The Premature Burial - Edgar Allan Poe

0:00The premature burial. There are certain themes of which the interest is all absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must astute if he do not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of pleasurable pain over the accounts of the passage of the bettersina, of the earthquake at Lisbon, of the plague at London, of the massacre at St. Bartolomew, or of the stifling of the 123 prisoners in the black hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact. It is the reality. It is the history which excites. As inventions we should regard them with simple aborance. I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and August calamities on record.

1:04But in these it is the extent, not less than the character of the calamity which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not remind the reader that, from the long and weird catalog of human miseries, I might have selected many individual instances more replete with essential suffering than any of these vast generalities of disaster. The true wretchedness indeed, the ultimate voe is particular, not diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man, the unit, and never by man the mass. For this let us thank a merciful God. To be buried while alive is beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen, will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague.

2:08Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins? We know that there are disease in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so-called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic opinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not forever loosened, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken, but where meantime was the soul. Apart, however, from the inevitable conclusion, our priori that such causes must produce such effects, that the well-known occurrence of such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise now and then to premature internments. Apart from this consideration, we have the direct testimony of medical and ordinary experience

3:14to prove that a vast number of such internments have actually taken place. I might refer at once, if necessary, to a hundred well-authenticated instances. One of the very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred not very long ago in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely extended excitement. The wife of one of the most respectable citizens, a lawyer of eminence, and a member of Congress, was seized with a sudden and unaccountable illness which completely baffled the skill of her physicians. After much suffering, she died, or was supposed to die. No one suspected, indeed, or had reason to suspect, that she was not actually dead. She presented all the ordinary appearances of death. The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble-power.

4:17The eyes were lustrous. There was no warmth. Palsation had seized. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity. The funeral in short was hastened, on account of the rapid advance of what was supposed to be decomposition. The lady was deposited in her family vault, which for three subsequent years was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term, it was opened for the reception of a sarcophagus. But alas, how fearful a shock awaited the husband, who personally threw open the door. As its portal swung outwardly back, some white apparel object fell rattling within his arms. It was a skeleton of his wife in her yet unmolded shroud. A careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived within two days after her entombment. That her struggles within the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge or shelf to the

5:20floor, where it was so broken as to permit her escape. A lamp which had been accidentally left full of oil within the tomb was found empty. It might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation. On the uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread chamber was a large fragment of the coffin, with which it seemed that she had never to arrest attention by striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swung, or possibly died, through sheer terror. When in failing, a shroud became entangled in some iron work which projected interiorly. Does she remained? And does she rot it? Correct. In the year 1810, a case of living inhumation happened in France, attended with circumstances which go far to warrant the assertion that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The heroine of the story was a madmouazel victorine lafoucade, a young girl of illustrious

6:24family, of wealth and of great personal beauty. Among her numerous suitors was Julien Bosway, a poor literator or journalist of Paris. His talents and general amoeubleity had recommended him to the notice of the eras by whom he seems to have been truly beloved. With her pride of birth decided her finally to reject him and to wed a Monsieur Chonelle, a banker and a diplomatist of some eminence. After marriage, however, this gentleman neglected and perhaps even positively ill-treated her. Having passed with him some wretched years, she died. At least her condition so closely resembled death, asked to deceive everyone who saw her. She was buried, not in a vault, but in an ordinary grave in the village of her nativity. Filled with despair and still inflamed by the memory of a profound attachment, the lover journeys from the capital to the remote province in which the village lies, with the romantic

7:29purpose of disinterring the corpse and possessing himself of its luxuriant treasures. He reaches the grave, at midnight he unouts the coffin, opens it, and is in the act of detaching the hair, when he is arrested by the unclosing of the beloved eyes. In fact the lady had been buried alive. Vitality had not altogether departed, and she was aroused by the caresses of her lover from the lethargy which had been mistaken for death. He bore her frantically to his lodging in the village. He employed certain powerful restoratives suggested by no little medical learning. And fine, she revived, she recognized her preserver. She remained with him until by slow degrees, she fully recovered her original health. Her woman's heart was not adamant, and this last lesson of love suffice to soften it. She bestowed it upon busway. She returned no more to her husband, but concealing from him her resurrection fled with

8:30her lover to America. Twenty years afterward the two returned to France in the persuasion that time had so greatly altered the lady's appearance that her friends would be unable to recognize her. They were mistaken, however, for at the first meeting Missyoranel did actually recognize and make claim to his wife. This claim, she resisted, and a judicial tribunal sustained her in her resistance, deciding that the peculiar circumstances with the long laps of years had extinguished not only equitably but legally the authority of the husband. The Syrological Journal of Life's Sick, a periodical of high authority and merit which some American bookseller would do well to translate and republish records in a late number a very distressing event of the character in question. An officer of artillery, a man of gigantic stature and of robust health being thrown from an unmanageable horse received a very severe contusion upon the head which rendered

9:33him insensible at once. The skull was slightly fractured, but no immediate danger was apprehended. Triphanning was accomplished successfully. He was bled, and many others of the ordinary means of relief were adopted. Gradually, he fell into a more and more hopeless state of stupor and finally it was thought that he died. The weather was warm and he was buried with indecent haste in one of the public cemeteries. His funeral took place on Thursday. On the Sunday following, the grounds of the cemetery were as usual much thronged with visitors and about noon an intense excitement was created by the declaration of a peasant that while sitting upon the grave of the officer he had felt a distinct commotion of the earth as a vocation by someone struggling beneath. At first little attention was paid to the man's assiviration, but his evident terror and the dogged of stenacy with which he persisted in his story had it lengthen their natural effect upon the crowd.

10:35Spades were hurriedly procured and the grave which was shimfully shallow was in a few minutes so far thronged open that the head of its occupant appeared. He was then seemingly dead, but he sat nearly erect within his coffin, the lid of which in his furious struggles he had partially uplifted. He was forth with conveyed to the nearest hospital and their pronounced to be still living, although in an asphatic condition. After some hours he revived recognized individuals of his acquaintance and in broken sentences spoke of his agonies in the grave. Even what he related it was clear that he must have been conscious of life for more than an hour while inhumed before lapsing into insensibility. The grave was carelessly and loosely filled with an exceedingly porous soil and thus some air was necessarily admitted. He heard the footsteps of the crowd overhead and endeavoured to make himself heard in turn. It was a tumult within the grounds of the cemetery he said which appeared to awaken him

11:36from a deep sleep. But no sooner was he awake than he became fully aware of the awful horrors of his position. The patient, it is recorded, was doing well and seemed to be in a fair way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim to the quakeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic peroxisms which occasionally it superinduces. The mention of the galvanic battery nevertheless recalls to my memory of well known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action proved the means of restoring to animation a younger turnie of London who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831 and created at the time a very profound sensation, wherever it was made the subject of converse. The patient Mr. Edward Stapleton had died, apparently of Typhus Fever, accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendance.

12:38Upon his seeming disease his friends were requested to sanction a post-mortem examination but declined to permit it. As often happens when such refusals are made the practitioners resolved to disinter the body and dissect it at leisure in private. Arrangements were easily affected with some of the numerous scores of body snatches with which London abounds, and upon the third night after the funeral the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave eight feet deep and deposited in the opening chamber of one of the private hospitals. An incision of some extent had been actually made in the abdomen when the fresh and undecated appearance of the subject suggested an application of the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and a customary effects superwind with nothing to characterize them in any respect except upon one or two occasions a more than ordinary degree of life-likeness in the convulsive action. It grew late, the day was about to dawn, and it was thought expedient at length to proceed

13:39at once to the dissection. A student, however, was especially desirous of testing a theory of his own and insisted upon applying the battery to one of the pectoral muscles. A rough gash was made, and a wire hastily brought into contact when the patient with a hurried but white, unconvulsive movement arose from the table, stepped into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few seconds, and then spoke. What he said was unintelligible, but words were uttered. The syllabification was distinct, having spoken he fell heavily to the floor. For some moments all were paralyzed with awe, but the urgency of the case soon restored them their presence of mind. It was seen that Stapleton was alive, although in a soon, upon exhibition of Ether he revived and was rapidly restored in health and to the society of his friends from whom, however, all knowledge of his resuscitation was withheld, until a relapse was no longer to be apprehended.

14:42They wonder, their rapturous astonishment may be conceived. The most thrilling peculiarity of this incident nevertheless is involved in what Mr S. himself asserts. He declares that at no period was he altogether insensible. That, doubly and confusedly, he was aware of everything which happened to him from the moment in which he was pronounced dead by his physicians, to that in which he fell suing to the floor of the hospital. I am alive, with the uncomprehended words which, upon recognizing the locality of the dissecting room, he had endeavoured in his extremity to utter. It were an easy matter to multiply such histories these, but I forbear, or, indeed, we have no need of such to establish the fact that premature internments occur. When we reflect how very rarely, from the nature of the case, we have it in our power to detect them. We must admit that they may frequently occur without our cognizance.

15:43Scarsely, in truth, is a graveyard ever encroached upon for any purpose, to any great extent, that skeletons are not found in postures which suggest the most fearful of suspicions. Fearful indeed the suspicion, but more fearful the doom. It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth, the clinging to the dead garments, the rigid embrace of the narrow house, the blackness of the absolute night. The silence, like a sea that overwhelms, the unseen but palpable presence of the conqueror worm. These things, with the thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed. That our hopeless portion

16:44is that of the really dead. These considerations, I say, carry into the heart which till palpitates a degree of appalling and impolarable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing, so agonizing upon earth, we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost hell, and thus all narratives upon this topic have an interest profound, an interest nevertheless which, through the sacred awe of the topic itself very properly and very peculiarly, depends upon our conviction of the truth of the matter narrated. What I have now to tell is of my actual knowledge of my own positive and personal experience. For several years I had been subject to attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy in default of a more definitive title, although both the immediate and

17:44the predisposing causes and even the actual diagnosis of this disease are still mysterious, its obvious and apparent character is sufficiently well understood. Its variations seem to be chiefly of degree. Sometimes the patient lies for a day only, or even for a shorter period, in a species of exaggerated lethargy. He is senseless and extremely motionless, but the pulsation of the heart is still faintly perceptible. Some traces of warmth remain, a slight color lingers within the center of the cheek, and upon application of a mirror to the lips we can detect a torpit, unequal and vacillating action of the lungs. Then again, the duration of the trans is four weeks, even for months. While the closest scrutiny and the most rigorous medical tests fail to establish any material distinction between the state of the sufferer and what we conceive of absolute death. Very usually, he is saved from the premature internment solely by the knowledge of

18:51his friends that he has been previously subject to catalepsy by the consequent suspicion excited and above all by the non-appearance of decay. The advances of the maladie are luckily gradual. The first manifestations, although marked, are unequivocal. The fits grew successfully more and more distinct and endure each for a longer term than the preceding. In this lies the principal security from enhumation. The unfortunate whose first attack should be of the extreme character which is occasionally seen would almost inevitably be consigned alive to the tumult. My own case differed in no important particular from those mentioned in medical books. Sometimes, without any apparent cause, I sank little by little into a condition of hemi-syncop, or half-soon. And in this condition, without pain, without ability to stir or strictly speaking,

19:56to think. But with a dull, lethargic consciousness of life and of the presence of those who surrounded my bed, I remained until the crisis of the disease restored me suddenly to perfect sensation. At other times, I was quickly and impetuously smitten. I grew sick ennum and chilly and dizzy, and so felt prostrate at once. Then for weeks all was void and black and silent. And nothing became the universe. Total annihilation could be no more. From these latter attacks I awoke however, with a gradation slow in proportion to the suddenness of the seizure. Just as a day dawns to the friendless and houseless beggar who roams the street throughout the long desolate winter night, just so tardily, just so wearily, just so cheerily, came back the light of the soul to me. Apart from the tendency to trans, however, my general health appeared to be good. Nor could I perceive that it was at all affected by the

21:01one prevalent malady. I less indeed an idiot's secrecy in my ordinary sleep may be looked upon as super-induced. Upon awakening from slumber, I could never gain at once terror possession of my senses and always remained for many minutes in much bewilderment and complexity. The mental faculties in general, but the memory in special being in a condition of absolute abayance. In all that I endured there was no physical suffering but of moral distress and infinitude. My fancy grew charnel. I taught a worms of tombs and epitaphs. I was lost in reveries of death and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive. In the latter, supreme. When the grim darkness overspread the earth, then with every horror of thought I shook, shook at the quivering blooms

22:05upon the hers. When nature couldn't do a wakefulness no longer, it was with a struggle that I consented to sleep. For I shuddered to reflect that upon a waking, I might find myself the tenant of a grave. And when, finally, I sank into slumber. It was only to rush at once into a world of fantasms, above which, with vast sable overshadowing wing, however, hovered predominant the one supportful idea. From the innumerable images of gloom which thus oppressed me in dreams, I select for record but a solitary vision. Me thought I was immersed in a cataleptic trance of more than usual duration and profundity. Suddenly, they came and I see hand upon my forehead and an impatient gibbering voice whispered the word, arise within my ear. I sat erect. The darkness was total. I could not see the figure of him who had aroused me. I could call to

23:09mind neither the period at which I had fallen into the trance, nor the locality in which I then lay. While I remained motionless and busy and endeavours to collect my thought, the cold hand grasped me fiercely by the wrist, shaking it petulently while the gibbering voice set again. A rise? Did I not bid thee a rise? And who, I demanded, are thou? I have no name in the regions which I inhabit. Reply the voice monthly. I am mortal but am fiend. I was merciless, but I am pitiful. Thou dost feel that I shudder. My teeth chatter as I speak. Yet it is not with the chillness of the night, of the night without any, but this hideousness is insufferable. How can stout tranquilly sleep? I cannot rest for the cry of these great agonies. These sights are more than I can bear. Get thee up, come with me into the outer night, and let me unfold to thee the graves,

24:14is not this as spectacle of woe. Behold, I looked, and the unseen figure which still grasped me by the wrist, had caused to be thrown open the graves of all mankind, and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay, so that I could see into the innermost recesses. And there viewed the shrouded bodies in their sad and solemn slumbers with the world. But alas, the real sleepers were fewer by many millions than those who slumbered not at all, and there was a feeble struggling, and there was a general sad unrest, and from out the depths of the countless pits, they came a melancholy rustling from the garments of the buried. And of those who seemed tranqually to repose, I saw that a vast number had changed. In a greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in which they had originally been entuned. And the voice again said to me as I gazed, is it not? Oh, is it not a pitiful sight?

25:20But before I could find the words to reply, the figure had ceased to grasp my wrist, the phosphoric lights expired, and the graves were closed with a sudden violence, while from out them arose a tumult of despairing cries saying, again, is it not? Oh, God, is it not a very pitiful sight? Fantasies such as these, presenting themselves at night, extended their terrific influence far into my waking hours. My nerves became thoroughly unstrung, and I fell afraid to perpetual horror. I hesitated to write, or to walk, or to indulge in any exercise that would carry me from home. In fact, I no longer dared trust myself out of the immediate presence of those who were aware of my proneness to catalepsy, lest falling into one of my usual fits, I should be buried before my real condition could be ascertained. I doubted the care, the fidelity of my dearest friends. I dreaded that,

26:24in some trance of more than customer-reguration, they might be prevailed upon to regard me as irrecoverable. I even went so far as to fear that, as I occasioned much trouble, they might be glad to consider any very protracted attack as sufficient excuse for getting rid of me altogether. It wasn't vain, they endeavoured to reassure me by the most solemn promises. I exacted the most sacred oaths that under no circumstances they would bury me until decomposition had so materially advanced as to render further preservation impossible. And even then, my mortal terrors would listen to no reason, would accept no consolation. I entered into a series of elaborate precautions, among other things. I had the family vault-sourry model as to admit of being readily open from within. The slightest pressure upon a long lever that

27:25extended far into the tomb would cause the iron portal to fly back. There were arrangements also for the free admission of air and light and convenient receptacles for food and water within immediate reach of the coffin intended for my reception. This coffin was warmly and softly padded and was provided with a lid fashioned upon the principle of the world door with the addition of spring so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set it at liberty. Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb a large bell, the rope of which it was designed should extend through a hole in the coffin and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse. But alas, what avails the vigilance against the destiny of man, not even these well contrived securities suffice to say from the uttermost agonies of living inhumation, a wretch to these agonies for doomed. There arrived an epoch, as often before there had arrived, in which I found

28:31myself emerging from total unconsciousness into the first feeble and indefinite sense of existence. Slowly, with a tortoise gradation approached the faint grey dawn of the cycle day, a torped uneasiness, an apathetic endurance of dull pain, no care, no hope, no effort. Then, after a wrong interval, a ringing in the ears, then, after a lapse still longer, a prickling or tingling sensation in the extremities, then a seemingly eternal period of pleasurable quietness, during which the awakening feelings are struggling into thought. Then a brief re-sinking into non-entity, then a sudden recovering. At length, the sight quivering of an eyelid, an immediate thereupon, an electric shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood and porous from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive effort to think, and now the first endeavour to remember,

29:33and now a partial and ever-nessent success, and now the memory has so far regained its dominion that in some measure, I am cognizant of my state. I feel that I am not awakeing from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been subject to catalepsy, and now at last, as it by the rush of an ocean, my shuddering spirit is overwhelmed by the one grim danger, by the one spectral and ever-prevalent idea. For some minutes, after this fancy possessed me, I remained without motion, and why? I could not summon courage to move. I dared not make the effort, which was to satisfy me of my fate, and yet there was something at my heart which whispered me, it was sure. This pair, such as no other species of wretchedness ever calls into pain, despair alone urged to me, after long a resolution, to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes. I uplifted them. It was dark. Or dark. I knew that the fit was over. I knew that the crisis of my

30:42disorder had long passed. I knew that I had now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties. And yet it was dark. All dark. The intense and utter raillessness of the night that endured forevermore. I endeavored to shriek, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt. But no voice issued from the cavernous lungs which oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated with the heart at every elaborate and struggling inspiration. The movement of the jaws in this effort to cry aloud showed me that they were bound up as is usual with the dead. I felt too that I lay upon some hard substance, and by something similar my sides were also closely compressed. So far, I had not venture to stir any of my limbs, but now I violently threw up my arms which had been lying at length with the wrists crossed.

31:42They struck a solid wooden substance which extended above my person at an elevation of not more than six inches from my face. I could no longer doubt that I reposed within a coffin at last. And now I met all my infinite miseries came sweetly the share of hope. For I thought of my precautions, I rhymed and made spasmodic exertions to force open the lid. It would not move. I felt my wrists for the bell-rope. It was not to be found. And now the comfort of fled forever, and a still stirner despair reigned triumphant. For I could not help perceiving the absence of the paddings which I had so carefully prepared. And then too, they came suddenly to my nostrils the strong peculiar order of moist earth. The conclusion was irresistible. I was not within the vault. I had fallen into a trance while absent from home while among strangers. When or how I could not remember, and it was

32:47they who had buried me as a dog nailed up in some coffin and thrust deep, deep and forever into some ordinary and nameless grave. As this awful conviction forced itself dust into the innermost chambers of my soul, I once again struggled to cry aloud. And in this second endeavour, I succeeded, a long wild and continuous shriek or yell of agony resounded to the realms of the subterranean night. Hellow, hellow there, said a gruff voice in reply. "'Was it the devil of the matter now?' said a second. "'Get out of that,' said a third. "'What do you mean by yowling in that air kind of style like a catamount?' said a folk. And you're upon I was seized and shaken without ceremony for several minutes by a huntel of very rough looking individuals. They did not arouse me from my slumber, for I was wide awake when I

33:50screamed, but they restored me to the full possession of my memory. This adventure occurred near Richmond, in Virginia. A company by a friend I had proceeded upon a gunning expedition, some miles down the banks of the James River. Night approached, and we were overtaken by a storm. The cabin of a small slupe lying at anchor in this stream, and laden with garden mold afforded us the only available shelter. We made the best of it, and passed the night on board. I slept in one of the only two birds in the vessel, and the birds of a slupe of 60 or 70 tons need scarcely be described. That which I occupied had no bedding of any kind. Its extreme width was 18 inches. The distance of its bottom from the deck overhead was precisely the same. I found it a matter of exceeding difficulty to squeeze myself in. Nevertheless, I slept soundly, and the whole of my vision for it was no dream and no nightmare arose naturally from the circumstances of my position, from my ordinary bias of thought, and from the

34:55difficulty to which I have alluded of collecting my senses, and especially of regaining my memory for a long time after awaking from slumber. The men who shook me with a cruel of the slupe, and some laborers engaged to unload it. From the load itself came the earthly smell, the bandage about the jaws with the silk handcatches in which I had bound up my head in default of my customary nightcap. The tortures endured, however, were intubitably quite equal for the time. To those of actual sepulcher, they were fearfully, they were inconceivably hideous, but out of evil proceeded good. For their very excess rot in my spirit and inevitable revulsion, my soul acquired tone, acquired temper, I went abroad, I took vigorous exercise, I breathed the free air of heaven, I thought upon other subjects than death, I discarded my medical books,

35:55buken I burnt, I read no night thoughts, no fused tin about church arts, no bugaboo tales such as this, in short I became a new man and lived a man's life. From that memorable night I dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions and with them vanished the catalepic disorder of which perhaps they had been less the consequence than the cause. There are moments when even to the sober eyes of reason the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell, but the imagination of a man is no craffis. To explore with impunity it's very cavern, and thus the grim lesion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful, but like the demons in whose company a frasyaab made his voyage down the oxis, they must sleep, or they will devour us, they must be suffered to slumber or we perish. End of The Premature burial by Edgar Allan Poe.