole was drilled in his head, which was sealed with wax. After that, he was wrapped in a bear skin and buried. To make it easier for the shaman to survive imprisonment, a special tube was inserted into his mouth, with which he could breathe. A few days later, the shaman was “released” from the grave, fumigated with incense and washed in water. It was believed that after this he was born again.
The tradition of burying the dead with things that could be useful to them in the afterlife existed already in ancient Egypt. A dozen years ago, several residents of Cape Town, South Africa, who were afraid of falling asleep under the influence of the witchcraft spells of ill-wishers and being buried alive, asked to put phones with spare batteries in coffins in the hope of waking up and calling for help.
In America, cases have been recorded where corpses were even cremated with telephones. Fulfilling the last wishes of the deceased, relatives and friends stuffed cell phones into their pockets without informing the crematorium workers. This arbitrariness can lead to trouble, because batteries tend to explode at high temperatures.
The eccentrics' fears of being buried alive are not unfounded. No one knows exactly how many people were buried who fell into a lethargic sleep. No one has ever kept such statistics, but without much risk of error we can assume that the count goes into the thousands!
Sailors have long had the custom of sewing a dead man into a shroud and throwing him into the sea. In order not to accidentally bury a living person, the last stitch was made through... the nose of the deceased. If there was no reaction, the body was thrown into the water.
Mummy in the museum
People have always been afraid of being buried alive, but in XVIII-XIX centuries this fear turned into real hysteria. Panic gripped not only the illiterate peasants, but also very educated people. First US President George Washington, for example, demanded that he be buried no earlier than two days after the doctors declared him dead.
There were originals who insisted that before burial... their heads would be cut off. Perhaps everyone was outdone by Miss Beswick, a resident of Manchester who died in late XVIII century. She wrote 20 thousand guineas to her doctor in her will, a lot of money at that time, but set one condition: her body should not be buried. The old woman wanted the doctor to embalm her, put her in his operating room and carefully examine her every day for signs of life. For several years the poor fellow honestly fulfilled the terrible condition. When his patience came to an end, he hid the mummy in a huge grandfather clock. After the doctor’s death, the eccentric woman’s embalmed body was kept for some time in the Manchester Museum, after which it was buried.
The fear of being buried alive reached its apogee in mid-19th century. In 1846, a competition was even organized in which participants competed to invent a reliable way to determine whether a person had died or fallen into a lethargic sleep. One Frenchman made pliers that were used to pull the nipples of a corpse with all his might. Wild pain, in his opinion, should have raised even the dead from the grave. An inventor from Sweden advised throwing insects into the ear of a dead person. The French doctor Bosho was recognized as the winner of the competition. He received 1.5 thousand gold francs for a completely reasonable proposal - to check with a recently invented stethoscope whether the heart of the deceased was beating.
Coffins were equipped with a wide variety of devices and devices that allowed the “living” dead to report that they were alive. The bell tower of the British engineer was very popular Bateson. A rope with a bell was tied to the corpse's hand. When the person came to his senses, he pulled the rope, resulting in a ringing sound. Bateson's bell tower was such a success that its inventor even received the Order of the British Empire from the hands of Queen Victoria. Alas, further fate The engineer himself turned out to be sad. Towards the end of his life he went crazy from the same fear. At first, Bateson stopped trusting his own invention, then he asked to have his body cremated. Fearing that his request would not be fulfilled, he doused himself with linseed oil and set himself on fire.
The Germans approached the solution of the problem with their characteristic pedantry. They were in no hurry with the funeral and kept the coffins in the mortuary until the bodies began to decompose - until late XIX centuries, decomposition was considered the main evidence of irreversible death.
The fashion craze has not spared Russia either. In 1897 Count Karnissky, former chamberlain of Nicholas II, presented a modernized coffin to the Parisians. It was equipped with a long tube extending to the surface, a bell and a red flag. When the deceased came to his senses and began to move, the tube automatically provided oxygen access. At the same time, the bell began to ring loudly and the flag began to flutter.
The inventor thought of everything except one detail. He did not take into account that during decomposition some “stirring” also occurs. The result of this omission was hundreds of cases when cemetery workers ran to the ringing, dug up a coffin and found a half-decomposed body in it.
Super coffins of the 20th century
Although when modern development medicine, the probability of being buried alive is practically reduced to zero, similar cases still occur occasionally today.
In the late 90s, a British doctor mistakenly declared her dead Daphnu Bank, the wife of a farmer from Cambridgeshire. It is unknown how the matter would have ended if not for the observant undertaker. Arriving at the morgue to pick up the body, he noticed that the corpse’s leg was twitching slightly and heard a barely audible snoring. In the case of Daphne, who is now alive and well, everything ended well. Alas, tragic stories much bigger.
Two days after the funeral, the Guinean Mbaswa woke up from sleep and began pounding on the coffin lid with all his might. The poor man was saved, but his “rebirth” did not bring him happiness. Considering him “marked” for death, not only his friends and acquaintances, but also his relatives and his fiancée turned away from him.
Ali Abdel-Rahim Mohammed, an Arabic teacher from Egypt, suddenly collapsed while on vacation in the Mediterranean. The doctor from the first aid station on the beach found no signs of life in him and decided that he died suddenly from sunstroke. Five hours later, Ali’s body was taken out of the refrigerator and taken for an autopsy. On operating table teacher... woke up. After spending several hours in the refrigerator, he was so cold that he could not speak. The pathologist, whose hand was grabbed by the “dead man” like a vice, ran out of the operating room in horror. Ali stood up with difficulty and hobbled to look for his phone to tell his family that rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated.
The Alexandria pathologist was lucky. The same cannot be said about another Egyptian doctor who heard screams coming from the morgue refrigerator. When the doctor saw the resurrected corpse, his heart could not stand it, and he collapsed dead. In February 2000, a businessman James McCarthy suddenly it became bad. On the way to the hospital, he fell into a coma. Deciding that James had died and there was nothing for them to do in the hospital, the relatives turned around and went to the morgue.
When McCarthy was taken out of the refrigerator the next day, he was dead but bruised all over his body. When James woke up, he tried to get out of the refrigerator, but was unable to free himself and ended up freezing to death.
Of course, people who were afraid of being buried alive did not stop fighting in the 20th century. In the 70s, fancy coffins costing $7.5 thousand, which contained almost everything necessary to sustain life, gained popularity among wealthy Americans. An impressive supply of provisions made it possible to live underground for a long time. A complex control panel regulated the air supply. If the “deceased” was stuffy, he could even turn on the fan. To perform natural needs, the supercoffin was equipped with a chemical toilet. In addition to these vital items, the inventive undertakers provided an electric alarm clock, a short-wave transmitter, a telephone and a small television. Particularly demanding clients were offered for an additional fee not provided for in standard set a miniature oven, a refrigerator and even a tape recorder.
Not a single case of rescue of the owner of a supercoffin was recorded. There is nothing particularly surprising here. On the one hand, all the owners of supercoffins most likely did not fall asleep, but died for real. On the other hand, it is not very clear why a person who has woken up in such a coffin would strive to return to the sinful earth?
