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The Premature Burial
What is the most horrible thing that can happen to a person? 
It is not death, but premature burial- burial before death, burial while you are still alive. 
It is everyone's worst fear.
Life and Death. When does one end, and the other begin? 
With some illnesses, we cannot be sure. 
The body is cold and still, the heart has stopped, breathing has stopped... but this is not always the end of a life.
So it is not difficult to understand why premature burials sometimes happen. 
People still remember the story of a Baltimore woman, not long ago. 
She went to her bed with a sudden illness, and died soon after. Or so her husband and her doctors thought.
Her heart was silent, her face grey, her eyes unseeing, her body as cold as the grave. 
She lay like this for three days, and then they buried her in the family vault.
Three years later, they opened the vault again for another coffin. 
When her husband pulled back the doors, something fell noisily into his arms.
It was his wife's skeleton, in her white burial clothes.
Doctors thought that the woman ‘came alive’ again about two days after her burial. 
She fought wildly to get out of her coffin, they said, until it fell and broke open. 
She then used a piece of the broken coffin to hit the metal doors of the vault. 
But nobody heard her, or her screams for help. 
Then perhaps she fainted, or even died of terror. 
Her burial dress caught on some metalwork, which stopped her falling. 
And so she stayed, standing dead at the door, for three years.
How often are people buried alive? Perhaps more often than we know. 
Think of the terror of it- the smell of the cold damp ground... 
the blackness of the night inside the narrow coffin... the long, long silence.
There are many true stories about premature burials. 
This is the one that happened to me.
For some years I had an illness called catalepsy. 
People who have catalepsy lie still and do not move for hours, or even days. 
They are still warm, and there is still some colour in their faces, but you have to listen hard to hear their heart or their breathing. 
Sometimes they can stay like this for weeks or months. And then it is difficult to find life in them.
When a cataleptic fit started, I always felt cold and ill, and then I fainted. 
After this, everything was black and silent. 
I always woke up very slowly- and I could never remember anything about the fit.
My body itself was well and strong, but I began to worry more and more. 
I talked all the time about coffins and graves. 
Day and night my thoughts were about premature burial. 
I was afraid of sleeping- and afraid of waking up in a grave. 
And when at last I did fall asleep, my dreams were about the terrors of death.
Once I dreamed that I was in a long cataleptic fit. 
A cold hand touched my face, and a voice in my ear said softly, ‘Get up!’
I sat up. Everything was dark and I could not see the speaker. Where was I? 
The cold hand started to shake my arm, and the voice said, ‘Get up! I said, get up!’
‘Who are you?’ I asked.[]‘I have no name in the place where I live,’ said the voice. 
‘I was alive, but now I am dead, and a thing of darkness. I cannot sleep, cannot rest. 
‘How can you sleep so quietly? Get up! Come with me into the night, and I will show you the graves of the dead.’
And in my dream I looked into the open graves of every dead person in the world. 
I saw them, sleeping the long sleep of death in their burial clothes. 
But more terrible than the dead were the not-dead- those who were not sleeping, 
those who were fighting to get out of their coffins, those who died trying to escape.
While I stared, the voice spoke to me again. ‘It is a most terrible thing to see, a most terrible thing...’
I remembered these dreams for a long time. 
I began to be afraid to leave my house. 
I did not want to be away from people who knew about my cataleptic fits. 
My friends, I thought, will never bury me alive by mistake. But then I began to worry about my friends...
So I made many changes in my family vault. 
Usually the doors opened from outside; now I could open them from inside. 
I made holes for air and light to come in, and places for food and water near the coffin. 
I bought a new coffin that was warm and comfortable. 
The top of the coffin was like a door, and I could open it from the inside. 
And on the ceiling of the vault I put a big bell, with a rope that came down to the coffin, and through a hole in the top, next to my hand.
But I was still afraid... And I was right to be afraid. 
One day I woke up slowly, eyes still closed, feeling strangely tired. 
Then a sudden terror hit me. I tried to think, to remember... 
and then I felt that I was waking up not from sleep, but from a cataleptic fit. 
And cold fear filled me at once, fear that never leaves me, day or night.
For some minutes I lay still, but at last I opened my eyes. 
It was dark- all dark- the darkness of a night that would never end. 
I felt that I lay on hard wood, and when I moved my arms, they hit wood on both sides of me, and above my face.
I was lying in a coffin. 
Then hope came. I pushed hard to open the top of my special coffin; it would not move. 
I tried to find the bell-rope; it was not there. And now hope left me. 
This was a hard wooden coffin, not my soft, comfortable one. 
And there was a smell of wetness, a smell of cold damp ground! 
I was not in my vault... ‘Oh, dear God!’ I thought. 
‘I have had a cataleptic fit, and I'm away from my home and with people who don't know me. 
‘They think that I'm dead, and they have buried me like a dog, in a cheap wooden coffin. Deep, deep in a grave with no name on it! 
‘No, no!’ I screamed- a long, wild, terrible scream.
‘Hello? Hello?’ a man's voice answered.[]‘What's the matter?’ said a second man's voice.
‘What's going on?’ said a third man's voice. ‘Why are you screaming like that?’ Then the men began to shake me. 
They did not wake me, because I was already awake, but the shaking helped me, and at once I remembered everything.
I was near Richmond, in Virginia, on a walk with a friend beside the James River. 
When night came, there was a sudden storm.
We saw an old sailing boat at the side of the river, and hurried along to it.
‘We must get out of this storm,’ I said to my friend. ‘The boat is very small, but it will keep us dry.’
So we slept there that night.
The beds were very narrow, and were not much better than long wooden boxes in the side of the boat.
They were only half a metre across, and half a metre from top to bottom. 
It was difficult to get into a bed that was so small, but I slept well... and dreamt.
In my dream- and of course it was a dream- my narrow wooden bed became my coffin. 
The damp smell came from the river and the wet ground after the rain. 
And the men who shook me to wake me up were the workmen on the boat.
It was a dream, yes. But the terror was real, and terror can make people ill, or even kill them. 
But something good came from this terrible adventure. 
After that day I stopped thinking about death and burial. 
I went walking and riding, and breathed the free air. 
My fears went away, and my catalepsy went with them.
It is easy to understand the terror of a living burial, the terror of waking inside a closed coffin. 
But we must put away thoughts like these, and close the door on them, 
or fear and worry will send us to an early grave.