Premature Burial
From "The Premature Burial" by Edgar Allen Poe:
"The unendurable oppression of the lungs — the stifling fumes of the damp earth — the clinging to the death garments — the rigid embrace of the narrow house — the blackness of the absolute Night — the silence like a sea that overwhelms — the useen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm."
Poe believed that burial alive was a subject 'too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction', and added, 'We know nothing so agonising upon Earth — we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.' The character in Poe's story had plenty of reason to be frightened, he had catalepsy, a neurological condition that causes intermittent incidents of paralysis, which was mistaken for death. It was thought that Poe had cataleptic episodes and that he lived in fear of being put into his family vault while still alive.
The fear of premature burial is one of humans oldest, more so than the fear of death itself. To be sent to the darkness when life is gone is scary enough, but when the Grim Reaper shows up before he is supposed to is to comdemn the still-living to an apparent eternity of stifling horror. It is also considered one of the causes of vampire and walking dead legends (we may devote a section to vampires in the future).
The history of being buried alive goes back to ancient times. Pliney the Elder (AD 23-79) cites examples of people thought to be dead that later revived — if only briefly. One report stated that Consul Acilius, who was placed on his funeral pyre. When the brushwood was lit, his screams of pain was proof that he wasn't dead, but before they could put out the fire, Acilius was dead.
An early case is that of Johannes Duns Scotus, who 'died' in 1308 and was placed in a vault. Some time later, when the vault was reopened, he was found outside the coffin, with his hands torn from trying to open the doors. Thomas à Kempis was denied sainthood after they found splinters of wood under his fingernails. They said: 'Surely no aspiring saint, finding himself alive in his grave, would have made such frantic attempts to postpone the meeting with his Maker.'
A twentieth-century example is related in Ronald Blythe's Akenfield. William Russ, the village grave digger, tells how, in the 1910's, people did not hurry to bury the dead, in case they were still alive. Russ belived that 'a rare lot of folk' got buried alive, and tells of old Micah Hibble of Framlingham who was thought to be dead no less than three times. On the last occurance Hibble 'Reckoned he saw Heaven and Hell but he wouldn't say what he saw in Hell; he thought it would be too much for Framlingham.'