A Terrifying And Gory Way Of Dying: Being Buried Alive
Fear of being buried alive is the fear of being placed in a grave while still alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. The abnormal, psychopathological version of this fear is referred to as taphophobia. Before the advent of modern medicine, the fear was not entirely irrational. Throughout history, there have been numerous cases of people being buried alive by accident. Let's dig more into these horror stories.
'The most terrible of all the atrocities that a man is capable of doing ...'
The above sentence was contained in a book written in 1661 describing the painful ending of the man named Lawrence Cawthorn.
Lawrence Cawthorn was a man buried alive in the 17th century. The reason why he went through this misfortune was that medical science was not sufficiently developed at that time. There were hundreds of people who were buried alive in the 17th century when doctors couldn't tell when people were in a coma and had lost consciousness. They were thought to have died but were in fact only in a coma.
Imagine for a moment what Lawrence Cawthorn experienced under the ground.
You're slowly regaining consciousness and you find yourself in a dark place. You are trying to get up but you understand you can't do that when you hit your head on a cold piece of wood. After a while, you notice that that wood is all around you and made it impossible for you to move. Your hopes and your oxygen are dying. You start to panic. You are repeatedly yelling as much as you, the chance of someone hearing you is almost impossible.
Cawthorn, buried in a church cemetery, was lucky enough to make his voice heard but couldn't be saved in time.
And when Cawthorn's grave was opened the scene was terrifying: the burial robe was torn, the corpse's eyes were swollen, his brain out of his skull, his mouth was full of blood, his chest was black and purple, and there was earth under his fingernails.
Is it really possible to imagine what a person goes through in such a situation?
According to the stories shared by people who have been saved after being buried alive, the 10-15 minutes when you can breathe causes the worst moments of a person's life. On one hand the person digs the earth and hopes to climb to the surface, but on the other hand, he/she begins to lose consciousness and starts seeing hallucinations due to decreasing oxygen.
Burying living people was used as a method of execution in the past.
For example, in medieval Italy, refusing to repent, the killers were punished by being buried alive. Likewise, women who killed their husbands in the 17th century Russia were executed in this way. During the Nanking Massacre in the 20th century, there was serious evidence and photographs of Japanese soldiers burying Chinese civilians alive.
Horrifying stories don't end here.
There are many horror stories in which people are buried alive: There are stories of women who give birth under the earth, victims whose hands are covered in their blood because they were trying to climb out of their tombs, and stories of people who have been lucky enough to be rescued by tomb raiders right before they could die. All of them give us a sense of fear, don't they?
To be buried alive is one of the greatest and deepest fears of people.
Today, even though it is rare to see such extreme cases, the scary idea still continues to exist in our consciousness. There is even a term for the fear of being buried alive, taphephobia. After all this information, we can say that one of the worst ways of dying is being buried alive and it truly is the most appalling of all the atrocities that a person is able to do ...
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