Buried Alive: Essie Dunbar's Coffin, Felt-Lined Vaults and Vestal Virgins

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Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, was never just Victorian paranoia. This episode explains what actually kills someone trapped in a coffin: carbon dioxide builds up as panic speeds the breathing, and hypercapnia sets in before the oxygen runs out, though a trickle of air through loose soil can stretch survival terrifyingly long. It weighs the legend of the fifth century Emperor Zeno, said to have screamed for three days inside his sarcophagus while Empress Ariadne refused to open it, against folklorist Paul Barber's point that decomposition gases can twist limbs and tear shrouds. Then come the verified cases, including 30 year old Essie Dunbar of South Carolina in 1915, who sat up in her coffin after her sister demanded one last look.

The fear outlived the 1800s. A Massachusetts funeral director found a living person in a body bag in 2001, and a Michigan woman pronounced dead in 2020 was found breathing at the funeral home, because a deeply slowed metabolism can drop below what field monitors detect. Society answered with Irish wakes, Robert Robinson's 1791 glass coffin window, J.G. Krichbaum's 1882 periscope pipe, and the 1896 London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. Live burial was also a punishment, from Rome's Vestal Virgins to medieval Germany, and a spectacle, from the yogi Sadhu Haridas to escape artist Bill Shirk.

• The Williamsport, Pennsylvania family of 1890 who built a felt lined vault at Wildwood Cemetery with an air supply and an escape wheel
• Why there is no evidence anyone was ever saved by a safety coffin
• Medieval German executioners driving stakes through buried women so they could not return as undead Wiedergänger
• The legend of St. Oran at Iona, dug up alive and buried again for saying heaven and hell did not exist
• Bill Shirk's 1992 plexiglass coffin collapsing under seven tons of dirt and cement