This happened at the beginning of the 19th century in Paris. Quiz Lefourcade, the daughter of a wealthy and wayward count, met a poor journalist named Julius Bossuet at one of the balls. For young people, this meeting became fateful - undoubtedly, it was mutual love at first sight. Among the dancing couples, the eyes of the young people met so as not to part this evening.
Quiz's father, too, noticed the glances that his daughter exchanged with the handsome journalist. He immediately inquired about the young man and found out that he had neither money nor estates and, among other things, was still a native of the lower classes.
“You will never marry this ragamuffin. He's no match for you,”the count said irritably to his beautiful daughter.
Knowing her father's unyielding nature, Quiz didn't even try to argue with him.
The young man tried many times to meet with Victorina, but her father intercepted the note that Julius sent to his beloved, followed by a stormy explanation with the count. Under the threat of police harassment, the journalist was strictly forbidden to approach the girl, and at Julius' request to marry him out of Quiz, the count only laughed contemptuously.
A few months later, her parents forcibly forced Victorina to marry a wealthy elderly general with a stable position in society.
But the life of the new family did not work out. In 1810, Quiz became seriously ill and died. Upon learning of the death of his beloved, Bossuet went to the village cemetery the next day after the funeral to say goodbye to her forever. He sobbed for a long time by the fresh grave mound.
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Finally, unable to withstand the heartache that was choking him, he, breaking his nails, using an old board, dug up the grave in order to take one last look at his Quiz and cut off a lock of her golden hair for memory. Finally, the lid of the coffin was thrown back and his beloved appeared before Bossuet. The young man covered her face with kisses, and suddenly there was a barely audible sigh - Quiz opened her eyes!
In the first minutes Bossuet thought that he had lost his mind, but the girl smiled at him with a faint, joyful smile. She was alive!
Whether it was a lethargic dream or great love resurrected the beloved, but the miracle happened. Taking her in his arms, Bossuet hurried to the carriage and left for Paris. In the morning, the cemetery watchman found a dug grave, but, fearing the anger of high-ranking relatives, did not say anything to anyone, he threw earth into the pit and put the burial in proper order.
And the young people left for America, where they lived happily for twenty years. Then, thinking that after such a long period of time, no one would recognize them, they nevertheless decided to return to their homeland. But here Quiz was recognized by one of the relatives of the Lefurcad family.
The overwhelming news instantly spread throughout Paris and, of course, reached Quiz's ex-husband. Trying to get his wife back, he sued her. But the court, obeying the opinion of the public, acquitted Quiz and Bossuet, giving them the opportunity to control their own lives. Needless to say, they lived a long and happy life.
In the town of Campobasso, in lower Italy, the worker Felicia, a mother of two sons, suddenly felt pain in labor. Labor, however, did not progress due to the patient's excessive weakness. The woman fainted, and the called doctor pronounced her dead.
Soon the proper authority issued the usual death certificate, and preparations for burial began immediately. Moreover, according to the custom of the country, the hands and feet of the deceased were tied.
Two days after the funeral, another burial was to take place, and a terrible sight presented itself to the gravedigger, who opened the common grave. The deceased woman, lowered into it two days ago, freed herself from the bonds that bound her, and held in her hands a newborn, already dead boy”(Family Illustrated Calendar, 1889).
On the basis of numerous stories about those buried alive, Johann Ellisen writes: “… He feels constrained between the boards, which do not allow him to stretch out his hands … He tries to change his position, but at the same time he is overwhelmed by the fumes of poisonous fumes from nearby corpses.
Then he begins to feel his distress and understand that he was considered dead and was buried … Meanwhile, the air thickens, forces are strained, his chest rises with heavy breathing, his face turns red, blood tends to all the holes, longing is aggravated, he tears his hair, torments his body and floats in blood … Finally, in these terrible sufferings, he dies.
Here are a few examples from Ellisen's capital work on those buried alive.
In the destroyed monastery, E. found at the end of a spacious building, between collapsed cellars with strong doors and gratings, a deep-lying vault, in which until that time the dead bodies of monks were usually placed before burial.
When they began to examine this vault, in which, apart from several wooden benches, there was nothing for the dead, crosses and lamps, they began to examine in detail, they found on the wall the following inscription in Latin, carefully written with the glass of a broken lamp, the fragments of which lay on the ground:
“Lord! Have mercy on me! Abandoned by the living, in Thy hands I betray my spirit! My strength is exhausted. They will not heed my cry! I am languishing with gladness. Creativity! Smell mi! The third day is already expiring! Woe to me who is dying! 1735.
Le Clercq, the prosecutor of Louis the Great, narrates that at the very time when in Orleans his deceased aunt was put in a common tomb, one of her servants climbed into it at night and wanted to remove the ring from her hand. The imaginary deceased, feeling severe pain when cutting her finger, began to scream, and the thief got scared and left. The woman who came to her senses rose from the coffin and, wrapped in a shroud, came home. She then lived another ten years and, moreover, gave birth to one son.
Often, it was the cemetery thieves who were the first witnesses of the burials alive, and only thanks to them, some of the buried people were most often saved.
In Elisen's "Medical News …" there are two more similar examples - about the robbery in the crypt of the Jacobin Church in Toulouse and about the gravedigger who dug up the fresh grave of the wife of a rich miller from Magdeburg for the sake of an expensive ring. In both cases, the "deceased" came to life, but the fate of the robbers was different: the first died of fright, and the second "on the occasion of the successful consequences of the theft committed by him was released from punishment."
An interesting case of being buried alive is described in Mikhail Chulkov's story "The Miser and the Thief".
It tells how a certain young man leading a riotous lifestyle could not wait for the death of his rich father in order to take possession of his goods. The father of the young mot was a terrible curmudgeon, he did not give anyone either the keys or the seal from his storerooms. Even during sleep, he tied the keys to his neck and put the seal in his mouth. Once a servant of a young man, on the orders of his master, tried to steal the seal from the mouth of the sleeping man, but the seal broke off and hit the miser in the larynx, which made him die.
The heir son buried his father on the same day, and the next day he appointed a wedding. At night, when both the owner and the drunken guests fell asleep, the servant went to the grave of the miser to take off his rich dress. He dug up the grave, pulled out the deceased, undressed him and pushed him back into the grave "so well that he broke off the seal on which the deceased choked."
“The dead man shouted with all his might:“Oh,”the thief's legs gave way, and they both fell into the grave, where they lay for a very long time without memory. Finally, the "dead man" came to his senses before the living and then thought about his pantry, climbed out of the pit rather hastily and ran home. Running to the doors of his luggage, he found them locked and without a seal, rushed to look for his son to take the keys from him, and when he ran into the bedroom, the young woman did not sleep at that time. Seeing the dead man, she was so scared that she lost her mind and went to the next world.
The old man, running up to his son, began to jerk him in a very non-political manner. The young prince, opening his eyes and seeing his dead father in front of him, jumped up and filled the whole house with a desperate cry, running everywhere and calling everyone to help him. The old man chased after him, the drunken guests woke up with fear and all fled from the village … At that time there was an army officer who had not quite slept yet … rushed into the room where the guns were, picking up one, loaded it with a bullet and shot, and when a living son with a dead father ran through the yard past the windows, then he fired and to stop all the fear he shot them both.
In the story "Buried Alive" by Edgar Poe, the heroes are "possessed by attacks of a mysterious disease, which doctors conventionally call catalepsy" (most likely in this case we are talking about lethargy).
He is terribly afraid of being buried alive and takes all measures to avoid it. The hero “ordered to rebuild his family crypt so that it could be opened from the inside. From the slightest pressure on the long lever, brought out to the depths of the tomb, the iron doors immediately swung open.
Air vents were made to let air and light in, as well as convenient storage facilities for food and water, which could be freely reached from the coffin. The coffin itself was lined from the inside with soft and warm upholstery, and its lid was equipped with the same device as the crypt doors, with springs that threw it back at the slightest movement of the body.
In addition, a large bell was suspended under the vault of the crypt, and the rope from it had to be passed through the hole in the coffin and tied to the hand.
But despite all the measures taken, the hero is constantly afraid that an epileptic seizure will happen to him somewhere else, on the road, and he will be buried alive in someone else's cemetery. One day our hero goes hunting with a friend. On the way, the hunters find rain, and they hide from it under an overturned fishing boat. Here the hero falls asleep, and waking up and thinking that he is in a cramped coffin, he experiences all the horrors of a buried man alive.
Cases of burial alive still occur today.
In December 1963, one of the residents of London suddenly lost consciousness on the street. He was mistakenly pronounced dead and taken to one of the city morgues. Here he woke up in a coffin, ready for burial.
In 1964, a similar incident occurred in New York. The man who fell in the street was pronounced dead and taken to the nearest morgue. To establish the cause of death, it was decided to perform an autopsy. But at the first touch of the scalpel to the body, the revived "corpse" grabbed the throat of the doctor who performed the autopsy. He died of fright, and the revived deceased is still alive.