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Short Stuff: Safety Coffins · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit.
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: So this is a short stuff that we can begin now.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: That's right, Josh, let me set the stage. It's seventeen
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: ninety nine. Founding Father George Washington is on his deathbed.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: He calls over his secretary Tobias Lear and says.
• 0:26
  Speaker 3: I am just going have me decently buried, but do
• 0:31
  Speaker 3: not let my body be put into the vault in
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: less than three days after I'm dead, because you never know.
• 0:40
  Speaker 4: That is the last part, But that's basically what he
• 0:43
  Speaker 4: was saying.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so, yeah, and that was a great George Washington,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: especially dying George Washington.
• 0:49
  Speaker 4: Thanks.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: The reason why he said that is because at the time,
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: there was a there was a chance, let's call it
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a non zero chance to get nerdy, yeah, that you
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: you might be buried alive accidentally. There's all sorts of
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: different conditions and stuff that we understand. Now, if you
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: hook somebody up to like a EKG or EEG or
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: some sort of g, you'd be able to detect their
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: heartbeat that you wouldn't be able to, say, like palpitating
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: it with your fingers or like watching somebody to see
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: if they're actually breathing. You might not even have a
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: decent doctor around at the time, and you may end
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: up being buried alive, in which case you are ft. Yeah.
• 1:32
  Speaker 4: I wonder when they started checking pulses.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: I don't know, let's say, eighteen hundred on the dot.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: I did a quick, rare look up, and if we
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: trust the AI overview.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I do not.
• 1:49
  Speaker 4: All right, National Institutes of Health.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Sure they're talking like four thousand plus years they've been
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: checking pulses.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, wellparently some people were better at it than others,
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: because there do seem to be documented accounts of people
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: who are found like entombed who had like scratch marks
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: on their coffin, or they were actually out of their
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: coffin in a tomb that seemed to have been buried alive,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: came to and then actually did die.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like they said, I feel betja and they got
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: up and so you know, let's say it didn't happen
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: that much, because it probably didn't happen enough to the
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: level of which people were scared of it.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Sure, like a plane crash, Yeah, it seems.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: To be an outsized fear back then of being buried alive.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: That is an actual phobia. It's called taphaphobia. T a
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: p h e is Greek for burial. And you know,
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: because where we're going with all this, and we may
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: have mentioned this briefly in our Coffins episode, I know
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: we have, we had to it, but this is a
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: deeper dive into what was known as a security coffin
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: or a safety coffin, which was you know, for a
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: while there a lot of people got patents to build
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: coffins that had all these little kind of ingenious ways
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: to either get you out of there or alert people
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: above ground that hey, I'm feeling better.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Right, come get me, I got some life left in me, right.
• 3:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: These patents date back to the seventeen nineties. I think
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: in Central Europe at least. There's a guy in this
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: House Stuff Works article that they interviewed named Adam Bisno,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: who's a historian at the US Patent and Trademark Office,
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: and so he would know about patents, even ones in
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Central Europe from the eighteenth century and at this time.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: The argument that's made for the kind of sudden appearance
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: for them is that this coincides with the popularity of romanticism,
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: which kind of came as a backlash to the rationalism
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: of enlightenment. The Enlightenment and romanticism is like, no, there's
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: stuff beyond this life that we can't see. There's there's
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: beauty in nature, there's like all of the stuff that
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: you can't just think your way out of or think
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: you're like things that you can't see that actually do exist,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: and there's probably some sort of afterlife, and who knows
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: whether the people are fully gone. This eventually led to
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: the rise of mediums and spiritualism, and there was just
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: this kind of zeitgeist that the dead could conceivably still
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: be in some sort of contact or communication, which doesn't
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: directly go to taphophobia, but if you're already thinking, like
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: I don't want to be buried alive, this would probably
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: goose you into potentially buying a safety coffin.
• 4:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah for sure. I Mean.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: The sort of a popular idea at the time was
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: that there the veil is very thin between life and death. Ah, yes,
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: and like how thin could it be? Like maybe so
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: thin where you bury me by accident?
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like poor Bill Pullman and Serpent in the Rainbow.
• 5:03
  Speaker 4: Oh yeah, or.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: Keefer Sutherland's wife in that movie, which was a remake
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: of a foreign film.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: So good, both of them were. It was one of
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: those rare films where the American adaptation was just as
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: good as the European original. Both of them are worth seeing.
• 5:23
  Speaker 4: What were those calls? Yeah vanishing?
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so yeah. And then also that poor guy
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: who almost got buried in the Twilight Zone, but he
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: started crying because he was so sad and scared, and
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: some nurse, one of the nurses noticed his tear was like, doctor,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: he's still alive right before. I think they did an
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: autopsy on him.
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, or like Uma Thurman and kill Bill.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: That's a great one too, sure, I think Also, Barnabas Collins,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: you can make a case for in Dark Shadows, the
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: TV show, not the terrible, terrible, terrible movie.
• 6:01
  Speaker 4: I didn't see that.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: I saw twenty minutes of it. I was like, oh, boy,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: like these people should be individually shamed for this.
• 6:09
  Speaker 4: It was Tim Burton, wasn't it.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Yes, Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, So we're going to
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: take a break and call Tim Burton, tell him to
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: think about what he's done, and we'll be right back
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: with safety Coffins soffy jaws. All right, So more than
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: one hundred security coffin patents were granted in the United
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: States alone in the nineteenth century, and they got a
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: little wacky, like each one had its own sort of
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: spin on the best way to either get someone out
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: or to alert people above ground.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. One way was like you could just do something
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: as simple as a bell to basically and put the
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: cord in the person's hand and they could just like
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: pull the bell. It's pretty simple and straightforward. There are
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: others that had, like I guess they would put a
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: tube in that led and connected to the coffin and
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: then buried the person buried around that stuff, so if
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: the person came to they could actually crawl use the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: ladder to crawl out of their own grave. Which talk
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: about a story to tell at parties.
• 7:34
  Speaker 4: It's like, you guys aren't gonna believe this.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, are you the guy who crumb climbed out of
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: his crave?
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know that starts at the dinner party
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: when anyone's like, I've been really lucky. I haven't lost
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: a lot of close friends. Like has anyone ever lost
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: like close friends and had to like preside over their
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: funeral and the guy just puts his napkin.
• 7:52
  Speaker 4: In his lap.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: That's pretty good.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a life preserving coffin, I believe, is what the
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: patent file was in eighteen forty three from Christian Eisenbront
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: of Baltimore, Maryland. And this had a spring loaded lid
• 8:08
  Speaker 2: where if you the quote was, the slightest motion of
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: either the head or the hand would spring this thing up.
• 8:14
  Speaker 4: Of course, that's no.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: Good if you're buried under six feet of dirt. So
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: his suggestion is like, hey, if this coffin only works
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: if you're in a tomb like an above ground vault,
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: and you got to leave a key on the inside
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: of that thing. So if you pop out of the
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: coffin and you're still locked in the tomb, that's no
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: good either.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Can't you see a loved one like sitting up in
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: the middle of the night like I forgot to leave
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: the key. Yeah, there's another problem with that too, if
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: this thing sprung open at the slightest movement of the
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: of the person. Corpses move and shift around during decomposition,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: and I'm sure that that has accounted. Like I think
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: there's accounts of corpses flipping over and being found face down.
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that that accounts for a lot of the
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: stories of people being found and suspected to have been
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: buried alive. But I don't think corpses like leave claw
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: marks on there their coffins, So there seemed to be
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: some that are legit.
• 9:07
  Speaker 4: Yeah, for sure.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: Edgar Allan Poe didn't help things much when in eighteen
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: forty four he wrote a short story called The Premature Burial,
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: where in it he says, to be buried alive is
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: beyond question the most terrific of those these extremes, which
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality that
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: denied by those who think. And then he talks about
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: the boundaries between life and death being shadowy and vague,
• 9:37
  Speaker 2: kind of playing into that he was writing of the times,
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: you know, because that's like we talked about, that's kind
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: of how people thought of things. So after that, I
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: think there were even more people coming out with these things.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There was a guy named Franz Vester who in
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: New Jersey, I guess it's where he was from. He
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: had an improved burial case and you could essentially climb
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: out of it. I think this was the one that
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: had the tube with the ladder. Yeah, and if you
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: were two weak you could pull on a bell. So
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: this was like, you know, I had a fail safe.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: And he gave demonstrations of his coffin where he would
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: be buried under like four feet of dirt and would
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: make his way out of the coffin back above ground.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he's not the only one. It seems like the
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: big showman because this was sort of around the snake
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: oil time where you would put on a big show
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: to try and talk people into buying your thing. Sure,
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: and in the nineteenth century there was a guy, Count
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: de Michele de Carnice Carniki, such a great name. He
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: dubbed himself as the Chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Whatever that means.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: It's the high ranking manager of a royal household.
• 10:49
  Speaker 4: Oh okay. So he was like, yeah, like a.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: Butler essentially, but he was in charge of everybody, like
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: the head butler, yeah, I guess sure, or the chamberlain.
• 11:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, hey, I'm not trying to degrade him. Because
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: he was quite the showman. He would travel through the
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Europe and the United States trying to sell his unit
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: called the Carnice. And there was an article from the
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: Chicago Tribune in eighteen ninety nine that they would read
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: before his big show where at the Academy of Medicine
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: in New York City, doctor Henry J.
• 11:23
  Speaker 4: How would you pronounce that one?
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: Gregus Gerragus where he startled his fellow members with the
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: assertion that one of every two hundred people buried in
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: the US was actually in a lethargic state and is
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: buried alive. So very dubious numbers, obviously, but he would
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: use that as prelude to take the stage and do
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: his own demonstration where he would bury somebody alive.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and La Carnice had an own had like a bell. Again,
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: this is pretty low hanging fruit, and it makes a
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: lot of sense. But he also put in a tube
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: that you could breathe through. You could also talk through it, yeah,
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: and be like, what's what's been going on in the
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: last few days? Now you wait for help? And he didn't.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: He wasn't himself buried alive like Frank Franz Vestor. He
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: would get volunteers to do it. And there's a guy
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: named Faropo Lorenzo, who is Italian, believe it or not,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: and he volunteered to be buried alive in this this
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: La Carnice casket and he stayed there for nine days
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: back in eighteen ninety eight, which is currently still the
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: record for being buried alive.
• 12:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: I think at one point on day like seven, he
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: spoke through the tube and he was like, I'm gonna
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: put my mouth around the tube now and just drop
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: a couple of tic.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: TACs, right, Yeah. And then the next day he shouted,
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: I got a poop through the through the tube. Nine days, chuck,
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: let's think about that.
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: Uh yeah, that's a long time and that seems verified.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There's one other thing too that we can't mentioned.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: We've definitely mentioned him before, but I find it so fascinating.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Timothy Clark Smith, who's grave in New Haven, Vermont, not Connecticut,
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: back in I think eighteen ninety three, was fitted out
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: with a window that looked down the six feet to
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: his face. Oh that was exposed so that passer's bike
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: can't check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: Man.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: And it's still there today, except you just can't see
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: very far. Because the windows kind of well, it's more
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: than one hundred years old.
• 13:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's too bad.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: You got anything else?
• 13:36
  Speaker 4: Man, I got nothing else?
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: And say it.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: Then I guess short stuff is out.
• 13:45
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• 13:47
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