commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Some of us are deathly afraid of being buried alive; others among us probably rarely even think about it. When I was a child, an obscure Edgar Allen Poe short story called “”The Premature Burial” was made into a film by noted director Roger Corman and won — fittingly enough — the “Sleeper of the Year” award. I never saw the film but remember seeing ads for it on TV and being momentarily transfixed with fear. Around that same time I was temporarily afraid of vampires.
Fast forward to Sao Paulo, Brazil, circa 2013. A women in this still largely Catholic nation is visiting her family tomb to pay respects to her dead relatives. Janet Tappin writes for the Daily Mail:
A woman visiting a family tomb in Brazil had the shock of her life when a body emerged alive from a grave, waving its arms around. The woman was at a cemetery in the suburb of Ferraz de Vasconcelos, Sao Paulo, when she heard faint noises then noticed the earth moving in a grave close by.
‘I was terrified to see a man, who I thought was dead, trying to get out of the grave,’ said the petrified woman, who asked not to be named. He had his head and hands out and was moving his arms around, trying to get out.’
The woman was naturally terrified and at first she ran away screaming. But then she calmed down, returned to the cemetery and called the authorities, who at first refused to believe her and accused her of wasting their time and playing a joke:
‘They kept questioning me asking: “Are you serious. This is a joke isn’t it?”‘
Displaying the hardened skepticism of many lawmen, the Sao Paulo police refused to believe the woman. She did not give up, though, nor did she doubt herself, at least not enough to “throw in the towel”. Instead, she went to the trouble of marching into the cemetery office and pleading with them to confirm with police that her discovery was real. The office personnel listened to her, went to the grave site and found the victim half-in and half-out of the soil.
* * * * *
The dramatic rescue, what has just been reported by the media, is believed to have take place about a week ago. In images shown on Brazil’s Record TV, the victim appears nearly lifeless but is still breathing as he is extracted from the soil by the emergency team.
A YouTube video shows the man wearing a grey jumper with the bottom half of his body almost completely buried in the earth.
The man is now recuperating in the local hospital in Ferraz de Vasconcelos. According to a hospital source, he is slowly ‘coming back to life’. Prior to his eventual release, understandably enough, he will be required to take a battery of psychological tests.
* * * * *
According to the police, this strange case was not the result of occult phenomena, vampires or some sort of bizarre medical mix-up. Rather, the constabulary has a perfectly logical explanation. The police believe that the man, who is thought to be a former city hall worker, was involved in an altercation in another part of the city. Badly beaten by his attackers, he eventually passed out and was transported to the cemetery by his assailants.
There, the police theorize, his assailants threw him into a empty grave which was partly filled with earth. They may have spread earth over his body to conceal him; in any event, they didn’t stick around for long and left him there. When the victim finally regained consciousness, he began making groaning noises which fortunately alerted the woman who discovered him there.
The officials believe it was a group assault with more than one person involved, describing it as a ‘despicable vendetta’ that could (would) have ended in tragedy if the woman had not chosen to visit her family’s grave that morning.
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This is the second incident of this type to occur in Brazil over the last three months. In September, a homeless man was beaten over the head with a shovel by three teenagers in the Brazilian capital, Rio de Janeiro. The wretched teens then tried to suffocate the man with a plastic bag before stripping him naked and burying him in the sand in the early hours on the city’s Leblon Beach.
The crime was reported by an anonymous witness but the man — who was taken to the hospital by police but was never identified — died shortly thereafter. The suspects, however, were arrested based on the tip and are presumably in prison.
* * * * *
So in this case, there is a perfectly logical explanation as to how the poor man came to be half-buried in the cemetery, moaning in pain and confusion. I’m certain, however, that there are many documented cases on record of individuals who through medical blunder or some other kind of human error ended up prematurely interred.
In the 19th century, Dr. Timothy Clark Smith of Vermont was so concerned about the possibility of being buried alive that he arranged to be buried in a special crypt that included a breathing tube and a glass window in his grave marker that would permit him to peer out to the living world six feet above.
Someone very near and dear to me has an abiding fear of being buried alive and has pressured me to promise her that in the event she goes to “the happy hunting ground” before my number is called, that I will make sure that she is cremated, not buried. So, of course, I have vowed to do precisely that.
When it comes to my own “happy hereafter”, however, I am of two minds. Although many moderns opt for cremation — which is, of course, the convenient way to go and results in a lovely urn of ashes — I retain the atavistic desire to be buried in the earth. I don’t know exactly why other than that it sounds restful to be lying there in a cool, dark coffin — out of sight but hopefully not completely out of mind.