Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. 2001. New York: Norton, 2002.

The stories are horrific. Sick people, men, women and children alike, are mistakenly declared dead by ignorant officials, careless medics and, worst of all, their own families, and confined to the grave while still alive. They wake in their coffins, nailed in, sometimes in time to be saved by a watchful attendant, sometimes to have their feeble cries ignored by the uncaring or hushed by the superstitious, sometimes too suffer a second, more terrifying, death. In these last cases, belated exhumations reveal bodies broken and twisted by impossible efforts to escape. Most of these stories are false.

That is the fortunate conclusion of Dr. Bondeson. His exploration of fear of premature burial spans history, society, literature and medicine over the course of centuries.

Fear of live interment peaked in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a time when medical professionals lost faith in the signs of death and common people lost faith in the medical profession. Such a fear now, in the west where modern medical practice is well established, would be considered irrational, but in those days, it was more reasonable, even if it was unlikely to occur.

In Germany, the view prevailed that only putrefaction was a sure sign of death, and it sparked the building of hospitals for the uncertainly dead, where attendants closely watched corpses for signs of life until sufficient decay confirmed its absence. Similar views later prevailed in France, though it did not build similar mortuaries. Anti-premature-burial was always a minority movement in English speaking nations, but adherents held out the longest in the United States and United Kingdom through ties to spiritualism, fringe medicine and other groups.


Bondeson shows the folly of the sensationalists who stirred live burial fears, but shows some sympathy for the true philanthropists who took up the cause. He doesn’t even rule it out today in undeveloped areas where modern methods for diagnosing death don’t prevail.

Buried Alive contains more than a few page-long paragraphs, but it is very readable. The tone is not academic and Bondeson’s enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. He handles some of the more lurid and sensational aspects of the history and literature with tongue-in-cheek humor.