Short Stuff: Safety Coffins

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
Episode: Short Stuff: Safety Coffins
Date: February 18, 2026
Hosts: Josh and Chuck

In this entertaining and informative "Short Stuff" episode, Josh and Chuck dive into the curious history of safety coffins, elaborate burial devices developed during the 18th and 19th centuries to prevent the terrifying fate of being buried alive. Blending spooky anecdotes, pop culture references, and fascinating patent history, they explain how medical uncertainty, cultural fears, and even literature fueled the safety coffin craze.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Stage: The Fear of Premature Burial

• George Washington’s Burial Fears (00:17–00:48)

  • Chuck recounts how, in 1799, George Washington instructed that his body not be entombed until three days after death to avoid being buried alive.

    “Just have me decently buried, but do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I’m dead. Because you never know.” — Chuck, paraphrasing Washington [00:25]

• Medical Limitations of the Time (00:54–01:36)

  • Josh explains why such fear existed: diagnostic methods of the 18th and 19th centuries were primitive, sometimes lacking even pulse checks.

    “There was a chance, let’s call it a non zero chance, that you might be buried alive accidentally.” — Josh [00:54]

The Rise and Roots of Taphophobia

• Taphophobia: The hosts introduce the term for the fear of being buried alive, noting its outsized psychological impact. [02:45]

  • Taphophobia comes from the Greek “taphē” meaning “burial.”

• The Cultural Climate (Romanticism & Spiritualism) (03:23–04:56)

  • Josh connects the invention of safety coffins to the Romanticism movement’s fascination with the afterlife, spiritualism, and the mysterious boundaries between life and death.

    “There was just this kind of zeitgeist that the dead could conceivably still be in some sort of contact or communication…” — Josh [04:21]

• Pop Culture Parallels (05:03–06:06)

  • The hosts have fun referencing scenes of premature burial in Serpent in the Rainbow, The Vanishing, Kill Bill, and the Twilight Zone.

    "Like poor Bill Pullman in Serpent in the Rainbow.” — Josh [05:03]

The Invention of Safety Coffins

• Patent Mania (06:48–07:59)

  • Over 100 safety coffin designs were patented in the U.S. during the 19th century, with solutions ranging from simple bells to spring-loaded lids and escape tubes.

    “They got a little wacky. Like each one had its own sort of spin on the best way to either get someone out or to alert people above ground.” — Chuck [06:48]

• Notable Patent Examples

  • Bell-in-Hand Coffins: The simplest method involved running a cord from the buried person's hand to a bell above ground (07:04).
  • Escape Tubes and Ladders: Some designs included ladders to allow physical escape, if awakening underground (07:17).

    "There are others that had... a tube... so if the person came to, they could actually crawl... out of their own grave." — Josh [07:19]

  • Spring-Loaded Lid Coffin: Christian Eisenbrandt’s 1843 design would spring open with the slightest movement — but only worked in tombs, not under dirt (08:01).

• Practical Problems

  • The spring-lid could spring from natural corpse movement, leading to false alarms [08:40].

Literature & Mass Hysteria

• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” (09:12)
  • Poe’s 1844 story shaped public fear, describing premature burial as “the most horrific... which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”

    "To be buried alive is beyond question the most horrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality..." — Poe, quoted by Chuck [09:18]

  • Poe’s writing reflected and amplified the era’s anxiety about the thin boundary between life and death.

Showmanship & Public Demonstrations

• Dramatic Demonstrations (09:51–12:37)

  • Franz Vester: Demonstrated escape coffins, being buried under four feet of dirt and escaping live [09:51].
  • Count Michel de Carnicki: Called himself “Chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia,” built his own safety coffin, and staged live-demonstrations; would invite volunteers to be buried and rescued, raising public awareness and hype [10:34].

• Tall Tales and Dubious Stats

  • Dr. Henry J. Garrigus is quoted as saying “one of every 200 people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic state and is buried alive” — numbers Chuck and Josh find exceedingly dubious [11:04].

    “So very dubious numbers, obviously...” — Chuck [11:30]

• The Nine-Day Burial Record (11:51–12:57)

  • Faropo Lorenzo survived for nine days in a Carnicki coffin—still the “record” for being buried alive.

    "He volunteered to be buried alive in this Le Carnice casket. And he stayed there for nine days back in 1898, which apparently still [is] the record..." — Josh [12:17] “Yeah, I think at one point on day like seven, he spoke through the tube... and the next day he shouted, I got a poop through the tube. Nine days, Chuck. Let's think about that.” — Chuck, Josh [12:37, 12:49]

Lasting Evidence

• Timothy Clark Smith’s Windowed Grave (13:00–13:37)
  • Smith, a doctor with taphophobia, had a window installed on his Vermont grave in 1893 to let passersby peer in and confirm he hadn’t been buried alive.

    “It was fitted out with a window that looked down... so passersby could check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive.” — Josh [13:00]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Historical Medical Limitations

  "If you hook somebody up to, like an EKG or EEG or some sort of g, you'd be able to detect their heartbeat. That you wouldn't be able to say, like, palpitating it with your fingers or like watching somebody to see if they're actually breathing. You might not even have a decent doctor around at the time." — Josh [00:54]

• On Cultural Fears

  “It seems to be an outsized fear back then of being buried alive. That is an actual phobia. It's called taphophobia.” — Chuck [02:45]

• On Showmanship

  "And in the 19th century, there was a guy, Count Michel de Carnicki, such a great name, he dubbed himself as the Chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia, whatever that means." — Chuck [10:34]

• On the Windowed Grave

  “Timothy Clark Smith, whose grave In New Haven, Vermont... was fitted out with a window that looked down... so passersby could check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive.” — Josh [13:00]

• Comic Relief:

  "Yeah, I think at one point on day like seven, he spoke through the tube and he was like, I'm going to put my mouth around the tube now and just drop a couple of Tic Tacs." — Chuck [12:37]
  "Yeah. And then the next day he shouted, I got a poop through the tube. Nine days, Chuck. Let's think about that." — Josh [12:49]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 1799 & George Washington's Fears: 00:17–00:48
• Medical Context & Pulse-Checking: 00:54–02:02
• Taphophobia Defined: 02:45
• Rise of Safety Coffins (Patents, Romanticism): 03:23–04:56
• Pop Culture References: 05:03–06:15
• Safety Coffin Inventions & Designs: 06:48–08:40
• Poe’s Story & Literary Influence: 09:12–09:51
• Showmen & Demonstrations: 09:51–12:37
• Timothy Clark Smith’s Grave: 13:00–13:37

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Episode Tone & Style

Josh and Chuck bring their trademark mix of witty banter, macabre fascination, and factual storytelling to the topic of safety coffins. The episode balances historical context and cultural critique with lighthearted riffs on grave-robbing, premature burial movies, and the colorful personalities who stoked—and capitalized on—societal fears.

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Summary

If you ever wondered why people were so scared of being buried alive, and how inventors, showmen, and even George Washington himself took pains to avoid this fate, this spirited episode offers a complete primer. From taphophobia and coffin patents to demonstration stunts and literary inspiration, Josh and Chuck cover the phenomena of safety coffins both seriously and humorously, leaving listeners both enlightened and entertained.

Transcript

[Narrator]

This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

[Josh]

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit. So this is a short stuff that we can begin now.

[Chuck]

That's right, Josh. Let me set the stage. It's 1799. Founding Father George Washington is on his deathbed.

[Josh]

He.

[Chuck]

He calls over his secretary, Tobias Lear, and says, I am just going have me decently buried, but do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I'm dead. Because you never know. That is the last part. But that's basically what he was saying.

[Josh]

Yeah. So, yeah. And that was a great George Washington. Especially dying George Washington.

[Chuck]

Thanks.

[Josh]

The reason why he said that is because at the time, there was a chance, let's call it a non zero chance, to get nerdy, that you might be buried alive accidentally. There's all sorts of different conditions and stuff that we understand now. If you hook somebody up to, like an EKG or EEG or some sort of g, you'd be able to detect their heartbeat. That you wouldn't be able to say, like, palpitating it with your fingers or like watching somebody to see if they're actually breathing. You might not even have a decent doctor around at the time. And you may end up being buried alive, in which case you are effed.

[Chuck]

Yeah. I wonder when they started checking pulses.

[Josh]

I don't know. Let's say 1800 on the dot.

[Chuck]

I did a quick rare lookup. And if we trust the AI overview, I do not. All right. National Institutes of Health.

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

They're talking like 4,000 plus years they've been checking pulses.

[Josh]

Okay. Well, apparently some people were better at it than others because there do seem to be documented accounts of people who were found, like, entombed, who had, like, scratch marks on their coffin or they were actually out of their coffin in a tomb that seemed to have been buried alive, came to, and then actually did die.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Like they said, I feel better. And they got up. And so, you know, let's say it didn't happen that much. Cause it probably didn't happen enough to the level of which people were scared of it.

[Josh]

Sure. Like a plane crash.

[Chuck]

Yeah. It seems to be an outsized fear back then of being buried alive. That is an actual phobia. It's called taphophobia. T A P H E is Greek for burial. And, you know, because where we're going with all this, and we may have mentioned this briefly in our coffins, Episode.

[Josh]

I know we have.

[Chuck]

We had to it, but this is a deeper dive into what was known as a security coffin or a safety coffin, which was, you know, for a while there, a lot of people got patents to build coffins that had all these little kind of ingenious ways to either get you out of there or alert people above ground that, hey, I'm feeling better.

[Josh]

Right? Come get me. I got some life left in me. Right? Yeah. These patents date back to the 1790s, I think, in Central Europe at least. There's a guy in this How Stuff Works article that they interviewed named Adam Bisno, who's a historian at the US Patent and Trademark Office. And so he would know about patents, even ones in Central Europe from the 18th century. And at this time, the argument that's made for the kind of sudden appearance for them is that this coincides with the popularity of Romanticism, which kind of came as a backlash to the rationalism of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment and Romanticism is like, no, there's stuff beyond this life that we can't see. There's beauty in nature. There's like, all of this stuff that you can't just think your way out of or think you're like, things that you can't see that actually do exist. And there's probably some sort of afterlife and who knows whether the people are fully gone. This eventually led to the rise of mediums and spiritualism, and there was just this kind of zeitgeist that the dead could conceivably still be in some sort of contact or communication, which doesn't directly go to taphephobia. But if you're already thinking, like, I don't want to be buried alive, this would probably goose you into potentially buying a safety coffin.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the sort of a popular idea at the time was that the veil is very thin between life and death.

[Josh]

Ah, yes.

[Chuck]

And, like, how thin could it be? Like, maybe so thin where you bury me by accident.

[Josh]

Yeah. Like poor Bill Pullman in Serpent in the Rainbow.

[Chuck]

Oh, yeah. Or Kiefer Sutherland's wife in that movie, which was a remake of a foreign film.

[Josh]

So good. Both of them were. It was one of those rare films where the American adaptation was just as good as the European original. Both of them are worth seeing.

[Narrator]

What were those called?

[Josh]

The Vanishing.

[Chuck]

Yeah, Vanishing. Yeah.

[Josh]

Yeah. So, yeah. And then also that poor guy who Art almost got buried in the Twilight Zone, but he started crying because he was so sad and scared. And some nurse, one of the nurses noticed his tear and was like, Dr. He's still alive right before I think they did an autopsy on him.

[Chuck]

Yeah. Or like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

[Josh]

That's a great one too. Sure. I think also Barnabas Collins, you can make a case for In Dark Shadows, the TV show, not the terrible, terrible, terrible movie.

[Chuck]

I didn't see that.

[Josh]

I saw 20 minutes of it and I was like, oh boy, these people should be individually shamed for this.

[Chuck]

It was Tim Burton, wasn't it?

[Josh]

Yes.

[Chuck]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so we're gonna take a break and call Tim Burton, tell him to think about what he's done and we'll be right back with safety coffins.

[Narrator]

Burning stuff with Joshua Showers stuff.

[Josh]

You.

[Chuck]

All right? So more than 100 security coffin patents were granted in the United States alone in the 19th century. And they got a little wacky. Like each one had its own sort of spin on the best way to either get someone out or to alert people above ground.

[Josh]

Yeah. One way was like you could just do something as simple as a bell to basically and put the cord in the person's hand and they could just like pull the bell. It's pretty simple and straightforward. There are others that had like, I guess they would put a tube in that led and connected to the coffin and then buried the person buried around that stuff. So if the person came to, they could actually crawl, use the ladder to crawl out of their own grave. Which. Talk about a story to tell at parties.

[Chuck]

It's like, you guys aren't going to believe this.

[Josh]

Yeah. Are you the guy who climbed out of his grave?

[Chuck]

Yeah. Yeah. Because you know that starts at the dinner party when, when anyone's like, I've been really lucky. I haven't lost a lot of close friends. Like has anyone ever lost like close friends and had to like preside over their funeral and the guy just puts his napkin in his lap.

[Josh]

That's pretty good.

[Chuck]

Yeah. A life preserving coffin I believe is what the patent file was in 1843 from Christian Eisenbrandt of Baltimore, Maryland. And this had a spring loaded lid where if you the quote was the slightest motion of either the head or the hand would spring this thing up. Of course that's no good if you're buried under six feet of dirt. So his suggestion is like, hey, this coffin only works if you're in a tomb, like an above ground vault and you gotta leave a key on the inside of that thing. So if you pop out of the coffin and you're still locked in the tomb, that's no good either.

[Josh]

Can't you see a loved one, like, sitting up in the middle of the night like, I forgot to leave the key?

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

There's another problem with that too. If this thing sprung open at the slightest movement of the person. Corpses move and shift around during decomposition, and I'm sure that that has accounted. Like, I think there's accounts of corpses flipping over and being found face down. I'm sure that accounts for a lot of the stories of people being found and suspected to have been buried alive. But I don't think corpses, like, leave claw marks on their coffins. So there seem to be some that are legit.

[Chuck]

Yeah, for sure. Edgar Allan Poe didn't help things much when in 1844, he wrote a short story called the Premature Burial, where in it he says, to be buried alive is beyond question the most horrific 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. And then he talks about the boundaries between life and death being shadowy and vague. Kind of playing into that. He was writing of the times, you know, because that's like we talked about. That's kind of how people thought of things. So after that, I think there were even more people coming out with these things.

[Josh]

Yeah, there was a guy named Franz Vester, who. In New Jersey, I guess that's where he was from. He had an improved burial case and you could essentially climb out of it. I think this is the one that had the tube with the ladder.

[Chuck]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And if you were too weak, you could pull on a bell. So this was like, you know, had a fail safe and he gave demonstrations of his coffin where he would be buried under like four feet of dirt and would make his way out of the coffin back above ground.

[Chuck]

Yeah, he's not the only one. It seems like the big showman, because this was sort of around the snake oil time where you would put on a big show to try and talk people into buying your thing.

[Josh]

Sure.

[Chuck]

And in the 19th century, there was a guy, Count Michel de Carnicki, such a great name, he dubbed himself as the Chamberlain to the Tsar of Russia, whatever that means.

[Josh]

It's the high ranking manager of a royal household.

[Chuck]

Oh, okay. So he was like.

[Josh]

Yeah, like a butler, essentially. But he was in charge of everybody.

[Chuck]

Like the head butler.

[Josh]

Yeah, I guess. Sure. Or the Chamberlain.

[Chuck]

Yeah. I mean, hey, I'm not trying to degrade him because he was quite the showman. He would travel through the Europe and the United States trying to sell his unit called the Carnice. And there was an article from the Chicago Tribune in 1899 that they would read before his big show where at the Academy of Medicine in New York City. Dr. Henry J. How would you pronounce that one?

[Josh]

Garrigus Garages.

[Chuck]

Garrigus. Where he startled his fellow members with the assertion that one of every 200 people buried in the US was actually in a lethargic state and is buried alive. So very dubious numbers, obviously, but he would use that as prelude to take the stage and do his own demonstration where he would bury somebody alive.

[Josh]

Yeah. And Le Carnice had an own. Had like a bell again. This is pretty low hanging fruit and it makes a lot of sense. But he also put in a tube that you could breathe through. You could also talk through it and be like, what's. What's been going on the last few days while you wait for help. And he wasn't himself buried alive like Franz Vester. He would get volunteers to do it. And there's a guy named Faropo Lorenzo, who is Italian, believe it or not. And he volunteered to be buried alive in this Le Carnice casket. And he stayed there for nine days back in 1898, which apparently still the record for being buried alive.

[Chuck]

Yeah, I think at one point on day like seven, he spoke through the tube and he was like, I'm going to put my mouth around the tube now and just drop a couple of Tic Tacs.

[Josh]

Yeah. And then the next day he shouted, I got a poop through the tube. Nine days, Chuck. Let's think about that.

[Chuck]

Yeah, That's a long time. And that seems verified.

[Josh]

Yeah. There's one other thing too, that we can't not mention. We've definitely mentioned them before, but I find it so fascinating. Timothy Clark Smith, whose grave In New Haven, Vermont, not Connecticut, back in, I think 1893, was fitted out with a window that looked down the six feet to his face. Oh, that's right. That was exposed so that passersby could check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive. Oh, man. And it's still there today, except you just can't see very far because the window's kind of. Well, it's more than 100 years old.

[Chuck]

Yeah, that's too bad.

[Josh]

You got anything else?

[Chuck]

Man, I got nothing else.

[Josh]

Say it then.

[Chuck]

I guess short stuff is out.

[Narrator]

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