Thomas Wolfe’s Premature Burial
“…their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth.” — Look Homeward, Angel
Fear of premature burial was once a common phobia called Taphophobia. Thomas Wolfe reveals Eugene Gant’s (his alter ego) fascination with the dimly lit local funeral parlor as he looks in the door while passing through town on his way home from school. He remembered the smell, “A sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedar-wood floated on the cool heavy air.” In Look Homeward, Angel Wolfe describes his own fear of being buried alive.
The ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him. In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had foreseen his waking life-in-death, his slow, frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from the ground a call for hands.
In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story titled “Premature Burial.” Like Eugene Gant in Look Homeward, Angel, its main character expresses concern about being buried alive. Poe was certainly taking advantage of the common phobia and public interest in the subject in this tale. Poe comments “There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.” One of the earliest stories about premature burial can be found recorded in 11th century Greek history. It claimed that the 5th-century Roman emperor Zeno was buried alive in Constantinople’s Church of the Holy Apostles after an illness related to alcohol poisoning. As the tale goes, for three days cries of “have pity on me!” could be heard from within his sarcophagus.
The truth of the matter is that despite the centuries-old fear, doctors rarely pronounced people dead by mistake. In 1879, an editorial in The Pee Dee Herald in Wadesboro, NC tried to reassure the public “that while such things have happened, and may still happen, they are of the rarest of occurrences.” To avoid the problem, the newspaper cited the modern practice in some cemeteries of the use of mortuary houses to keep the dead in storage for a few days before interment. Physicians wrote numerous new treatises about properly detecting the signs of death. Coffins occasionally were equipped with emergency devices, such as bells, to allow the corpse to call for help. Perhaps you have heard of a “dead ringer.”
Yet, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, stories continually surfaced in newspapers about premature burials. It is no wonder Thomas Wolfe was afraid. The Charlotte Observer printed a report in February of 1885 that the exhumed corpse of a young man named Jenkins in Buncombe County, NC was found turned over onto its front inside the coffin, with much of his hair pulled out. Scratch marks were also visible on all sides of the coffin’s interior. The following month the Asheville Weekly Citizen reported there was no truth to the story.
Also in February of 1885, The People’s Press in Winston-Salem shared the news from Springfield, WV that a popular young lady named Mary Cox was buried in a vault after an accidental morphine overdose. For two days a neighbor's dogs howled outside the tomb. The grave was opened, and the horror was revealed. The poor girl had briefly come to life shredding the interior of the coffin in her unsuccessful attempt to escape. Another report in 1900 from Columbia, SC described a legal debate over a man named Pinckney Sizemore, accused of stealing his brother’s watch. He collapsed in the courtroom and the coroner quickly pronounced him dead from a heart attack. A grave was dug and the man was about to be interred when the police postponed the action until evidence of the death was proven unmistakable. Sizemore was alive, a shallow breath detected at his mouth with the use of a mirror. The Chatam Record shared the news in April of 1928 from Madison County, VA that Miss Fannie Broyles, stunned from a blow to the head by a falling tree limb, listened to her own funeral in an open coffin. The realization that she would soon be buried alive caused her to begin to twitch her eyelids. Mourning relatives noticed and a successful resuscitation effort began.
“That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” — Edgar Allen Poe
Read Poe’s story here: https://poestories.com/read/premature
Learn even more here: https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/when-fears-of-premature-burial-stalked-the-land/
