Brazilian Freud de Melo lives in a crypt for fear … of being buried alive. And he is not alone
An elderly Brazilian whiled away the rest of his life in a residential coffin. He arranged it to his taste in a crypt built with his own hands, in the shade of giant tree-like ficuses near the Brazilian village of Idrolandia. Freud de Melo, 73, has a TV, a jug of water and a fruit pantry here. A fresh breeze enters the crypt through the vent.
Two self-made megaphones are mounted on the walls - plastic cones with their wide side outward. Freud recently decided to test the reliability of this "rescue equipment" of his. Lying in the crypt, he shouted into megaphones: “Help! Hurry to help! I am buried alive!"
These screams of him were heard far around. Melu hopes that when he needs real help, the surrounding residents will answer the call.
Nightmares in dreams and in reality
Freud de Melo is a retired private entrepreneur and politician. He has long suffered from taphobia (fear of being buried alive). “I often have a nightmare that I’m digging myself out of the ground,” Freud says.
His father named him with this uncharacteristic name for Brazil in honor of the founder of psychoanalysis. In Russian scientific literature, Sigmund Freud became Freud, but in other countries they try to pronounce his last name without distortion.
The Freud de Melo Crypt, with its original life support system, has become one of the main tourist attractions in central Brazil.
Halloween devotees and horror movie buffs have something in common with the ancient Greeks and Romans, who cultivated the legends of warriors who were mistakenly dead and rose from the grave at their own funerals.
Fear of premature burial was widespread in the 18th and 19th centuries, when medicine was not as developed as it is now. There were frequent cases when people who were still alive, suffering from typhoid fever, cholera and plague, looked like dead people - with all the ensuing consequences.
Dead or Alive?
Fiction did not pass by such subjects. Edgar According to his story "Premature Burial", even more inflamed the fear of falling into the coffin alive.
US President George Washington was so afraid to wake up one day in a grave that he issued a special instruction: if it seems to others that the head of the White House is dead, then within three days after his death he should not be buried in order to finally make sure that he will not wake up.
Going abroad and staying in hotels, the Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen left a note near the bed before going to bed: "I am not dead."
In the year 1800, morgues appeared in Germany, in which the bodies of supposedly dead people were monitored for two to three days, after which those who did not show signs of life were interred.
By the end of the 19th century, with the invention of the stethoscope (which allowed doctors to state death with greater certainty), the excitement around possible premature burials subsided. This was facilitated by other achievements of science, which provided an explanation for many strange cemetery phenomena. For example, the noises emanating from the coffins are not pleas for help, but the release of cadaveric gases.
But even today, although much less often than before, mistakes occur when establishing the facts of death and recognizing people as dead. Such incidents contribute to the resurrection of past fears.
Crypts in reserve
In January 2001, in Ashland, Massachusetts, an ambulance team found a 39-year-old woman in a bathtub with no visible signs of life. According to doctors, the woman committed suicide with a drug overdose. The body was placed in a bag and taken to the funeral home. But soon the director of the bureau, John Matarese, heard a gurgling sound from the bag. "She's alive!" - Matarese exclaimed and called the doctors. On the seventh anniversary of the incident, the director received a letter of thanks from the family of the rescued woman.
"Due to the negligible likelihood of being buried alive, fear of premature burial is currently one of the rarest phobias," says psychologist Jonathan Abramovitz, director of the stress and anxiety clinic at North Carolina State University.
Freud de Melo is one of the few of our contemporaries suffering from taphobia. He is unable to remember when and under what circumstances nightmares such as being confined in a coffin or being buried in the ground without a coffin began to torment him.
In addition to the crypt, the Brazilian has built another structure over the past 15 years, designed to protect him from a nightmare in reality. This is a small chapel. Now he is working on the design of the third vault - it will be another, more intricate structure, the crypt.
Freud de Melo admits that he himself does not know exactly where his body will be placed at rest, but in any case there will be food, ventilation and means of communication with the outside world. The one of the coffins that turns out to be superfluous, the Brazilian "bequeaths to humanity."
The mental disorder described above did not prevent Mr. de Melo from pursuing a career as a businessman, newspaper columnist and mayor of the nearby town of Aparecida di Goiania.
Freud has been married to a woman for 52 years. He still works today, managing the affairs of the resort park of 1200 hectares, on the territory of which there are 37 stone castles and a huge number of sculptures, including the scene of the Nativity of Christ, the Loch Ness Monster, Joan of Arc and Noah's Ark.
To some extent, the Brazilian's crypt itself resembles an ark - it is a lifeline to the world from which a person never managed to get out. Time will tell whether he will help him.
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Based on materials from http: /online.wsj.com, http: /ekabu.ru. Translation of Publishing House "Province"