Taphephobia, the fear of being buried alive

Gasebalwe Seretse
Correspondent | Friday January 14, 2011 00:00

You can hear every word the people say and as they sob around your 'deathbed' you want to scream, 'I am alive!'.

The doctor comes through and you hear him or her pronouncing you dead. You are taken to the nearest morgue and put on a cold slab. You try to lift your hand or scream to the morgue attendants but nothing happens. You stay in the morgue for a few days before transported to your 'final' resting place.

You hear the priest offering words of condolences as he preaches from the Bible and you can clearly hear the mourners singing some of your favourite hymns.  As the coffin is lowered into the grave, you try to scream  that you are alive but nothing comes out of your mouth.

You hear the soil hitting the coffin as your mother or your lover wails in distress.  This is perhaps the worst nightmare that any living person can ever have and the truth of the matter is that many living people today have the secret fear of  being buried alive.

According to Wikipedia, the fear of being buried alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead is called taphephobia.

Wikipedia asserts that before the advent of modern medicine, the fear was not irrational as throughout history, there have been numerous cases of unfortunate people being buried alive.

The online dictionary further says that in 1905, the English reformer, William Tebb collected accounts of premature burial. He found 219 cases of near burial, 149 actual live burial, 10 cases of live dissection and 2 cases of awakening while being embalmed.

In Botswana, there have been allegations of people being presumed dead while they are actually alive. A few years back, a local tabloid reported a case in which a dead man is said to have winked at his fiance and stretched his hands out to mourners. This sounds like a grade B Hollywood movie but whether those stories are true or not, is hard to prove.

Among black Africans, they have always been stories of people being bewitched so that they look dead to their beloved ones. The person is buried alive only to be dug out of the grave by the witches or witchdoctors to be turned into a zombie. 

The zombie is then made to slave away in the yard of its owner oblivious of things happening around him. While many Batswana may not necessarily say much about the fear of being buried alive, many believe that people have indeed been buried only to be exhumed and  turned into zombies or matholwane/setotwane in Setswana.

It is not only Africans who believe that people can be buried alive. One of the prominent figures in history who might have had the fear of being buried alive is one of the founding fathers of the United States of America (US), George Washington who is said to have asked his assistants on his deathbed not to bury him for two days.

They have also been stories of religious fanatics who told their followers not to bury them immediately after their death as they were going to rise again in a given period of time. Could these insinuations be driven by the fear of being buried alive or the fear of death itself?

Some critics of the biblical story of resurrection say Jesus Christ was not really dead when he was put in the tomb and that is why he was able to get out of it. There is no indication however that Christ himself had the fear of being buried alive but some of his words prior to his crucifixion suggest that he was looking forward to passing through the stage of his imminent torture and death on the cross.

While Christ is said to have miraculously woken up from the dead and the stone at the mouth of his tomb was also miraculously rolled away, some victims who have been buried alive do not normally have stories with happy endings.

In the ancient times, some people were buried in large tombs meaning that if it so happened that another relative died they would be buried in the same tomb.

According to some accounts, there were instances when relatives came to bury another family member or inspect the tomb, only to find their dead at the mouth of the tomb as if they had tried to escape from it. Some also tell stories of coffins which were exhumed and opened only to find the dead with outstretched hands, a sign that the dead person might have actually been buried alive.

Inventors have throughout history made coffins that allow those presumed dead to alert the living that he is alive but so far these inventions have not saved many from untimely burial.

According to Wikipedia, urban legend states that the saying 'saved by the bell 'and 'dead ringer' are both derived from the notion of how a rope attached to a bell in the coffin that would alert people that the recently buried person is not deceased but that theory has been proved false.

However, according to experts, modern medicine has equipped doctors to use a number of methods to determine if a person is really deceased and therefore the chance of being buried alive has become slimmer.  This however offers little comfort to the many people out there who suffer from taphephobia.