Fear of Being Buried Alive

A phobia is defined by disproportion to the danger. Where the danger was real, the term does not apply, and the interesting question becomes when it started applying.

What Tebb counted

The English reformer William Tebb collected accounts of premature burial and published his tally in 1905. His tally:

• two hundred and nineteen cases of near live burial
• one hundred and forty-nine actual live burials
• ten cases of live dissection
• two of people awakening while being embalmed

Those are collected accounts rather than verified cases, and they are the most specific numbers attached to this fear anywhere. The last two categories are the ones that stay with a reader, and they are the reason the fear had a nineteenth-century apparatus of safety coffins, waiting mortuaries and signal bells behind it.

The dispute about how often it happened

T. M. Montgomery, an American funeral director, reported in 1896 that nearly two per cent of those exhumed were no doubt victims of suspended animation.

The folklorist Paul Barber has argued the opposite: that the incidence of live burial has been overestimated, and that the normal effects of decomposition are being mistaken for signs of life. A body moves after death for reasons that have nothing to do with life, and a disturbed grave has explanations that do not require the occupant to have been breathing.

Both positions are in the record and this entry keeps them both. What can be said is that the two accounts differ about the physical evidence rather than about whether the fear existed.

How medicine removed the factual basis

The eighteenth century developed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and crude defibrillation techniques for reviving people considered dead, and the Royal Humane Society was founded, under its original name, as the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned.

That name is the whole history in one phrase. Apparently drowned. A category of person who looks dead and is not was formally recognised, an organisation was created for them, and the techniques for telling the difference began to exist. Once the distinction could be made reliably, the fear lost its factual basis and became available to be a phobia.

What taphophobia means now

The modern fear inherits an old danger and keeps the specificity of it. Taphophobia is not a fear of death, of coffins or of graveyards in general; the definition names being buried alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. The error is part of the object.

That distinguishes it from Claustrophobia, whose two beliefs, suffocation and restriction, would both apply in a coffin and neither of which requires a mistake by anybody else. It also distinguishes it from necrophobia, which concerns the dead rather than being taken for one of them.

Many urban legends carry the same shape, generally featuring someone entering a state of sopor or coma and being taken for dead. The 2008 printed encyclopedia of phobias files the fear alongside graves rather than alongside death.

What has not been established

No prevalence figure exists. No study is named. Nothing in the material measures how many people hold this fear now, in a period when the medical determination of death is not seriously in doubt.

The absence is worth stating plainly, because taphophobia is one of the fears most confidently described elsewhere, on the strength of a history that stopped being current two centuries ago.