Who can contemplate the ultimate of horror of being buried alive without being chilled to the marrow? But before the advent of modern medicine, doctors were hard pressed to tell the difference between death, comas, paralysis, and catalepsy, which sometimes led to living people being mistakenly interred. The Roman emperor Zeno and the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol are rumoured to have suffered this fate, along with countless other less illustrious mortals. Fears of being buried alive led to safety coffins being developed in which a string was tied to the occupant’s finger allowing them to ring a bell above ground should they unexpectedly revive.

Live burial was also practised as a punishment in many cultures, including in ancient China for heretics, among Germanic tribes in the Dark Ages for cowardice in battle and in medieval England for crimes such as sodomy,

Robert Stephenson’s illustrated talk will consider the fear that this taboo subject once generated and the physical precautions introduced to avoid this unthinkable calamity. These included strange tests for ascertaining fatality, the infliction of death-inducing measures on questionable corpses, waiting mortuaries, the afore-mentioned escape coffins and the founding of societies to pacify the trembling citizens of Victorian and Edwardian times.

Tickets £12 including a Victorian punch and a 20% donation to a host of restoration projects at Brompton Cemetery. Please click here to purchase.

ROBERT STEPHENSON
Robert Stephenson is a qualified City of London Culture and Heritage guide and a trustee at Kensal Green and Brompton cemeteries. He teaches on London and death studies. Robert is also chairman of the National Federation of Cemetery Friends.