Safety Coffins

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fear of being buried alive was so common that several designs for safety coffins were patented. Fitted with a mechanism to allow the occupant to signal that they were still alive. Many of them during the cholera epidemic in the 18 hundreds.

Before the era of modern medicine, the fear was not entirely irrational. Throughout history, there have been numerous cases of people being buried alive by accident. In 1905, the English reformer William Tebb collected accounts of premature burial. He found two hundred nineteen cases of near live-burial, one hundred forty nine cases of actual live-burials, ten cases of live-dissection and two cases of awakening while being embalmed.

Live-burial has also been used as a form of punishment or execution. In Nuremberg Germany, during the fifteen-hundreds, those found guilty of theft would be buried alive and then impaled through the heart. Although, in 1515 the city council decided that the punishment was too cruel and opted for drowning instead.