Real life is sometimes worse than fiction. And some horrific stories about premature burials are chilling even more than the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
10. Octavia Smith Hatcher
In the late 1800s, the American city of Pickewill, in the state of Kentucky, was shocked by an unknown illness, and the most tragic case was that of Octavia Smith Hatcher.
After her young son passed away in January 1891, Octavia was overcome by depression, she did not get out of bed, became very ill and fell into a coma. On May 2 of the same year, she was declared dead for an unknown reason.
Embalming was not practiced then, so the woman was quickly buried in the local cemetery due to the sweltering heat. Just a week after her funeral, many of the townspeople were struck by the same disease, as a result of which they also fell into a coma, with the only difference that after a while they woke up.
Octavia's husband began to fear the worst and worried that he had buried his living wife. He ordered the exhumation of her body, and, as it turned out, the worst fears were confirmed.
Promotional video:
The linings on the inside of the coffin were scratched, the woman's nails were broken and bloody, and a stamp of horror was forever frozen on her face. She died while being buried alive.
Octavia was reburied, and her husband erected a very majestic monument over her grave, which still stands today. It was later suggested that the mysterious disease was caused by the tsetse fly, an African insect that can cause sleeping sickness.
9. Mina El Houari
When a person goes on a first date, he always thinks about how it will end. Many are faced with an unexpected date ending, but hardly anyone expects to be buried alive after dessert.
One such horrifying story happened in May 2014, when 25-year-old French woman Mina El Houari chatted with a potential fiancé online for several months before deciding to travel to Morocco to meet him.
On May 19, she checked into a hotel room in Fez, Morocco to go on her first real date with the man of her dreams, but she was not destined to leave the hotel.
Mina met a man live, they spent a wonderful evening together, at the end of which she collapsed dead on the floor. Instead of calling the police or an ambulance, the man thought that Mina was dead and decided to bury her in his garden.
Everything would be fine, but Mina did not really die. As is often the case with people with diabetes, Mina fell into a diabetic coma and was buried alive. Several days passed before the girl's family reported missing and flew to Morocco to try to find her.
The Moroccan police managed to find this poor fellow. Before the discovery of the grave in the yard, they were in his house with dirty clothes and a shovel with which he buried the girl. The man confessed to the crime and was charged with murder.
8. Mrs. Boger
In July 1893, farmer Charles Boger and his wife were living in Whitehaven, Pennsylvania, when Mrs. Boger died suddenly for some unknown reason. Doctors confirmed that the woman was dead and was buried.
This was supposed to be the end of the story, but some time after her death, a friend told Charles that before meeting him, his wife suffered from bouts of hysteria, and perhaps she did not die.
The very thought that he could bury his wife alive did not give Charles rest until he himself fell into hysterics. The man could not live with the thought that his wife was dying in a coffin and, with the help of his friends, carried out the exhumation of his wife's body to confirm or deny his fears. What he found shocked him.
Mrs Boger's body was turned over. Her clothes were torn, the glass lid of the coffin was shattered, and fragments flew all over her body. The woman's skin was bloody and covered with wounds, and there were no fingers at all.
She was supposed to gnaw them in a hysterical fit as she tried to free herself. No one knows what happened to Charles after the terrible find.
7. Angelo Hays
Some of the scariest stories of being buried alive are not so dire because the victim miraculously managed to escape.
This was also the case with Angelo Hayes. In 1937, Angelo was a regular 19 year old boy living in Saint Quentin de Chalet, France. One day Angelo was riding his motorcycle, lost control and hit a brick wall.
Without hesitation, the boy was pronounced dead and buried three days after the accident. In the neighboring town of Bordeaux, an insurance company suspected something was wrong after learning that Angelo's father had recently insured his son's life for 200,000 francs, so an inspector went to the scene.
The inspector requested the exhumation of Angelo's body two days after the funeral to confirm the cause of death, however, faced with a complete surprise. The boy was not really dead!
When the doctor took off the boy's funeral clothes, his body was still warm, and his heart was barely beating. He was immediately taken to the hospital, where Angelo underwent several more surgeries and general rehabilitation before he fully recovered.
During all this, he was unconscious, because he received a serious head injury. After his recovery, the guy began to release coffins, from which it was possible to get out in case of premature burial. He toured with his invention and became somewhat of a celebrity in France.
6. Mr. Cornish
John Snart published The Thesaurus of Horror in 1817. In the book, he tells the gruesome story of being buried alive involving a man named Mr. Cornish.
Cornish was the beloved mayor of Bath, who died of a fever about 80 years before Snart published his work.
As was the custom at the time, the body was buried fairly quickly after death was announced. The gravedigger was almost halfway through his work when he decided to rest and have a drink with passing acquaintances. He walked away from the grave to talk with visitors, when suddenly they all heard choking groans coming from the grave of the half-buried Mr. Cornish.
The gravedigger realized that he had buried the man alive and tried to save him while the oxygen was still in the coffin. But by the time they had scattered all the dirt and managed to remove the lid of the coffin, it was too late, because Cornish died, scratching his elbows and knees bloody.
This story so scared the elder half-sister of Cornish that she asked her relatives after her death to chop off her head so that she would not suffer the same fate.
5. Surviving 6-year-old child
To bury a person alive is terrible, but it becomes unimaginably scary when a child becomes a victim of such a disaster. In August 2014, this is exactly what happened to a six-year-old girl from the Indian village of Uttar Pradesh.
According to the girl's uncle, Alok Awasthi, a couple who lived nearby, told her that her mother had asked them to take the baby to a nearby village. The girl agreed to go with them, but when they reached the sugarcane field, the couple decided, for some unknown reason, to strangle the girl and bury her on the spot.
Fortunately, some people working in the field saw the couple get out without the girl. They found her unconscious in a shallow grave whipped up right in the middle of a field. At the very last moment, caring people managed to take the baby to the hospital, and when the girl came to, she was able to tell about her kidnappers.
The girl does not remember that she was buried alive. The police are not aware of the reasons why the couple decided to kill the girl, and the suspects have not yet been found. Fortunately, the story did not end tragically.
4. Buried alive of his own free will
As long as a person is alive, fate will be challenged. Nowadays, there are even textbooks that tell you what to do if you are buried alive, and how to avoid death.
Moreover, people go so far that they voluntarily bury themselves in order to play with death. In 2011, a 35-year-old resident of Russia did just that, and, unfortunately, died tragically. It is unclear why the man believed that if he was buried alive within 24 hours, it would make him happy for the rest of his life.
With the help of a friend, he dug his own grave outside the city of Blagoveshchensk, where he placed a homemade coffin complete with an air pipe, one bottle of water and a cell phone.
After the man lay down in the coffin, his friend threw mud and dirt at the hole and left. The man only called his friend once to say that he was feeling great. However, when the friend returned to the burial site the next morning, there was already a corpse in the coffin.
It turned out that it started raining at night, which suddenly blocked the air duct, and the man suffocated in his own coffin. Despite the tragedy of history, the tendency to be buried alive was very common, and few people know who suffered the same fate.
3. Lawrence Cawthorn
This story is about a London butcher named Lawrence Cawthorne, who was struck down by an unknown disease in 1661. The owner of the land where the butcher worked was interested in his early death in order to inherit the man's property. She encouraged him to be declared dead quickly, without consulting a doctor, and buried the poor fellow in a nearby chapel.
Soon after the burial of the unfortunate man, visitors and mourners heard screams and screams coming from the grave. People rushed to dig up the man's coffin, but it was too late.
The clothes in which Lawrence was buried were completely torn, his eyes were swollen, and his head was bloody beyond recognition. The woman was accused of burying a man alive, and history wandered from generation to generation for hundreds of years.
2. Sipho Williams Mdletshe (Sipho William Mdletshe)
In 1993, a 24-year-old South African man named Sipho William Mdletsche and his fiancée were involved in a serious car accident. Sipho's fiancee survived, and the man himself was so badly wounded that he was pronounced dead.
Sipho's body was taken to a morgue in Johannesburg and placed in a metal box for burial. But the man didn't really die, he just passed out. For two days and nights he was in the box, until he came to his senses, in a daze he realized that he was in a closed metal box, and began to call for help.
Fortunately, the morgue workers were nearby and were able to help him. However, when Sipho came home to his fiancee, she chased him away, saying that a zombie had come. To be buried alive is simply terrifying, and then the bride did not accept.
1. Stephen Small
In 1987, wealthy media heir Stephen Small was kidnapped and buried alive in a makeshift wooden crate near Kankakee, an American town in Illinois.
His captors, a 30-year-old man named Danny Edwards (Danny Edwards) and his 26-year-old girlfriend Nancy Rish (Nancy Rish), decided to hold the man underground, demanding a ransom from relatives for him in $ 1 million.
The couple buried the 39-year-old man 1 meter underground, providing him with a minimum amount of air, water and light. Unfortunately, he suffocated. The police managed to find the man only when they found a dark-burgundy Mercedes near the burial place. Despite the fact that the couple was still convicted, for a long time there were discussions about whether the murder was deliberate or not.
In any case, the crime is horrific, with tragic consequences, and Edwards and Risch will spend another 27 years behind bars.