An unthinkable scenario many have sadly endured.
Lionsgate
There are few things quite as awful to imagine as the notion of being buried alive.
Stuck underground in an airtight box with limited oxygen and no way to contact the outside world isn’t exactly the way most of us would like to go out, given the choice. But people can and do find themselves in this situation, and while some survive – with severe mental and physical scars – most people’s first grave is also their last.
From everyday citizens being placed in a coffin after a false declaration of death, to criminals holding their victims hostage deep underground, it might seem like a rare occurrence, but there are a shocking number of recorded incidents from as far back as 100 years ago, all the way up to the present day.
The fear of this happening is so great that it led to a coffin with a built-in communication device being manufactured – let’s pray you never have to use one. And if you weren’t scared of being buried alive already (for some reason) then these ten cases will probably turn you.
10. Rosangela Almeida Dos Santos
A recent incident that gained significant media traction due to its horrifying nature, the 37-year-old Rosangela Almeida Dos Santos was thought to have died of septic shock on 28 January 2018.
As a result, funeral arrangements were prepared and the ceremony took place in the town of Riachao das Neves, located in the northeast of Brazil.
However, residents who lived near the burial site reportedly began to hear screams coming from Santos’ tomb, according to Brazilian news site G1.
Video footage shows her coffin being retrieved, and upon opening it, Santos’ dead body was found with bloody injuries on the hands and forehead, evidence of the fact that the woman had tried to force her way out of her grave. She was estimated to have been trapped for 11 days.
Those involved have since been accused of needlessly violating Santos’ resting place, after doctors claimed it was impossible for them to not notice the woman was alive before she was buried.
Because of how recently this all took place, only time will tell who’s really at fault here.
9. Jenkins
The New York Times
In February 1885, The New York Times published a disturbing story about a man known simply as Jenkins.
He had reportedly been ill for several weeks, and eventually became speechless, with cold, clammy skin and no readily apparent signs of life. Because of this, he was presumed dead, and the very next day, he was buried inside a coffin.
Those involved with burying Jenkins had mentioned that his limbs felt unusually loose for a dead man, and it was the opinion of many locals that he had accidentally been buried alive.
Shortly after, Jenkins was to be moved to the family burial ground, so it was suggested that the coffin be opened so the condition of the corpse could be checked (if it was in a bad state, it’d have to be placed in a metal casket for the 20-mile journey).
And to the shock of everyone present, Jenkins was found lying face-down. His hair had been pulled from his head in large amounts, and there were fingernail scratches all around the inside of the coffin.
He had tried to claw his way out of the dark wooden box.
8. An Unnamed Six-Year-Old Girl
Uttar Pradesh Police
In 2014, CNN reported the story of an Indian child who was kidnapped and buried alive by her two neighbours, who had told the unnamed six-year-old that her mother had asked them to take her to a fair in a local village.
As they took the girl away from her home, the neighbours – a married couple – came to a sugar cane field, where they tried to strangle their young victim. Fortunately, a handful of villagers had seen the trio enter the sugar cane field, and when they spotted the neighbours emerging without the little girl, they decided to investigate.
Here, the villagers were met with an awful sight: the girl was buried in a small pit in the middle of the field. Thankfully, she was alive, and she was rushed to a nearby hospital where she eventually regained consciousness.
Exactly why the neighbours did this is not clear, and to add to the confusion, the girl did not even remember being buried. However, she did identify the neighbours as suspects after viewing their photographs.
7. Stephen B. Small
Chris Light (Via WikiMedia Commons)
In September 1987, Stephen B. Small – a successful businessman in the town of Kankakee, Illinois – received a phone call telling him that one of the properties he owned had been broken into.
But this was just bait, and the man was being lured into a trap.
After he’d left his home, his wife, Nancy, received another call from someone who claimed to have taken her husband hostage – and they wanted $1 million in exchange for his life, according to The New York Times.
Nancy and Stephen’s family were willing to comply with these demands, but they could not understand a message sent to them by the abductors, which told them where to drop the money off.
As a result, not a single dollar exchanged hands, and the authorities found Stephen’s dead body several hours later, southeast of Kankakee. He had been buried alive in a makeshift wooden box under three feet of sand.
The kidnappers had given Stephen a little bit of light, some water, and an air pipe that went above ground, but none of this helped – he is presumed to have suffocated or had a heart attack while lying in the hastily cobbled-together box.
6. Neysi Perez
The fact that Honduran teenager Neysi Perez was buried alive is tragic in its own right, but when you learn that she was three-months pregnant at the time, it becomes an even more saddening story.
After suffering a panic attack outside her home due to a sudden burst of gunfire, Perez began foaming at the mouth, at which point her parents – believing her to be possessed by a malevolent spirit – contacted a priest to carry out an exorcism.
Unfortunately, the 16-year-old Perez became lifeless shortly after, and was taken to a local hospital where she was declared dead.
After she’d been buried in her local cemetery for around one day, Perez’s husband – Rudy Gonzales – told TV news channel Primer Impacto that he heard muffled screaming and banging noises emanating from his wife’s grave.
When the girl’s family went to investigate the situation, they found that the glass viewing window on her coffin had been shattered and her fingertips were badly bruised, both results of her efforts to escape her premature grave.
Perez – who was still slightly warm to the touch – was quickly removed from her coffin and rushed to hospital, where, sadly, doctors could find no signs of life. She was later reburied in the same cemetery.
5. Lawrence Cawthorn
Antoine Wiertz [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The live burial of Lawrence Cawthorn – a butcher living in London during the 17th century – was initially recorded in a pamphlet titled The Most Lamentable And Deplorable Accident, in the year 1661.
Obviously, at this time, medical technology was nowhere near as advanced as it is today, so determining whether a person was dead or not was often reduced to simply checking for breath or a pulse – with no further investigation.
Because of this, it was often left to random family members or close friends to declare someone dead, and this is exactly what happened to Cawthorn. His landlady – who wished to inherit his belongings – eagerly had him pronounced dead, and soon after, the man was buried at a local chapel.
It was only when people started hearing screams and yells coming from his grave that they realised Cawthorn was still alive, but when he was finally exhumed, it was too late.
His dead body was in a terrible state: his head was wounded and bleeding, his eyes horribly swollen, and it appeared as though he had beaten himself to death, choosing to kill himself rather than suffocate.
4. An Unnamed Russian Man
Pixabay
There aren’t many people who’d voluntarily choose to bury themselves alive, but that’s exactly what a Russian man did in 2011.
After being persuaded by a friend, the man decided that spending a night in a coffin would bring him good fortune – bizarrely. So, he dug himself a grave, fitted a makeshift coffin with holes for air pipes, grabbed a mobile phone and some water, and clambered into the box that would soon become his tomb.
His friend buried the coffin underneath 20cm of earth and left, expecting to return the next morning and dig his live friend from the ground, but unfortunately, that wasn’t how it played out.
According to the BBC, the man had actually died during the night. It was suspected that heavy rainfall could have clogged his air pipes, rendering him unable to breathe. The man had hoped that surviving a night underground would bring him luck for the rest of his days, but as it turned out, his luck had already ran out.
3. Mina El Houari
Patrick Morin (Via WikiMedia Commons)
Remember all those horror stories you’d hear about people meeting absolute creeps via an online dating service? Mina El Houari’s experience with a man she met over the internet might just be the most frightening case out of the lot.
Morocco World News reported that the 25-year-old Hourari – who lived in France – had been chatting online with a man for a number of months, and in May 2014, she actually travelled to Morocco to meet him, checking into a hotel in the city of Fez.
The two soon went out on a date, but midway through the night, disaster struck, when Houari – who was diabetic – fainted.
Naturally, her date was rather distressed by this turn of events, but rather than taking her to a hospital, he took her home and buried her in his backyard, believing she’d suddenly dropped dead.
But Houari was very much alive, and because of the man’s actions, she suffocated to death. After her body was found, the man took full responsibility for the incident and was charged with involuntary manslaughter.
2. Virginia MacDonald
Relativity Media
From a story published in Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented, Virginia MacDonald was a young girl living in New York during the 19th century.
In 1851, she fell severely ill, and after fighting her sickness for quite some time, she finally succumbed to it and passed away. Or so everyone thought.
After her “death”, Virginia was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout this entire process, her mother had been repeatedly insisting that she was, in fact, alive, a claim that fell on deaf ears and went entirely ignored.
Virginia’s other relatives attempted to convince the mother that her daughter was gone, but she didn’t believe them in the slightest. After a lot of back and forth between the two different points of view, Virginia’s family finally agreed to investigate the matter further by opening up her coffin and examining her corpse.
When they did so, they were met with a horrific sight: Virginia’s body was rolled on its side, and her hands were bloody and bitten, both indicators that her mother was correct and she had indeed been buried alive.
It’s not known why Virginia chose to bite into her own hands, but this was possibly an attempt to stave off starvation by eating her own flesh.
1. Ursula Herrmann
Der Spiegel
Ursula Herrmann was just ten years old when she died, after she was kidnapped and buried alive while cycling through the woods close to her home.
In September 1981, the young girl was snatched by Werner Mazurek, her neighbour, who took her deep into the woods near Eching, Germany, in order to carry out his disturbing scheme.
Deep within the forest, the man had buried a small wooden box – roughly a metre in width – that was set up with a light source, bottles of water, biscuits, chocolate and comic books. He forced Herrmann to stay here while he demanded ransom money from her family.
Mazurek got in touch with her parents and reportedly requested two million deutschmarks if they wanted their daughter to be returned safely. If they went to the police or failed to meet his demands, they’d never see her again.
And sadly, that threat rang true. Shortly after she was buried, Herrmann suffocated when the box’s air holes became clogged with dirt and stray leaves. It took 19 days for the authorities to find the girl’s body, at which point, she was well beyond saving.
Just last year, Spiegel Online reported that Mazurek was approaching a possible retrial, 36 years after he committed the initial crime.
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