You might be familiar with our previous list of premature burials, but if you thought that was the end of it, you couldn’t be more wrong. Believe it or not, there are even more horrifying tales of premature burial as recent as this year that are just as terrifying as Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. If being buried alive wasn’t your greatest fear before, it might be now.
10- Octavia Smith Hatcher
In the late 1800s, the city of Pikeville, Kentucky was shaken with an unknown disease, and the most tragic case of all was that of Octavia Smith Hatcher. After her infant son Jacob passed away in January 1891, Octavia went into a bedridden depression where she gradually became very ill and slipped into a coma. On May 2 of the same year, she was pronounced dead of unknown causes while still in her bed.
Embalming was not yet a practice, and Octavia was buried very quickly in the local cemetery due to the sweltering heat. Barely a week after her burial, many of the townspeople had been stricken with the same debilitating illness and fallen into a comatose state. The difference? After a time, the townspeople began to wake up. Octavia’s husband began to fear the worst and worried that he had prematurely buried his wife while she was still breathing. He procured an exhumation of her grave only to find that his worst fears were in fact true. The lining on the inside of the coffin had been scratched and torn to pieces. Octavia’s nails were bloodied and broken, and her face was contorted with horrific fear. She had died in the ground after being buried alive.
Octavia was reburied and her husband erected a lifelike monument over her grave site. The monument still stands today. It was later speculated that the mysterious illness had been caused by a Tsetse fly, an African insect that can cause a disease known as sleeping sickness.
9- Mina El Houari
Mina met the man and they shared a lovely evening until she collapsed onto the floor mid-date. Instead of calling the police or an ambulance, the man assumed Mina had died on the spot and made the hasty decision to bury her in a shallow grave in his garden. The problem was, Mina wasn’t actually dead. As it happens, she was an undiagnosed diabetic and was in a diabetic coma while he buried her alive. A few days passed before Mina’s family filed a missing persons report and flew to Morocco to try and find her. The Moroccan police were finally able to track down her murderer and raided his home. They found his muddy clothes and a used shovel before discoveringthe horrific scene in his backyard. The man confessed to his crime and was charged with manslaughter.
8- Mrs. Boger
Unable to live with the thought of his wife dying in her casket, he employed friends to help him exhume her body for confirmation. What he found was shocking. Mrs. Boger’s body was turned over. Her shroud and robes were shredded to pieces and the glass of her coffin lid was broken all over her body. Her skin was bloodied and scratched, while her fingers were missing entirely. It was presumed that she chewed them off while attempting to escape. Nobody knows what happened to Charles Boger after the discovery.
7- Angelo Hays
The inspector had Angelo’s body exhumed just two days after he had been buried to confirm the cause of death, only to find a surprising answer. Angelo wasn’t actually dead! When the doctor removed the death shroud, he found Angelo’s body warm and his heart barely beating. He was immediately taken to a hospital, where he endured several operations and extensive rehabilitation before making a full recovery. As it happens, he had only been in a state of unconsciousness due to his severe head injury. Angelo went on to invent a security coffin with all the bells and whistles to ensure survival of a premature burial. He toured with his invention and became somewhat of a celebrity in France.
6- Mr. Cornish
It dawned on them that he had in fact been buried alive, so they hurried to try and save him before he ran out of oxygen in his casket. But by the time they had removed the dirt and were able to open the coffin lid, it was too late—Mr. Cornish had suffocated in his own grave and left his knees and elbows bloodied and beaten. This story scared Cornish’s half sister so much that she told her relatives to behead her when she was thought to be dead so that she wouldn’t suffer the same fate.
5- The 6-Year-Old Who Survived
Luckily, some of the villagers working in the field saw them enter and became suspicious when they exited without the child. They went to the spot and found her unconscious and not breathing in a shallow grave just inside the field. They were able to rush her to the hospital in the nick of time, and when she regained consciousness she was able to identify her kidnappers. The girl did not remember being buried alive. Police do not know why the neighbors planned to kill the girl, and the hunt is still on for the two suspects. As horrifying as the case is, luckily it did not end with a tragic death.
4- Buried Alive Voluntarily
Once the man got inside the casket, his friend covered him with nearly a foot of dirt and left. The man called his friend just once to say he was fine, but when the friend returned to relieve him in the morning, he was dead. It seems that an overnight rain might have blocked the air pipes and left the man to suffocate in his own casket. While this story is tragic, the more disturbing thing is that being buried alive was a popular Internet trend in Russia at the time, so who knows how many more suffered the same horrific fate.
3- Lawrence Cawthorn
Not long after his entombment, visitors and mourners heard screams and shrieks coming from the grave. They rushed to dig up Cawthorn’s coffin, but it was too late. Cawthorne’s shroud was completely shredded. His eyes were swollen and his head was bloodied beyond recognition from where he’dbeaten it against the coffin in an attempt to escape. His landlady was then accused of prematurely putting Cawthorn in his grave, and the story became a thing of myth and legend for hundreds of years.
2- Sipho William Mdletshe
Luckily, some of the workers at the morgue were around to let him out of the box, and he survived the whole ordeal. The unfortunate part of the story came when Sipho tried to return home to his fiance, only to be sent away because she thought he was a zombie. As if being buried alive wasn’t horrific enough.
1- Stephen Small
Police were only able to find Mr. Small by locating his maroon Mercedes near the burial site. Since Edwards and Rish were convicted, there has been some debate with the testimonies over whether or not the two intended for Mr. Small to die in his coffin. Either way, it was a horrific crime with tragic consequences, and Edwards and Rish will most likely remain behind bars for another 27 years.
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