What is Taphophobia?

Taphophobia is the fear of being buried alive. If you were to speak about having this fear today, you might get some strange looks! However, this was a very common phobia during the Victorian Era, and it was not without merit. So many people were buried alive during that time that doctors had to adapt their practices to ensure patients headed for burial were actually dead!

Unfortunately, medicine was quite rudimentary in the 1800s compared to modern practice. During the Yellow Fever outbreaks throughout the 1800s, many doctors were afraid to touch their patients to feel for a pulse or breath. Today we know that the last phase of Yellow Fever is coma, but back then the doctors would simply see a pale, unresponsive person lying in their bed and assume they were dead.

In Savannah, if you came from a wealthy family; it was likely that you’d have a family crypt that you’d be buried in. Crypts in Savannah look like little houses half-buried in the cemetery. They go down into the ground about eight feet on average, and they have shelves lining the inner walls. When a family member dies, they’d be wrapped in a burial shroud and placed on one of the shelves inside. After their body fully deteriorated, their bones would be placed in a large chest within the crypt, alongside the bones of other deceased relatives. This provided enough space to use the same burial crypt for generations, saving money in the long run and keeping the family together at rest.

During Yellow Fever, however, people were dying faster than the bodies in the crypt could deteriorate. This meant that the person burying their family members would have to enter the crypt during the most gut-twisting parts of decay. Imagine this person’s surprise when they enter the crypt to find their deceased loved one strewn out inside the crypt right in front of the door. Their burial shroud is a crumpled mess on the shelf they once rested on, and the skin on their fingers has worn down to the bone. A look of terror is frozen on their lifeless face, staring helplessly toward the bloody scratches on the door that only opens from the outside.

This was a disturbingly common occurrence during the outbreaks of Yellow Fever. People began to panic, and taphophobia wreaked nearly as much havoc on the population as the epidemic. Doctors, scientists, and terrified civilians began to desperately try to come up with a solution to the horrors their loved ones had faced- horrors they too would face unless they could fix this.

In 1857, the new and improved safety coffin emerged from New Jersey. This coffin featured a window on the lid and a tube on the side. They figured if someone was wrongfully placed in the coffin while they were still alive, the window would fog up from their breath before they were buried. However, if the funeral operators failed to notice the foggy window in time, a rope was to be tied around the wrist of the deceased. They would feed the rope up through the tube attached to the coffin, and it would be tied off to a bell on the surface of the burial plot. If the deceased suddenly came to life underground, they could ring the bell at the surface of the plot and alert anyone nearby that they were still alive.

Unfortunately, the bell wasn’t foolproof either. If someone was actually dead, their body would swell up with gasses during decomposition, which would move the extremities as well as the bell attached to said extremities. Luckily, we have come a long way in terms of medical practices, and doctors are able to determine whether or not their patients are actually dead or not. In fact, doctors are now required by law to announce the death of a patient, along with the time they were declared dead, to prevent these atrocities from happening again.