Short Stuff: Safety Coffins

Back in the 1800s, people had an outsized fear of being buried alive. Enter... THE SAFETY COFFIN! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:07Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit. So this is a short stuff that we can begin now.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  That's right, Josh. Let me set the stage. It's 1799. Founding father George Washington is on his deathbed. He calls over his secretary Tobias Lear and says, I am just going. Have me decently buried. But do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I'm dead because you never know.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  That is the last part, but that's basically what he was saying.

• 1:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, um, yeah. And that was a great George Washington, especially dying George Washington.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 1:53Josh Clark?

  The reason why he said that is because at the time there was a, there was a chance, let's call it a non-zero chance to get nerdy.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  That you might be buried alive accidentally. There's all sorts of different conditions and stuff that we understand now. If you hook somebody up to like a EKG or EEG or some sort of G, you'd be able to detect their heartbeat that you wouldn't be able to say like, um, palpitating it with your fingers or like watching somebody to see if they're actually breathing.

• 2:26Josh Clark?

  You might not even have a decent doctor around at the time and you may end up being buried alive, in which case you are effed.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder when they started checking pulses.

• 2:39Josh Clark?

  I don't know. Let's say 1800 on the dot.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Uh, I did a quick rare lookup and if we trust the AI overview.

• 2:49Josh Clark?

  I do not.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  All right, National Institutes of Health?

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Uh, they're talking like 4,000 plus years they've been checking pulses.

• 3:01Josh Clark?

  Okay, well, apparently some people were better at it than others because there do seem to be documented accounts of people who were found like entombed, um, who had like scratch marks on their coffin, or they were actually out of their coffin in a tomb.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21Josh Clark?

  That, that seemed to have been buried alive, came to, and then actually did die.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, like they said, I feel better.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  And they got up and so, you know, let, let's say it didn't happen that much because it probably didn't happen enough to the level of which people were scared of it.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  Sure, like a plane crash.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems to be an outsized fear back then of being buried alive. Um, that is an actual phobia. It's called, uh, taphophobia. T A P H E is Greek for burial. And, you know, because where we're going with all this, and we may have mentioned this briefly in our coffins episode.

• 4:02Josh Clark?

  I know we have.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  We had to, but this is a deeper dive into what was known as a security coffin or a safety coffin, which was, you know, for a while there, a lot of people got patents to build coffins that had all these little kind of ingenious ways to either get you out of there or alert people above ground that, hey, I'm feeling better.

• 4:22Josh Clark?

  Right. Come get me. I got some life left in me, right?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:26Josh Clark?

  These patents date back to the 1790s. Um, I think in Central Europe, at least there's a guy in this How Stuff Works article that, um, they interviewed named Adam Bisno, who's a historian at the US Patent and Trademark Office. And so he would know about patents, even ones in Central Europe from the 18th century. And at this time, the argument that's made for the kind of sudden appearance for them is that this coincides with the popularity of Romanticism, which kind of came as a backlash to the rationalism of Enlightenment, the Enlightenment. And Romanticism is like, no, there's stuff beyond this life that we can't see. There's, there's beauty in nature.

• 5:11Josh Clark?

  There's like, all of this stuff that you can't just think your way out of, or think you're like, things that you can't see that actually do exist.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:21Josh Clark?

  And there's probably some sort of afterlife. And who knows whether the people are fully gone. This eventually led to the rise of mediums and spiritualism. And there was just this kind of zeitgeist that the dead could conceivably still be in some sort of contact or communication, which doesn't directly go to Taphophobia. But if you're already thinking like, I don't want to be buried alive, this would probably goose you into potentially buying a safety coffin.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, the sort of a popular idea at the time was that the veil is very thin between life and death.

• 5:56Josh Clark?

  Ah, yes.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And like, how thin could it be? Like, maybe so thin where you bury me by accident?

• 6:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like poor Bill Pullman in Serpent in the Rainbow.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Or Kiefer Sutherland's wife in that movie, which was a remake of a foreign film.

• 6:14Josh Clark?

  So good. Both of them were, it was one of those rare films where the American adaptation was just as good as the European original. Both of them are worth seeing.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  What were those called? It was one word?

• 6:28Josh Clark?

  The Vanishing?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, Vanishing, yeah.

• 6:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So, um, yeah. And then also that poor guy who almost got buried in the Twilight Zone, but he, he started crying because he was so sad and scared. And some nurse, one of the nurses noticed his tears, like, Doctor, he's still alive, right before I think they did an autopsy on him.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, or like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

• 6:52Josh Clark?

  That's a great one, too. Sure. I think also Barnabas Collins, you can make a case for in Dark Shadows. The TV show, not the terrible, terrible, terrible movie.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  I didn't see that.

• 7:05Josh Clark?

  I saw 20 minutes of it and was like, oh, boy. Like, these people should be individually shamed for this.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  It was Tim Burton, wasn't it?

• 7:13Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. So we're going to take a break and call Tim Burton, tell him to think about what he's done and we'll be right back with Safety Coffins.

• 7:39Josh Clark?

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• 8:02Josh Clark?

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• 8:17Speaker 02

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• 9:57Speaker 02

  All right, so more than 100 security coffin patents were granted in the United States alone in the 19th century. And they got a little wacky, like each one had its own sort of spin on the best way to either get someone out or to alert people above ground.

• 10:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, one way was like you could just do something as simple as a bell to basically and put the cord in the person's hand and they could just like pull the bell. It's pretty simple and straightforward. There are others that had like, I guess they would put a tube in that led and connected to the coffin and then buried the person buried around that stuff. So if the person came to, they could actually crawl, use the ladder to crawl out of their own grave, which talk about a story to tell at parties.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  It's like, you guys aren't going to believe this.

• 10:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Are you the guy who climbed out of his grave?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Because you know, that starts at the dinner party and when anyone's like, I've been really lucky, I haven't lost a lot of close friends. Like, has anyone ever lost like close friends and had to like preside over their funeral? And the guy just puts his napkin in his lap.

• 11:07Josh Clark?

  That's pretty good.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, a life preserving coffin, I believe, is what the patent file was in 1843 from Christian Eisenbrunt of Baltimore, Maryland. And this had a spring loaded lid where if you, the quote was, the slightest motion of either the head or the hand would spring this thing up. Of course, that's no good if you're buried under six feet of dirt.

• 11:29Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  So his suggestion is like, hey, this coffin only works if you're in a, in a tomb, like an above ground vault. And you got to leave a key on the inside of that thing. So if you pop out of the coffin and you're still locked in the tomb, that's no good either.

• 11:43Josh Clark?

  Can't you see a loved one like sitting up in the middle of the night like, I forgot to leave the key?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:48Josh Clark?

  There's something, there's another problem with that, too. If this thing sprung open at the slightest movement of the, of the person, corpses move and shift around during decomposition. And I'm sure that that has accounted, like, I think there's accounts of corpses flipping over and being found face down. I'm sure that that accounts for a lot of the stories of people being found and suspected to have been buried alive. But I don't think corpses, like, leave claw marks on their, their coffins. So there, there seem to be some that are legit.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Edgar Allan Poe didn't help things much when in 1844, he wrote a short story called The Premature Burial, where in it, he says, "To be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of those, these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think." And then he talks about the boundaries between life and death being shadowy and vague, kind of playing into that, he was writing of the times, you know, because that's like we talked about, that's kind of how people thought of things. So after that, I think there were even more people coming out with these things.

• 13:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there was a guy named Franz Wester, who in New Jersey, I guess that's where he was from, he had an improved burial case. And you could essentially climb out of it, I think. This is the one that had the tube with the ladder.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:16Josh Clark?

  And if you were too weak, you could pull on a bell. So this was like, you know, it had a failsafe. And he gave demonstrations of his coffin, where he would be buried under, like, four feet of dirt and would make his way out of the coffin back above ground.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's not the only one. It seems like the, the big showman, because this was sort of around the snake oil time, where you would put on a big show to try and talk people into buying your thing.

• 13:43Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  And in the 19th century, there was a guy, Count Michel de Carnice Carnicchi, such a great name. He dubbed himself as the Chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia, whatever that means.

• 13:56Josh Clark?

  It's the high ranking manager of a royal household.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. So he was like, yeah, like a butler.

• 14:05Josh Clark?

  Essentially, but he was in charge of everybody.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Like the head butler.

• 14:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I guess. Sure. Or the Chamberlain.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, hey, I'm not trying to degrade him. Because he was quite the showman. He would travel through Europe and the United States trying to sell his unit called the Carnice. And there was an article from the Chicago Tribune in 1899 that they would read before his big show where at the Academy of Medicine in New York City, Dr. Henry J.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  How would you pronounce that one?

• 14:37Josh Clark?

  Garrigas.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Garrigas. Where he startled his fellow members with the assertion that one of every 200 people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic state and is buried alive. So very dubious numbers, obviously, but he would use that as prelude to take the stage and do his own demonstration where he would bury somebody alive.

• 15:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and the Le Carnice had an own, had like a bell. Again, this is pretty low hanging fruit and it makes a lot of sense.

• 15:09Josh Clark?

  But he also put in a tube that you could breathe through. You could also talk through it.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:14Josh Clark?

  And be like, what's, what's been going on the last few days? While you wait for help. And he didn't, he wasn't himself buried alive like Franz Wester. He would get volunteers to do it. And there's a guy named Farofo Lorenzo, who is Italian, believe it or not, and he volunteered to be buried alive in this, this Le Carnice casket. And he stayed there for nine days back in 1898, which apparently is still the record for being buried alive.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think at one point on day like seven, he spoke through the tube and he was like, I'm gonna put my mouth around the tube now and just drop a couple of Tic Tacs.

• 15:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And then the next day he shouted, I gotta poop through the, through the tube. Nine days, Chuck. Let's think about that.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a long time. And that seems verified.

• 16:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's one other thing, too, that we can't not mention. We've definitely mentioned him before, but I find it so fascinating. Timothy Clark Smith, whose grave in New Haven, Vermont, not Connecticut, back in, I think, 1893, was fitted out with a window that looked down the six feet to his face.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right.

• 16:33Josh Clark?

  That was exposed so that pastors by could check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 16:39Josh Clark?

  And it's still there today, except you just can't see very far because the window's kind of, well, it's more than 100 years old.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's too bad.

• 16:47Josh Clark?

  Uh, you got anything else, man?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I got nothing else.

• 16:51Josh Clark?

  Say it.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Uh, then I guess short stuff is out.

• 16:57Speaker 03

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