If a person is buried and he is alive. Stories of the Buried Alive

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. Neisy 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 again.

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. Fortunately, 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.

Incredible facts

Real life is sometimes scarier than fiction.

And some horrific stories of premature funerals are even more chilling than the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

In the late 1800s, the American town of Pikeville, Kentucky, was shaken unknown disease, and the most tragic incident happened with Octavia Smith Hatcher.

After her little son passed away in January 1891, Octavia was overcome by depression, she did not get out of bed, became very ill and fell into a coma. On May 2 of that year, she was declared dead of unknown causes.

Embalming was not practiced then, so the woman was quickly buried in a local cemetery due to the sweltering heat. Just a week after her funeral, many of the townspeople were stricken with the same disease, which also resulted in them falling into a coma, the only difference being that after a while they woke up.

Octavia's husband began to fear the worst and worried about what he had buried living wife. He ordered the exhumation of her body, and, as it turned out, worst fears confirmed.

Overlays for inside the coffins were scratched, the woman’s nails were broken and bloody, and the stamp of horror was forever frozen on her face. She died after being buried alive.

Octavia was reburied, and her husband erected a grave over her grave very majestic monument, which still stands today. It was later suggested that the mysterious illness was caused by the tsetse fly, an African insect that can cause sleeping sickness.

Buried alive people

9. Mina El Houari

When a person goes on a first date, he always thinks about how it will end. Many people face an unexpected ending to a date, but hardly anyone expects to be buried alive after dessert.

One of these horror stories happened in May 2014, when 25-year-old French woman Mina El Houary communicated with a potential groom on the Internet for several months, before deciding to travel to Morocco to meet him.

On May 19, she checked into a hotel room in Fez, Morocco, to go on her first real date with the man of her dreams, but she was not destined to leave the hotel.

Mina met a man in person, they spent a wonderful evening together, at the end of which she collapsed dead on the floor. Instead of calling the police or ambulance, the man thought that Mina died and decided to bury her in his garden.

Everything would be fine, but Mina didn’t actually die. As often happens with people suffering from diabetes, Mina fell into a diabetic coma and was buried alive. Several days passed before the girl's family reported her missing and flew to Morocco to try to find her.

The Moroccan police managed to find this poor fellow. Before discovering the grave in the yard, they found dirty clothes and the shovel with which he buried the girl in his house. The man confessed to the crime and was charged with murder.

8. Mrs. Boger

In July 1893, farmer Charles Boger and his wife were living in Whitehaven, Pennsylvania, when Mrs. Boger died suddenly from an unknown cause. Doctors confirmed that the woman was dead and she was buried.

This should have been the end of the story, but some time after her death, a friend told Charles that before meeting him his wife suffered from bouts of hysteria and may not have died.

The very thought that he could bury his wife alive haunted Charles until he himself fell into hysterics.

The man could not live with the thought that his wife was dying in a coffin and, with the help of his friends, exhumed his wife’s body to confirm or refute his fears. What he discovered shocked him.

Mrs. Boger's body was turned over. Her clothes were torn, the glass lid of the coffin was broken, and fragments scattered all over her body. The woman's skin was bloody and covered with wounds, and there were no fingers at all.

It was assumed that she chewed them off in a hysterical fit when she tried to free herself. No one knows what happened to Charles after the terrible discovery.

Stories of those buried alive

7. Angelo Hays

Some of the worst stories of being buried alive are not so horrific because the victim had a miraculous escape.

Such was the case with Angelo Hayes. In 1937, Angelo was an ordinary 19-year-old guy living in St. Quentin de Chalets, France. One day Angelo was riding his motorcycle, lost control and hit a brick wall.

Without hesitation, the boy was declared dead and buried three days after the accident. In the neighboring city of Bordeaux Insurance Company suspected something was wrong when she learned that Angelo’s father had recently insured his son’s life for 200,000 francs, so an inspector went to the scene.

The inspector requested the exhumation of Angelo's body two days after the funeral to confirm the cause of death, but was met with a complete surprise. The boy wasn't really dead!

When the doctor took off the guy’s funeral clothes, his body was still warm and his heart was barely beating. He was immediately taken to the hospital, where Angelo underwent several more surgeries and general rehabilitation before making a full recovery.

During all this he was unconscious because he received severe head injury. After recovery, the guy began producing coffins from which one could escape in case of premature burial. He toured with his invention and became something of a celebrity in France.

6. Mr. Cornish

Cornish was the beloved mayor of Bath, who died of fever some 80 years before Snart published his work.

As was customary at the time, the body was buried fairly quickly after death was declared. The gravedigger was almost half finished with his work when he I decided to take a break and have a drink with friends passing by.

He walked away from the grave to talk with the visitors, when suddenly they all heard suffocating moans coming from the grave of the half-buried Mr. Cornish.

The gravedigger realized that he had buried a man alive and tried to save him while there was still oxygen in the coffin. But by the time they had scattered all the dirt and managed to remove the coffin lid, it was already too late, because Cornish died with his elbows and knees scratched until they bled.

This story so frightened Cornish's older half-sister that she asked her relatives to cut off her head after her death so that she would not suffer the same fate.

People buried alive

5. Surviving 6-year-old child

Burying a person alive is terrible, but it becomes unimaginably scary when a child becomes the victim of such a catastrophe. In August 2014, this is exactly what happened to a six-year-old girl, a resident of the Indian village of Uttar Pradesh.

According to the girl's uncle, Alok Awasthi, married couple, who lived nearby, told her that her mother asked them to take the baby to a neighboring village. The girl agreed to go with them, but when they reached the sugar cane field, the couple decided for an unknown reason strangle the girl and bury her on the spot.

Luckily, some people working in the field saw the couple leave without the girl. They found her unconscious in a shallow grave made in a quick fix right in the middle of the field.

Caring people managed to deliver the baby to the hospital at the very last moment, and when the girl came to her senses, she was able to tell about her kidnappers.

The girl does not remember that she was buried alive. Police do not know the reasons why the couple decided to kill the girl, and the suspects have not yet been found.

Luckily, the story did not end tragically.

4. Buried alive by choice

As long as a person lives, there will be challenges to fate. Nowadays there are even textbooks that tell you what to do if you find yourself buried alive and how to avoid death.

Moreover, people go so far that they voluntarily bury themselves in order to play with death. In 2011, a 35-year-old resident of Russia did just that, and, unfortunately, died tragically.

What to do if you are buried alive in a coffin September 12th, 2017

Remember, we found out, but there is another horror story.

The fate of being buried alive can befall each of us. For example, you may fall into a lethargic sleep, your relatives will think that you are dead, they will drink jelly at your funeral and hammer a nail into the lid of your coffin.

The worst option is when a person is deliberately buried in a coffin in order to scare or get rid of him: according to some rumors, the famous Jap liked to do this.

Maybe that’s why all the “bohemians” and the crowd talked to him so nicely?

Many of us have watched the movie Buried Alive, where main character comes to his senses and finds that he is buried alive in a wooden box, where oxygen is gradually running out. Worse situation you can hardly imagine. And those who watched this film to the end will agree with this.
Horror stories about someone being buried alive have existed since the Middle Ages, if not earlier. And then they were not horror stories, but real facts. The level of development of medicine was too low and such cases could well have happened. There are rumors that a similar terrible situation happened to the great writer Nikolai Gogol, and not to him alone.

As for our time, there is practically no chance of being buried alive. The fact is that for some reason curious doctors are extremely fond of clarifying why this or that person died, and to do this they open him up, examine his organs and, upon completion, carefully stitch him up. You understand that in this situation it will not be possible to wake up in a coffin; rather, the pathologist’s report will contain the line “The autopsy showed that death occurred as a result of an autopsy.”

How to escape if you wake up in a coffin, and above you there is a boarded-up lid and a couple of meters of earth? How to get out of the coffin
First of all, don't panic! Seriously, panic can significantly reduce the time available to survive. In a state of panic, you will use oxygen more actively. It's usually possible to live in a coffin for one or two hours, provided you don't panic. If you know how to meditate, do it immediately. Try to relax as much as possible, this will help you think more clearly.

Check if you can call. These days, it is not uncommon for people to be buried with cell phones, tablets, or other communications devices. If this is the case in your case, try contacting relatives or friends. Once you do this, relax and meditate to conserve oxygen.

Don't have a cell phone? Okay... Considering that you are still alive in a coffin with limited air supply, you were buried recently. This means that the ground must be soft enough.

Loosen the lid with your hands in the cheapest fiberboard coffins, you can even make a hole ( wedding ring, belt buckle...)
Cross your arms over your chest, grab your shoulders with your palms and pull your shirt or T-shirt up, tie it in a knot above your head, hanging like a bag on your head, it will protect you from suffocation if you hit the ground in your face.

If your coffin is not yet damaged by the gravity of the earth, use your feet to make a hole in the coffin. The best place for this purpose there will be the middle of the lid.

Once you have successfully cracked the coffin open, use your hands and feet to push the soil coming into the hole towards the edges of the coffin. Fill the coffin with as much earth as possible, compacting it so as not to lose the ability to stick your head and shoulders into the hole.

By all means try to sit down, the earth will fill the empty space and shift in your favor, do not stop and continue to breathe calmly.
Once you have packed as much dirt inside the coffin as you can, use all your strength to stand up straight. It may be necessary to make the hole in the lid larger, but this will not be difficult with a cheap coffin.

Once your head is on the surface and you can breathe freely, don't hesitate to let yourself panic a little, even scream if necessary. If no one comes to your aid, pull yourself out of the ground, squirming like a worm.

Remember, the soil in a fresh grave is always loose and “it’s relatively easy to fight with it”; it’s much more difficult to get out during the rain: wet ground denser and heavier. The same can be said about clay.

Unless your relatives are cheapskates and have buried you in a stainless steel coffin, the best thing to do in this case is to try to get loud sounds from the coffin by pressing on the lid where it is attached or banging on the coffin with a belt buckle or something similar. Perhaps someone is still standing near the grave.

Please note that lighting a match or lighter if you have one is a bad idea. An open fire will very quickly destroy the entire supply of oxygen.

Buried alive

It is no coincidence that in almost all nations it is customary to hold a burial ceremony not immediately, but after a certain number of days after death. There were many cases when “dead people” came to life at funerals, and there were also cases when they woke up inside the coffin. Since ancient times, man has been afraid of being buried alive. Taphophobia - the fear of being buried alive is observed in many people. It is believed that this is one of the basic phobias of the human psyche. According to the laws of the Russian Federation, the deliberate burial of a person alive is considered murder committed with extreme cruelty and is punished accordingly.

Imaginary death

Lethargy is an unexplored painful condition that is similar to a normal dream. Even in ancient times, signs of death were considered to be the absence of breathing and the cessation of heartbeat. However, in the absence modern equipment it was difficult to determine where the imaginary death was and where the real one was. Nowadays there are practically no cases of funerals of living people, but a couple of centuries ago this was a fairly common occurrence. Lethargic sleep usually lasts from several hours to several weeks. But there are cases when lethargy lasted for months. Lethargic sleep differs from coma in that the human body maintains the vital functions of organs and is not under threat of death. There are many examples of lethargic sleep and related issues in the literature, but they do not always have a scientific basis and are often fictional. Thus, H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel “When the Sleeper Awake” tells about a man who “slept” for 200 years. This is certainly impossible.

Scary awakening

There are quite a lot of stories when people plunged into a state of lethargic sleep; let’s focus on the most interesting ones. In 1773, a terrible incident occurred in Germany: after the burial of a pregnant girl, strange sounds began to be heard from her grave. It was decided to dig up the grave and everyone who was there was shocked by what they saw. As it turned out, the girl began to give birth and as a result came out of a state of lethargic sleep. She was able to give birth in such cramped conditions, but due to lack of oxygen, neither the baby nor his mother managed to survive.
Another story, but not so terrible, happened in England in 1838. One official was always afraid of being buried alive and, as luck would have it, his fear materialized. A respected man woke up in a coffin and started screaming. At that moment, a young man was passing through the cemetery, who, hearing the man’s voice, ran for help. When the coffin was dug and opened, people saw the deceased with a frozen, eerie grimace. The victim died a few minutes before being rescued. Doctors diagnosed him with cardiac arrest; the man could not withstand such a terrible awakening to reality.

There were people who perfectly understood what lethargic sleep was and what to do if such a misfortune overtook them. For example, the English playwright Wilkie Collins was afraid that he would be buried while he was still alive. There was always a note near his bed, which spoke of the measures that should be taken before his burial.

Method of execution

As a way death penalty Live burial was used by the ancient Romans. For example, if a girl broke her vow of virginity, she was buried alive. A similar method of execution was used for many Christian martyrs. In the 10th century, Princess Olga gave the order to bury the Drevlyan ambassadors alive. During the Middle Ages in Italy, unrepentant murderers faced the fate of people buried alive. The Zaporozhye Cossacks buried the murderer alive in a coffin with the person whom he took life. In addition, the Germans used methods of execution through burial alive during the Great Patriotic War. Patriotic War 1941-1945. The Nazis executed Jews using this terrible method.

Ritual burials

It is worth noting that there are cases when people, of their own free will, find themselves buried alive. So, among certain nationalities South America, Africa and Siberia there is a ritual in which people bury the shaman of their village alive. It is believed that during the “pseudo-funeral” ritual, the healer receives the gift of communication with the souls of deceased ancestors.

Sources:

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 sleep (as lethargic sleep is often called) without modern equipment is 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 were preparing to hammer nails into the coffin, 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 deceased was restored. In Bergerac in 1842, the patient took a sleeping pill, 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.” This is only 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 didn’t even occur 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 dead man’s face. 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 had died of sudden cardiac arrest. As expected, Mikhail was buried on the third day, a wake was held... 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 testified that the man woke up in a grave, and then died for a long time and painfully. Elena Ivanovna Duzhkina, a resident of the city of Bereznyaki near Solikamsk, recalls how once in childhood she and a group of children saw a coffin floating out of 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 with time, was covered with deep scratches from the inside.

Living Gogol

The most famous similar case became scary tale, associated with Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. During his life, several times he fell into a strange, absolutely motionless state, reminiscent of death. But great writer He always came to his senses quickly, although he managed to fairly scare those around him. Gogol knew about this peculiarity of his and, more than anything else, 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 present here my last will.
I bequeath my body not to be buried until they appear obvious signs decomposition. 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, who kept it. 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 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 newspaper “Biysky Rabochiy”. 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. Thus, among some African tribes, peoples of 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 ritual of “pseudo-funeral” occupies an important place among the 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 certain channels open in his mind 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 pipe 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...