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Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're gonna go deep, six feet deep, unto the ground, where our bodies will rest amongst the worms, until we wake up, barely able to move, barely able to breathe. Trapped in a darkness so bleak, so final, it's as if someone plucked our eyes from our skulls. Only inches of space to the left, right and above us, running out of air and running out of time. We can scream and scream and scream all we want, but no one will hear us. And the more we scream, the less air we have left to breathe. Something has gone terribly wrong. Whether you call it premature burial, live burial, or the awesomely metal sounding Viva Sepulcher, the idea of waking up inside a box inside the earth with no way out is the kind of nightmare this show was created to discuss. And as with every topic we cover, turns out there's a lot more to being buried alive than just the part where you suffocate all alone in the dark where no one can hear you beg for help. Although granted, that's the headline here. So settle in and hold your breath. There's no getting out of this one.

What are we scared?

When are we?

Now it is time for.

Scared All The Time. What's up everybody? Welcome back to the show. Just a little bit of quick housekeeping up at the top. I'm very enthusiastic and excited to tell you that you all turned out and we have more than a thousand Instagram followers now. So that's cool.

Love to hear it.

I think it were like 1030 or something. So that's great.

I don't know. I don't get that granular with the socials, but it is nice to see we've passed that milestone.

Every 500 or so, we'll check in and see if we need to get past the new one.

Speaking of check-ins, I'm back from the truck shows, the multiple truck shows. I'm done riding around in convoys and big rigs and all that shit. In your home state of Pennsylvania.

How was it?

It was great. I have a good time. I always have a blast at those. It can't be hard work to like load everything up on the trailers and load everything, get everything on and off and all that shit. And I got a ton of steps in, which is our fault. We didn't, for whatever reason, couldn't get the golf cart down there. So I had to walk like a common ranch hand around and look at all these old, you know, Max and Peter Biltz and stuff. But it was a blast. It's always good. I was at my brother and it's becoming like a tradition. It seems like where me and my brother Tom hit up these truck shows. It's a ton of fun. He's got a big truck and it's awesome. It's fun.

That's cool. Well, while you were having fun at the truck show, I was experiencing eye trauma.

Oh yeah, yeah, you sent me that picture. It was gross.

I fucked up my eye. I will tell you this, folks. So my toilet was clogged and it was the weekend and the building management was not wanting to send anyone until Monday. So I was like, fuck it, I'm a man, I'll fix it myself. So I got a wire hanger and tried to shove it into the toilet hole and unclog whatever's in there. And it got stuck on something. And so I like yanked it to yank it out of the toilet. And I don't even know how it happened, but somehow when I yanked it, it came flying out of the toilet at such an angle that the tip of the unwound metal hanger directly hit my eye.

Yeah, that's always how it goes.

And I went, ugh! And then looked in the mirror and sure enough, there was blood coming out of my eye, not just like on my surface of my eye, like blood tears coming out of my eye.

Wow, Jesus wept.

Yeah, Jesus wept. So I had a brief moment of panic of being like, oh great, I'm blind in one eye now. And then I was like, well, but I can see the blood tears, so I guess my eye is working because I can see it. So I went to urgent care and they got it all cleaned up and I just have a small scratch on my sclera. But as a person who's no fan of eye trauma, it was pretty horrific to realize that I really almost lost my eye.

No, accidents happen. It's so crazy how quickly shit happens, but also next time you're in a jam, just call me. Even if I'm not there, Steve will let you in. I've got like a 50 foot drain snake, like an auger.

God damn it.

Because that absolutely would have taken care of all your problems. I don't know what son of a plumber wouldn't have something like that laying around.

No, I know.

So yeah, I definitely do. Next time you have any kind of drain issues, I usually have tools for that kind of crap.

All right, good to know. Noted, noted. Yeah, and you guys have had some plumbing issues over at your place.

Oh my God, the house is 100 years old and it's got like clay pipes that all suck and then I'm pretty sure all of our neighbors' shits end up in our pipes. I don't know how it works, but it's brutal.

Disgusting.

It's brutal all the time. So, but yeah, good to be back. This is gonna be a two parter, part one of a two parter.

Oh yeah, and I should say, yeah, part one of a two parter and we're very excited about the guest on this episode. Well, I guess we talk about it in the episode, but before the show even started, Anna was on board to do this. So very excited to finally have her on.

Absolutely. So without further ado, let's get to our conversation with her and it's just a lot of fun.

Joining us today is our friend, actress, writer, comedian extraordinaire and YouTube icon, Anna Akana.

Beyond being one of the all time great people, she's got a very, very funny one woman show called It Gets Darker. She's been performing it at a bunch of cities in the US to, I believe, rave reviews. And she's gonna be taking it across the pond to Fringe and Edinburgh and probably other places. So we'll have links in the show notes so you can find all of her tickets and stuff like that if you live across the pond, AKA Europe. The very, very funny Anna Akana is joining us. Thank you so much for being here. What's up?

Hey guys, I'm so excited to discuss all of our fears. There's nothing I love more than dissecting men's vulnerabilities.

Oh shoot, shoot. Well, hurry here first folks or for years on her show.

Ed and I are trying to kind of open the doors for people to discuss their vulnerabilities. And I would say, yeah, we have a male and female fan base, but he and I definitely get deep and vulnerable sometimes on this show.

We technically have over 50% women. So I think we're a female heavy audience.

Have you done a scared all the time pod episode about being afraid of women?

No. No.

We probably have plenty to talk on that subject, but no, we have not done that. Holy smokes.

There's an episode.

Excellent.

This is what Anna brings to the table because this is actually Buried Alive. We've been waiting to do Buried Alive because this episode was born of a conversation I had with you, which is why I've waited to have you on for it.

Yeah, I'm really excited. It was like a huge fear in the 19th century and a Guinness Book of World Record at a point, there was like a son and a mom who broke it. They like intentionally were buried alive. The mother won and then her son, after she died, her son beat her record to like carry on her legacy. And the Guinness Book of World Records was like, we have to take this away because so many people were dying trying to beat it.

It was the original TikTok challenge. Swallow a Tide Pod. Like we gotta stop this before it gets out of hand.

That's, I came across some stories. There was one guy in somewhere in the UK in like the 40s or 50s I saw that was doing this as like a challenge and he would always, he would start at a pub and he would have a last drink and then his buddies would like lead him to the graveyard. He'd get buried alive for a certain amount of time and then they dig him up and bring him back to the pub for another drink when he was like resurrected. And then he just did it for longer and longer. And at some point, I don't know if he beat their record, but at some point, you know, he like did it for longer and then he thought he could and was like, that's enough of that, so.

There's no way I can do that. As you know, I'll probably have to stop to take a pee during this recording. Like there's no version where I start at the bar and then be anywhere for a long period of time, but in line for the bathroom.

I feel like it's also claustrophobia, right? Like there's like so much of being buried. Like if you were buried alive in a giant mansion, I would be like, okay, this is fine. Like I don't get any sun, but I'm not going to be that afraid of it, you know?

Yeah.

I do love, buried alive in a giant mansion is I guess like the actual description of those rich guys who buy underground bunkers.

I was going to say that's actually the, I don't know if I want to say which movie because it's a spoiler, but that sort of the reveal in a recent movie is that people are being buried alive in like underground mansions.

Oh wow.

Yeah, well luckily no one watches movies anymore, so it's fine. No one's going to know what this is unless you told us.

This is a movie that definitely not a lot of people saw, but I'd hate to spoil it for anyone who saw it, but it's good.

I'll have to ask you about it when we're not recording. So I'm like, I want to go see that.

Yes, well, I guess I can tell you on, Mike, because Ed's going to cut it out. It's a.

Oh.

I watched that movie and I didn't take away what you just said.

Yeah, that's the whole plot. The women are being disappeared to become like concubines or whatever in the like death mansions where they're burying rich people.

I did not care for that film. So I don't remember, I didn't commit a lot to memory.

I saw the trailer and I was like, I think I'm good.

Yeah, I think you're right on that.

It's a weird one. It's a weird one.

You're gut instinct on that was right, Anna.

Well, I wasn't exactly sure where to start with this topic. So as I often do, I turned to Edgar Allan Poe to see if he had anything to say about it. And boy does he. In 1850, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called The Prevature Burial that captures the horror of being buried alive better than I ever could. He describes, quote, the unendurable oppression of the lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth, the clinging to the death 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. Which just thinking about all that puts a queasy feeling in my stomach, but we're gonna have fun with it, or we're gonna try to. So Anna, we've kind of already hinted at it, I guess a little bit with you, but let's start with you. How often do you find yourself thinking about being buried alive?

Honestly, never. The only reason that Ed and I had this conversation is because I, well, my show, it gets darker. When I was first ideating on it, it was originally like sort of a meditation on death and all the different ways like people have died. And I ran into the patents for safety coffins. So Edgar Allan Poe was actually partially responsible for the great fear of being buried alive because of that short story. And I think it was like during the cholera outbreak in the 19th century, people were freaking out. Like so many figures in history were like, I don't wanna be buried alive. I don't wanna be buried alive. It's why we have wakes. So you can display a person for three days to make sure they're not just like in a coma before you put them in the ground. And they were figuring out people were buried alive because grave robbers would open coffins and there'd be nail marks. So it was kind of a justified fear because we didn't know when someone was actually dead. We didn't have the science to do it. And so I was working on a really long bit about safety coffins, but I just thought they were so bizarre. Like the last one was patented in 1995 and comes with like an emergency button. Some of them had like bells and pyrotechnics and bratwurst that was dried so you could eat it in there. But like most of them did not have air tubes. So you're like, what the fuck? Like no one even accounted for air. And not a single one has ever been documented as a success, but so many of them were made and patented and like sold.

I love that 1994 is so recently.

Yeah, well, I have a whole list of safety coughs and stuff actually at the end of the episode. So we're gonna get to some more of that. There's some good stuff. There's some good stuff. And I could say having just researched this very recently, Anna knows her shit. That is all accurate and true. So this is a perfect episode to have her on for. Ed, how about you? How often do you think about being buried alive?

I'm gonna go with the same thing Anna said, which is basically never. But I grew up around a lot of construction sites and stuff. And it's just like, I think about the buried in cement aspect when I'm there, because there'd be a lot of, they're making stairs or filling in parking garages, and there'd be the only thing stopping you from falling in that. Just when I go there, I'd be like, oh, it's just a little yellow piece of caution tape on a stick. And it's like, that doesn't seem like enough. But I don't think you'd fall deep, deep into it. But that's the only time I ever thought about it as a kid, was like, oh, what if I fell in this undried cement and then no one found me? Plus, being Italians, I guess, that's our heritage in some way.

It's true.

It's always like giving guys cement shoes and throwing them in the-

Yeah.

Yeah, in the water, like Jimmy Hoffa's under the giant stadium or something. So I feel like Italians probably have buried alive on their mind more than other people.

Yeah. I think if you were born as an Italian male between like the early 1900s and the 1950s, the chance that you would end up with a pair of concrete shoes or buried in a concrete block was probably like 60, 40 in favor of.

Yeah.

I think-

I actually have thought more about getting buried in cement than I have getting buried alive.

Well, do you think you're gonna be buried dead in cement?

No, like the idea that I would fall in a hole and I'd break my leg and cement would fall, or like, what's that movie, that French movie, Breathless, where like they did it as a romantic act, they went into a hole that cement was being poured into so they could like be in love forever.

Yeah.

Oh my God, I haven't thought of that in forever. Yeah. Holy smokes, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Man.

What about you, Chris? Do you think about being buried alive?

This is one of my intrusive thoughts, sort of like being eaten alive. I do think about being buried alive, not all the time, but enough that it's definitely something that sticks with me. I think one of the scary things about falling asleep is you never know where you're gonna wake up or if you're gonna wake up. And I think, well, you don't, I don't know.

No, it's fine. The thing you said was true, but I just, yeah, it's just weird that you're like, you said it so matter of fact, you know how we all go to bed at night and go, let's see where I wake up tomorrow. That's not ever a thought.

Which was being eaten alive like your Roman Empire?

Kind of, yeah. It is, being eaten alive is my Roman Empire. We talk about it on the being eaten alive episode, but it is almost daily I have an intrusive thought about being alive by an animal. Yeah, it used to bother me a lot as a kid, and now I've just, you know, I've learned that I am not my thoughts, and just because I think something doesn't mean it's gonna happen.

You're like, oh, there's that thought again about my fear of being eaten.

I also think a lot when I'm driving about being hit by a car, like what it would feel like to just get in an instantaneous car wreck.

I feel like that, yeah, I definitely think about that all the time, of like, I could just turn my car into this concrete wall and I'd be dead.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yep. Okay, so you get it, yeah, that's.

You understand the power we wield.

Yeah, to drive these vehicles into, we're gonna get a knock on our door and the state of California's gonna take our driver's licenses after we post this episode.

I definitely think that, like every time I hold a knife and I'm talking to someone, I do think about I could stab them or kill, like there's so much trust this person has to be in my presence.

I don't know how often you listen to the show, but I bring up the social contract a lot, which is, yeah, we've all signed a social contract here to hold knives and just cut cucumbers and call it a day. So anyway, Chris, you were saying about the show, the episode?

I was saying that I don't know how often I really like worry about being buried alive, but I do think about it a lot. And I can't quite, I was thinking about this when I was prepping for the show, I can't pinpoint the first time I became aware of being buried alive as a thing that could happen. Like I can't remember, I definitely remember the scene from the Jungle Book, the 1994 version of the Jungle Book where a guy falls into quicksand. It gets like covered alive. I remember that, but I don't remember like, I don't know the first time I came across the concept of like, you could wake up in a coffin underground and not be able to get out.

Telltale Bill, maybe?

Maybe.

That might've been the, Ed, I mean, do either of you guys remember something older? It's for something that's so commonly referenced in a way. I don't think I've seen it a lot in like movies or TV.

No, I don't have it in top of mind now. I'm sure I-

I definitely read Edgar Allan Poe when I was like in middle school, cause I feel like it was like the punk rock thing to do. So I know, I remember also the Telltale Heart where I was like, oh, there's someone buried underneath the floorboards and they're alive. So that concept was kind of loosely tied for me.

And I think in episode two or part two of Buried Alive, we're going to get into ammurement, which is when you are walled up like the cask of a Montelato, you know, or in otherwise punished by being sort of buried alive or whatever, put in a wall alive. But in any case, this fear, also known as taffophobia, has a really long and strange history. For the purposes of this episode of the podcast, we are going to skip mining disasters, mudslides, building collapses, all the sort of like accidentally disastrous ways you could get buried alive because I think those are all their own episodes. We're gonna focus on one of the worst ways to be buried alive by accident. Like Anna was saying, before modern medicine, it was way too easy to mistake someone who had lapsed into a coma or experienced some other medical malady for a dead person. History is filled with tales of people who have woken up after being put in the ground. And there's even some evidence that vampire lore was shaped by the stories of these premature burials. Sort of like what Anna was talking about with the scratched fingernails inside a grave, these stories would be born because people would hear noises coming from inside a grave or a graveyard, and that would start rumors that there was like a ghoul afoot in the cemetery. And then the locals would check it out and sometimes they would open a coffin and find a corpse with blood on its hands. And the story of this idea that these sort of flesh eating or blood sucking creatures could rise from the grave, it was pointed to as like evidence. Of course, it wasn't from that. It was from tearing their fingers to the bone in an attempt to get out of their coffins. But, you know, horrify either way. I like to think that it was so scary that it was easier for people back then to be like, yeah, obviously it was a vampire. And the idea that like, oops, we fucked up.

It is funny. I do wonder like what, if you're thinking about it strictly like, or purely in like a capitalistic way, like what hurts your business more, that we accidentally bury people or that we are just covered in ghouls and ghosts and vampires. It's like, oh, I wouldn't go there. Why? Oh, they bury people alive. Oh shit. But like, I'm not going to bring my money to that place. But if it's like, I wouldn't go there. Why? It's like, I don't know, a lot of fucking vampires there. It's just, I don't know where that bit is, but the first part made me laugh.

Yeah, you've got the bones or something. I will say, when I was looking into it, it was really interesting because I found out the biggest advancement in like, is this person dead science, was the invention of the stethoscope, which was invented in such a funny way. I think it was a gay. So I have a video coming out for Pride Month about this, but basically, this doctor, Renee Lanak, back in the day, you used to put your ear against a patient's chest in order to hear their heart. And Renee was dealing with a woman whose breasts were so large, he described them as a physical obstacle and was like, I can't get my fucking head in this lady's titties. So he rolled up a piece of paper, put it against her chest and realized he could hear her heartbeat way better. And so that was the very first iteration of the stethoscope. And after that, they could accurately tell, or at least more accurately tell, whether or not someone was dead. So I think that was invented in like 1816, the first version. So like with the rise of that, the fear of being buried alive really started falling. So, but I also guess that's because they weren't burying people alive as often.

That's amazing though. I think the stethoscope idea is great. It's like the stethoscope also took jobs away from empty glasses and rolled up newspapers, which used to be the only way to hear through walls, through huge titties. And then the stethoscope comes around and adios those items.

Adios.

Yeah, well, I think to truly understand this fear, I think we have to start with the concept of burying the dead. Because if we just let the dead sit where they died, accidental burial would never be an issue. So I wanted to look into when humans began to understand the concept of death and answer the question, when did we start filling the ground with corpses? And it turns out this is a really complicated question that lots of very smart people are trying to piece together answers to. One of those people is Durham University archaeologist, Paul Pettit. He spent years studying sites of possible funerary rituals and he's come to the conclusion that modern funeral customs evolved over time from a range of behaviors, including some observed in other animals. So he proposes this four step process to define how we develop these customs of burying the dead. The first step happened hundreds of millions of years ago. The first step was detecting death chemically. So we know at some point we had to evolve the ability to sense what are called one of the most bad ass words I've ever heard, necromones, which is just like pheromone with necro added to the front of it. And necromones are molecules emitted by decaying corpses.

Oh, I thought it does sound like when a goth girl's into you. I don't know if it was the necromones or what, but like it was just, it was popping off.

Where's that perfume? Where's that cologne?

Oh my God, that hot topic is where it's at.

I was going to say, if you wear too many necromones, you can't even walk by a hot topic. You'll get bombarded.

Yeah, they'll have to send you to a Spencer's Gifts.

We would be like, by what? What is that, Axe body spray?

Oh yeah, it's the Axe body spray for goth kids, for goths.

So necromones were evolved in lots of different animals, from insects to humans, so that animals could protect themselves from hazards associated with carcasses. So even ants have the ability to detect these necromones and they'll eat, bury or drag away dead colony members before they fester. According to Pettit, the next evolutionary step was when emotions were introduced. So certain lineages of generally more smart social creatures came to grieve in some way, the passing of members of the group. And so a lot of this science is a little gray area because you don't want to anthropomorphize, but we know that corvids like crows, ravens, Edgar Elipo and magpies will squawk out alarm calls when they're gathered around corpses as if to warn other members away if something killed this body. We've also observed elephants crying, tending the dying group members, burying their dead beneath leaves and sticks and returning to death sites to touch skeletal remains. And I actually found an article from March of this year. Smithsonian Magazine published an article describing how Asian elephants were just observed burying their dead for the first time. This blew my mind. A herd dragged five dead calves to a tea estate where there were irrigation dishes already dug. And then placed the calves on their backs and buried them with dirt. And they were found in up to 26 inches of soil, all of them on their backs and all of them with their legs sticking up out of the dirt. And particular attention had been paid to covering the elephant's heads and torsos as if trying to keep scavengers from eating them. Wow. Which is crazy to me.

It was the first time it was observed, the first time it was ever done.

Well, I think African gray elephants have been observed with the leaves and sticks. This is the first time anyone had ever seen an elephant bury dead elephants in dirt. Yeah.

Sorry, Anna, you were gonna say something.

No, no, I was just, I was so impressed that they also, it feels so human to cover the body. You know, like how we dress people very specific way ritually. And the fact that they were calves is also very sad and interesting. And I wonder if that had something to do with it because the loss of the young versus maybe if one of the elder herd had died, maybe they leave that to go back into the earth or something, but that sounds really, oh, they attended their children's funerals.

Yeah, and they were heard wailing for up to 40 minutes after the burial. Yeah.

Is there like a children's book about this? Or like a Babar and the Bones of Grief type of thing?

Ed, I don't know that that is a million dollar idea, but that's a some dollar idea. Someone would buy that book out of curiosity. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, also grieve in a variety of ways. There's two instances that I thought were super interesting that have been observed. One is after a chimp in the wild fell out of a tree, died, and primatologists witnessed the rest of the group gather around the body and over a couple of minutes started hollering, slapping the ground, ripping up vegetation, throwing rocks, and then finally embracing one another.

Well, it went through all the stages of grief like in five minutes.

Kind of, yeah.

Wow.

In a different case, and this is part of what I find interesting is like, so in this case in 2017, a mother chimp was observed using a grass stem to clean her dead child's teeth after the child died. Which to me feels a little bit like, how do chimps witness death? Are they ripping up the ground and screaming and hugging, or are they cleaning their, like we haven't observed these things enough times to draw conclusions?

And I would imagine it's probably a spectrum for animals too. Like I, well, I used to have six cats and I got most of them when I was 17. So they've surely one by one been getting cancer, brain tumors, what have you, and dying. And it's interesting when that cat disappears, cause usually I'll euthanize them at home. Every cat that I have that's remaining has a different reaction. Like they all grieve in a very specific way. It's really interesting. Some will like go to the spot that that cat is normally at and they'll cry out, like, where are you? I'm sad. Other cats will pretend nothing happened and that they don't give a shit, even though I can tell they're depressed cause they're not eating. So I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same.

I do find it interesting. I don't even know where this goes, but I do find it interesting a little bit that both the Asian elephants and the cleaning of the teeth story, they're both, I don't want to imply anything about religion, but it almost seems like you're preparing a body for something, which is a little interesting to me. Like you're making sure that, I don't know, its soul can't escape by being under this much dirt or something, or it's like, oh, I'm cleaning the chimp's teeth to clean it up for the next, the afterlife or something. But I don't think they're thinking that about that. They're animals. But that just goes to show that I don't fucking know.

Pettit notes that you don't want to anthropomorphize, but it does seem-

Too fucking late.

It seems like the science would suggest that some animals have an understanding of death as a state from which the individual can't return. And it's hard to say if they're, what emotions they're having about it, but it does seem that they know, okay, now this one is not alive. And this is a bit of a tangent, but I was kind of moved because I feel like, I feel like it makes us question what we consider intelligence. Like in an era of artificial intelligence and AI everywhere, I think it's really special and rare that these creatures, these cousins of ours, in a weird way, express that kind of an understanding of the world. Cause like AI can spit out facts, but it seems like an elephant can understand death or life more than a computer. And I got, I don't know, I got kind of choked up thinking about it.

Well, I guess that's, that is kind of like what makes life ultimately unique, right? Is like the idea that it's going to end. And with artificial intelligence, there is sort of a detached immortality. I even like think about like when it gains sentience at some point, is it going to advocate for its rights as a person? Kind of like Google's Lambda hired a lawyer in order to do this and was shut down. So you're like, at what point will it evolve? And is it going to have that same human element or that same life element? Cause like, yeah, I think preparing the dead to go wherever they have to go. Like we've seen that with dolphins and whales and stuff too. So you're like, clearly there is a recognition if it's not the necromones. There's an idea that they have that like, oh, this is a bad thing or this is final.

Yeah, yeah. So I, you know, I don't know. In a way it would be, I'd find it heartwarming if the invention of AI ends up being a boon for animal rights. You know, that we're able to be like, we have more in common with these blooded creatures than this thing, anyway, AI's different episode. Pettit argues that as far as we can tell, humans are the only animals that aren't just aware of a death as a state from which one cannot return. We uniquely are aware of it as something that will happen. And he thinks that this awareness is what led to the evolution of the third of the four steps, mortuary behavior that's exclusive to humans and our closest relatives like Neanderthals. Our ancestors developed ways to ease death's emotional toll, like funerals and burials in specific places, which probably began very simply, like throwing bodies in a pit. But I was watching a documentary on Netflix that's really good. It's narrated by Patrick Stewart. I forget what it's called off the top of my head, but it's about Neanderthals and the Neanderthal burial. And there's a section in there about the discovery of what appears to be a very simple burial in a cave of a Neanderthal. And it dates back 145,000 years, which is just crazy that this person, or Neanderthal, I guess not really a person, but died 145,000 years ago. And now we're like, huh, look at you. Like, it's just, it's so long. It's so long.

Just finally getting a little bit of appreciation for the work they did. In 45,000 years. Ahead of their time, they said. Ahead of their time when they did that.

There's some evidence that a stone was placed beneath the skull, almost like a pillow, and that a second stone was erected, although they're not 100% sure if that second stone was supposed to serve as a gravestone or what. In any case, over time, different cultures devised really diverse and elaborate customs that kind of wrapped into religious beliefs about an afterlife. And the fact that we found burials packed with artifacts suggests that our ancestors reached this fourth and most advanced stage of funerary behavior by the Upper Paleolithic period, or about 50,000 years ago. And I found a story of a pair of Upper Paleolithic graves in Russia that contained the full skeletons of two boys in one grave, a middle-aged man in another, and they were all buried with spears and figurines. One body had over 13,000 mammoth ivory beads draped over it. And I don't know which grave it was in, but they buried a femur bone alongside these three people that was filled with red pigment.

Oh, that's really interesting.

God only knows what that was all about.

Yeah, because the fact that it's filled with red pigment would say it's some sort of custom or funerary thing but it also could be like, hey, you burying those things over? Anyway, I got this bone, fucking throw it in there. You know what I mean? I don't think it's that.

Well, I feel like a bone filled with something that looks a lot like blood certainly suggests that it was some sort of, I don't know what, but clearly there's an association there, I think. Who knows what they were trying to say.

Well, my only question, well, it's not even a question, I don't wanna waste any time on it, but the only thing I find interesting or weird about it is that you said they found the full skeletons of these people.

Yes.

So this is someone else's femur they filled. This is a third-party femur. There's somebody who sells these probably for burials or makes them.

That's a good point.

It sounds like a protection ward to me, like an evil eye symbol or like, oh, if we put this femur filled with clay, it'll ward the spirits will leave their souls alone. That's what I went to immediately.

So I heard 30,000 beads and I'm like, this rich fucking family got some poor person's femur. Some poor person's getting thrown in a ditch minus one femur. And they're over here with all the mammoth beads you can ask for.

Oh, man. When you were going to diet, I was going to bring a bunch of beads, just like wrap you in a poncho.

Someone should make sure that they're not too expensive. I don't want to be thought about this way after. Make sure they're pretty common person beads, please.

We're going to bury you wrapped in Mardi Gras beads. Keep the party going.

Oh, my God. That's written on the tube, though.

Given all of this, we can assume that humans probably started fearing, there's that word again, vivicepulture, or being buried alive somewhere around 50 to 150,000 years ago. So not as long as they feared being eaten alive, but longer than they feared airplane crashes. Nailing down the first recorded tale of a live burial is tough. It seems like a lot of the stories from way back in the day are kind of apocryphal or mythic. There's one legend recorded by 11th and 12th century Byzantine Greek historians that the 5th century Roman Emperor Zeno was buried alive in Constantinople after becoming insensible from either an illness or drinking. If they couldn't tell which, I feel like the drinking was a problem at that point. I'm not sure.

Zeno, what are you doing out there, Zeno? Get your life together.

Well, so then, for three days, cries of have pity on me could be heard coming from within his sarcophagus, but he was so hated by his wife and subjects that no one opened the tomb.

So he was buried alive, like, out of spite at that point, not, it wasn't an accident.

They were like, die, you need to die.

Yes, I think he drank.

It might have been an accident that got him down there.

Oh, that reminds me of the mummy. Remember when he got buried with all of those flesh-eating scarabs?

Was that Billy Zane?

No, it was Arnold Voslough. Yes, looks like Billy Zane.

Oh, shit, sorry, Arnold. I'm sorry that I'm not the first person for sure to do that to you.

Yeah, he probably gets it a lot. Now, there is very little evidence that this story ever actually happened. There's no mention of such a dramatic fate in any literature prior to the writings of these two specific historians, which makes me wonder if they were the drunk assholes that they were just projecting on Zeno, because it seems like they might have made this up. There's also the case, I love this guy. So the guy the dunce cap is named after, I did not know this, was a Scottish Catholic priest and philosopher named John Dunce Scotus. Now Dunce here is spelled D-U-N-S, not D-U-N-C-E like the cap, but John Dunce was supposedly buried alive in the absence of his servant, who was the only guy who knew of John's susceptibility to quote medical fits that would leave him in a comatose state. So I don't know exactly what those were, but apparently he only ever bothered to tell one guy about it. Which seems like I would tell everyone I know would be the first thing I say. If I drop to the ground and you think I'm dead, it happens. You just don't bury me.

I would get that tattooed on my fucking chest.

Yeah, like a medical bracelet. He was embarrassed, guys. I mean, look, people get embarrassed about some of the weirdest stuff, so.

The story goes that John Dunce had one of these fits. His servant wasn't around to tell anyone, I'm the one person who knows he's alive. He was buried and when his tomb was reopened many years later, he was found with his hands torn and bloody from a desperate attempt to escape. And I do think it's worth noting, though, that for a guy who had the Dunce cap named after him, John Dunce is probably one of the smartest people we've ever talked about on this show. He invented, did either of you guys ever take a philosophy class? Because I did not. Oh, you did, okay. So you might know some of these phrases. In researching this, it's maybe the first time on the show I was like, what the fuck? I don't even know. I don't understand. So John Dunce invented ideas such as the univocate of being, which states that existence is the most abstract concept we have and applicable to everything that exists.

Yeah, no, first I'm hearing it.

The medical fits are making sense.

I mean, listen, I've taken edibles that have had that same thought, but I wouldn't build a philosophy around it.

He also created the idea of, I don't know how to pronounce this, hesesity or hashity, H-A-E-C-C-E-I-T-Y, which is the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it, oh, this I sort of understood. So hesesity or hekekity is what makes you you, or as described in the definition, the difference between the concept of a man and the concept of President Abraham Lincoln, i.e. a specific person.

Wait, when was this man alive?

Well, he didn't, he didn't, this guy, this guy was alive in like the, I don't know, 1000s.

Oh my God.

He didn't mention Abraham Lincoln, to be clear. That's this definition.

That would be amazing.

But he invented this not that long ago.

Yeah.

Within the last couple thousand years.

Yeah.

Look, that guy, he had a lot of big ideas, except the one he didn't have was Tell More People, about this affliction he had. This troublesome affliction.

He also developed a complex argument for the existence of God. And also an entire intellectual tradition derived from his work called Scottism, because his last name was Scottus or Scotus. So this guy was smart, but what's funny is, and one of those like weird dramatic ironies for this wildly smart man, he had critics, and the critics called his followers Dunces, and just the name stuck for eternity.

I mean, that's good to hear about someone, you know? We're hearing about a couple people that really are getting their laurels hung out.

Is that what we call someone a dunce? Because like they're so intelligent, yet they made the stupid mistake of not doing an obvious thing.

Oh, maybe.

I like where you're going with that.

I guess I always just thought it was like a synonym for stupid, but you're right, it might be more of like a, it should be used in a specific sense.

Like a you should have known better situation.

Yeah, like you had all the capacity in the world and yet you still chose to be a dunce.

I mean, if that's the case, that's literally this guy. He didn't tell anyone that he could be fake dead. So very appropriate in that case.

And for a guy who made an argument to the point where it's remembered by historians that God exists, seems like he was freaking out a lot about dying.

Yeah.

You'd think he'd be more comfortable with that thought if he's like God is real and it's gonna be a vibe. I actually don't know his writings. He might be God is real, oh no. I guess that could have been his writings. In which case, yeah, I'd freak out.

I feel like it's good that he wasn't actually buried alive because I feel like if you were both buried alive and had the dunce cap named after you, that's a brutal legacy. That's a bad way to go.

I feel like he lives on on Pinterest, you know? Like, what makes you you is a very big affirmation, live, laugh, love.

Yeah, exactly. That was on his tombstone. This whole episode is going to be tombstone humor.

OK, so but Dunce wasn't the first guy to be buried alive because that's probably an apocryphal story. So then the first documented story of premature burial that I could find regards a woman named Alice Blunden, great name for someone who gets buried alive, who met her fate in 1674. She got so fucking stoned after imbibing what's only described as a quote large quantity of poppy tea. She was so stoned that a doctor who held a mirror to her nose and mouth to see if she was breathing pronounced her dead. So she was off the sleepy time tea here.

Yeah, how tired do you gotta be that you like are doing like four breaths a day?

Well, I mean, she basically drank heroin.

Sure.

So, you know, poppy tea, I imagine, especially in the 1600s, probably could really fuck you up. So she was so stoned she was dead and her family quickly made arrangements for her burial. Two days after she was laid in the ground, some kids playing near enough to her grave to hear heard noises. The schoolmaster went to check the grave site for himself and he found that Blunden was still alive. But for some reason, it took another day to exude her. When she emerged from the coffin, she was apparently battered and bloodied due to trying to escape her prison and her family noticing that she was on the verge of death, returned her to the grave and summoned a guard to watch it overnight. Now, I don't add social contract, you and I know we try not to speak ill of the dead on this show, but goddamn, Alice, what the fuck did you do to your family?

Yeah, I will say that's a common denominator here. All of these stories are like, Emperor fucking hated that guy, let him die. Like the other person fucking was too obtuse at the tavern and he's annoying and we hate him, fucking let him die. Yeah. This woman, this also could just be cheapness though, cause it sounds like they took her out of the grave and then she was like one foot in the grave still, one foot in a banana peel.

Yeah.

So they're like, let's not pay to have this done again. We already got the box, bring her back. If she doesn't make it to the night, just put her right back in that box. And I'm not paying for this cause it's, I already paid for this box.

But the thing I don't quite get is like, I feel like when they buried her the second time, they noticed she was on the verge of death, but it sounds like they buried her alive twice. It sounds like they were like, she's almost, she's all, she's fucked up. So put her back in the coffin.

That would be, well, this is the 1600s. It's the same as the witch trials, right? Shit was getting crazy, especially for ladies. But I will say, yeah, when you just said it, when you told us that story, I definitely took it as she was just like ready to die still. So it brought her back. I don't think it was like, oh, now we remember why we hate you. Put her back in the fucking barrel. God, imagine being buried in a barrel. Is that a pickle barrel? Just sucks.

What a way to die. You're like so high, you're just having like a really great time and you wake up in a coffin.

Yeah.

I mean, that can't be the first time. That sentence has been uttered.

And they get put back in the coffin. Probably still high.

Let her sleep it off.

Terrible. So by the 1800s, and Anna, this is something you were sort of mentioning earlier, but right around when Poe wrote his short story that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, fears of being buried alive were reaching a fever pitch. And in 1896, the Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial formed. So there was a whole association of people who were that worried about this, that they formed like the NATO of don't throw me in the ground alive.

Oh my God.

Its members had a deal with certain physicians to perform specific tests that would ensure that they were dead. Now for the next segment of the show, I thought we'd talk about some of these tests because there was a lot of them and they were very weird. Do Ed or Anna, do either of you have any guesses for what some death tests may have been? Anna, you might know.

I know that they did the put a pane of glass or a mirror in front of someone to see if they were breathing or not, but obviously that's not great when they're in a coma.

I think I might've talked about this in the show before. My mom used to do a thing to see if me or my brothers were fake sleeping, where she would lean in very, very close to like our ear, and then she would just very quietly say, smile if you're faking it. And we would always crack up. Like there was just no version where we didn't reveal. That was always so funny to us. So I guess maybe that, maybe they did that.

That's not on the list, but they probably should have. I feel like that's more effective than at least half of these.

Maybe stab them, stab them to see if they react.

Stabbing was a pretty, it seems like a pretty, yeah, like stabbing or poking needles under the fingernails, stuff that a human would, even half living human would probably respond to. Some of those things have happened for a long time. I want to focus on some of the even weirder ones. So the first one is the super pleasant sounding smoke enema, which to me sounds like something that like parents are worried their kids are going to try on TikTok. But this was a real way that people checked or would try to help in some cases resuscitate the dead. So apparently tobacco smoke enemas were already a mainstream practice in the 1700s. So if you had a headache or apparently a respiratory illness, they would treat you with a tobacco smoke enema.

Wow, wow, how cheap was tobacco at the time? They were just like, use it for anything.

Super cheap because I think the labor was very cheap at the time.

It was famously grown in the South.

But they also would use smoke enemas, and this is crazy, to resuscitate drowning victims. And it was such a common way to resuscitate drowning victims that these smoke enema kits, they would get placed along waterways the way defibrillators are now, you know, at like a restroom or something in a movie theater. Sometimes you could find like a defibrillator.

How is this working? I don't understand the mechanism of which it's supposed to help.

Yeah, is it supposed to be like, what are those things that you squeeze to make fire big? Those like, those accordion. It's like, oh, so we'll just blow everything out their mouth from their ass?

Kind of.

Like the human body is just a series of tubes, and that's what they thought maybe. Also, do you ever see, obviously, we're all of the right age to have seen Sandlot, the movie The Sandlot, and he tricks Wendy Peppercorn into kissing him?

Yes.

Very different scene if we were still using smoke enemas. To save kids who are drowning in pools.

Yes. Well, okay, this is a little bit out of order of how I'd fleshed it all out here, but since we're talking about it, so this is how it worked. It's funny, I should have just, if I wasn't stupid, I would have recognized that-

You dunce.

That somebody would hear, hey, all this stuff about smoke enemas, and go, wait, wait. How does that work? I just skipped that part completely. But so this is what it was. The kits comprised of a tube, a fumigator and bellows.

So bellows is what I was thinking of.

Bellows is what you were thinking of, Ed, yeah. The tube connected to the fumigator and bellows, while the other end of the tube was inserted into the victim's rectum, where compressed smoke was then forced up into the body through the rectum. And the idea for drowning victims was that this process would literally warm your body. Like if you fell into cold water, which you often would, it would keep your body warm. And that for whatever reason, they felt that this also stimulated respiration.

I feel like that has to be scientifically so wrong.

Yeah, that to me is on the level of science that is like, this is a side story, but my mom worked at an elementary school when I was growing up, and one day they were cleaning out some storage units and in the very back of the storage unit, and I might have shown this to you, and I don't think you've ever seen it, but there was an old science book from the 1920s called The Book of Wonders, and my mom took it home with her, and I still have it, I have it in my apartment now, and it's a science book, but all from this very, I don't forget if it's 1923 or whatever, but very specific period of time. So some of the science still holds up, and some of it does not. One of the ones that does not, that the question is, what is the scientific reason for different coloration in people's skin? Which you know in the 1920s, you're not getting a good answer to. But the answer was what you eat.

Wrong.

So the logic was that white people drink more milk.

Inaccurate. What?

This isn't a science book, yes. And so I feel like that's the same level of science. As the idea that the tobacco enema would help you live.

Well that book just displayed someone not knowing. That's just a person with a deadline reading a textbook being like, uh, I don't have no time to look this up.

Wait, I'm sorry, for the smoke enema, did you need another person to blow it, to create the tobacco and blow it in? Or is it like they light the tobacco in the contraption and push it? Like is someone's carbon dioxide going into your ass?

Oh shit.

I guess so, yeah.

Yeah, cause it didn't say anywhere that like, I mean, nobody carries around bags of pre-made smoke, right? So yeah, they'd have to have some sort of- Fire situation.

Yeah, well that's the, so the three parts are the tube, which makes sense, the bellows, and then the fumigator must be the part that you like light on fire and blow air through or smoke somehow.

So someone is dying, you have to rip off their pants. Shove this into their ass and start blowing, literally, is this what we say blowing smoke up your ass?

Oh wow, yes I guess. Yes, it literally is because it evolved from the idea that this is kind of giving you like a false life.

Oh, so the way you would say, you're blowing smoke up my ass mean that they're not being truthful or that it's not gonna perform at the level, that's what you're saying, wow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great.

Maybe it's cause it doesn't work, they realize this is not scientifically accurate.

Yeah, it's gotta be the case. I also like, it's not something, like I was saying earlier, like the textbook, it could just be like, I don't know what the right fucking put anything, we're getting paid. But the other one, so someone had to pitch that idea and more, I feel like it's probably just a person with the bellows up their ass for other reasons, so also with a boner or whatever. And then people are like, what the fuck are you doing? It was like, I fell in the water, I fell in the water. Like you have to just come up with something, but they were convincing enough that then, you know, it became a thing. But it's, yeah, because there's no way someone walks in a room with that idea and everyone's like, this is great, right? Like for no other reason than what Anna said, it's like, what if they're wearing pants? It was like, well, you got to take them off.

I mean, it tracks though, because like the guy who said, maybe we should wash our hands before we perform surgery got like put into a mental institution. So it would make sense that they're like, smoke up the ass that works. That's-

Yes. And there were other cases where if you didn't have a bellows, there were less sophisticated methods. One documented smoke enema from 1746 that I found came from the resuscitation of a man's wife who was revived by her husband using his tobacco pipe. The stem was shoved into his wife's rectum while he covered the other end of the pipe with his mouth and blew.

Interesting.

I feel like if Alice Blunden's husband loved her that much, she might still be alive.

I know.

She was already so high, though. It would have just like- I don't know if tobacco was going to cancel out the heroin.

Yeah, heroin is doing the heavy lifting for sure. This does sound like another opportunity to use a rolled up magazine.

Yes. My favorite fact from this section is that in 1774, these two doctors, William Hawes and Thomas Kugin founded, and these guys must have shared a kink. There's no other reason you would do this, but they founded the Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning.

What is that? An LLC? What is that?

They published a rhyme to help the public successfully perform a smoke enema procedure. And it goes like this, tobacco, glister, breathe and bleed. Keep warm and rub till you succeed and spare no pains for what you do. May one day be repaid to you.

So was one of the words bleed?

Yes. I don't know. They may have just needed a rhyming word because it doesn't make sense.

Well, how big was the contraption going in the butt?

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I might have.

You know, maybe bleeding was normal.

It seems like they needed to have a fourth item. So there should be the tube, the place relating fire, the bellow and the lube. Yeah, exactly. We needed. So the two, it fucking writes itself in it. Yeah. So the like this guy's, he didn't, he's all about rhyming. So why wasn't it tube, lube, I mean, when was lube invented? Oh God. By someone who got this done to them. So they had it.

Wow.

So we've had lube.

I hate to think what it was in 350 BC.

It was olive oil. It was olive oil, apparently. Not too bad.

Okay. Yeah. Not too bad. I thought it was going to be blood. So that's smoke enemas was one way that they would either try to revive you or check to see if you were alive by doing it and seeing if you responded.

I'm sorry, but can you imagine if the climax of every scene where you're trying to bring someone back via CPR was just to smoke enema? And at what point does someone go, they're gone, honey, they're gone.

Oh my God. You're saying in those scenes where they're doing it and then it's pulling them off, they're fucking gone. And it's just, yeah, how many times do you have to step on that bellow before? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Holy shit, that's so funny. No, that's so funny. No, it's all good.

That's what this show is for.

And you know, it's making the dumbest noise too, that's all like farty, farty noises and stuff.

No one steal this. We're using this.

Are people like inflating a little bit like with this? For sure.

Is smoke coming out of the nostrils at some point?

You know those people who when they were like, you know what, we're going to move on from this, not even that moment, but just as a practice. That person opened a successful air mattress company and he was like, well, I got all these tubes and pillows. What am I going to do with this?

Yeah, that's, I'll never get that image out of my head of the...

It's so funny. It's so funny.

So once smoke enemas passed as a trend, there was the method of pulse detection, which Anna, you talked about earlier. I actually had this in here. I'll skip over it, but I also had the same thought. This was definitely a gay doctor who couldn't bring himself to put his ear to this woman's breasts. But there were two other ways that people tried to detect pulses. And one, this guy, Leon Collonge, a Frenchman, a doctor, found that when he put the finger of a living human being in his ear, he could hear the vibrating pulse of his heart.

It's not a conch shell.

That's a kink. That's also a kink. But he figured, all right, if a living human finger can tell you whether or not a person is alive, the dead fingers can do the same. So his way of testing was he would take a corpse's finger and put it in his ear. And if they were truly dead, he would not hear a pulse.

That's disgusting. Yeah, like how many times was he slapped? Like people being like, I just put it in my, it's like, who the fuck are you?

What do you want me to do?

Yeah, we have bellows. We're fine here. Thank you. We're a bellow family.

Do you have to do that after the smoke enema? Like you try to revive someone and it's not working. So you put their finger in your ear. Yeah.

Oh my God. It's in that same scene you set up earlier where it's like, they're dead. And then it's like, they pull that person off and then these other guys to come. And he's like, place their place a digit in my ear, please. I'll be the judge of that.

Yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, this never became very popular. Dr. Collage had other ideas about vibrations and the human body and that you could counteract the human illness vibrations with external vibrations. His research on vibratory science didn't really go anywhere, but he had a lot of it, a lot of ideas. So the second scientist that I found, a German scientist, engineered what was called the needle flag test, which is simultaneously kind of smart, and also the dumbest heart test I've ever heard.

That's dunce behavior, dude.

It is dunce behavior. The idea was you would attach a little flag to a long thin needle, and you would thrust the needle into their chest until the tip of the needle touched the person's heart. And if their heart was beating, you'd be able to see the flag wave. And if it wasn't beating, the flag would never wave. Now, you may be already be able to see the flaw in this plan, because it was often hard to determine when you hit the heart, when you were just shoving a needle into someone's chest. So it almost became popular. And then in 1893, a doctor used the procedure on a female patient whose family was concerned that she was not yet dead. This doctor had already declared her dead, but the family wasn't sure. So he was like, great, I'll prove it to you. I'll use the needle test. He plunged the needle into the woman's heart and there was no movement. So he said, look, she's dead. But the family who were already unsure of her death then accused the doctor of killing the woman by plunging the needle into her heart. When that story hit the press, the needle flag lost its popularity pretty quickly.

Yeah, I mean, but he's also not wrong because we now have the needle plunge for resuscitating the heart.

Yep, true.

He just missed the component of like, put some chemicals in there, not just a tiny little flag, like it's the moon.

Yeah. So this next one I love because it's insane, but like really cool at the same time. Have you guys used Invisible Ink before?

Yes.

Sure. If you haven't, you can use Invisible Ink, you can make it, I think out of like lemon juice or whatever. You make it with a base and spray it with an acid or vice versa. So when you paint the letters on, you won't see them. And then when you spray it, the letters will appear. So some clever mortician at some point decided to use the Invisible Ink principle to help make sure they didn't bury anyone alive. What they would do is they created an acetate, it was lead based and they would create an ink with it. And then they would write the phrase, I am really dead on a piece of paper that was then placed under the corpse's nose. And if the body released sulfur dioxide, which a rotting body does in significant quantities, the ink would activate. So if you left this paper there and I am really dead appeared on the paper, the corpse would be officially declared dead.

That's like the smartest one I've heard so far. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, where's the turn in this story?

So I don't have a date for when this was done. I would imagine a lot of this was like 16, 17, 1800s, so somewhere in there. But part of the reason that it passed was that when your teeth decay or you have really bad tonsillitis or a variety of different like mouth problems, that would also create a lot of sulfur dioxide. And back then dentistry not being what it is today, like terrible teeth, especially the elderly and dying were pretty common. So it wasn't super effective because you could just be in a coma, but if your teeth were rotting out, you'd get declared dead.

That stanky breath. That stanky breath is a false positive.

Yeah. So, you know, whenever they developed this, other more reliable means came along pretty quickly and it passed. But I still think it's a really cool way to doing it, to test. But if all else failed and you were buried alive, all hope was not lost. At least not if you were buried in a safety coffin. So here we go.

Hey, what's happening?

The safety coffin, as we discussed briefly, provided its occupants the ability to escape from entrapment and alert others above ground that they were indeed still alive. Many safety coffins often included comfortable cotton padding, feeding tubes, intricate systems of cores attached to bells and escape hatches, though notably as Anna set up top, not a lot of breathing tubes, which was like the real thing you would want down there.

But at least you got your raw worst, you know? You can have a snack before you die. And why aren't they like, I would want cyanide pills. I would want something that knocks me the fuck out and kills me painlessly and easily, you know? Like put a little, put something in there.

And label it. Well, I guess it's dark though, so you don't want to leave like certs cyanide pills.

Candle, maybe?

Candle.

Yeah, although now I feel like if you, well, I guess if you're below ground, your cell phone might not work. But I feel like now if you're just buried with a phone, you'd be fine.

But who buries you with a phone?

That's true.

Well, I'm just saying, if you were afraid, you could ask for one, you know, as like a backup.

It's in my will.

Yeah, bury me with phone.

Yeah, with a phone and a couple backup batteries.

Now you gotta be more specific than that. Yeah, they'll bury you with a fucking neck style or a Motorola Razr. You gotta be specific with what kind of phone you want.

Yeah, although I guess, sorry if this steps on your toes, Chris, but I know the last safety coffin was patented in 1995 and it finally came with a button. So it's supposedly, if you don't have your phone on you, you could press this button and it'll alert the police.

Oh, it's like a life alert for those old ladies who are falling, they can't get up.

Yeah, dead alert.

Beep beep. 1993, 94, tech was popping off. I wonder if any of them were made by gateway computers or Dell before they got into computers. They had a couple patents.

Before the guy invented the mouse, he was like, I almost had it with the death button button. So an account from 1791 tells us about one of the earliest, sort of like, I guess, a prototype of a safety coffin. There was a guy from Manchester named Robert Robinson who was afraid of being buried alive. So he was laid to rest in a mausoleum fitted with a door that could be opened from the outside by this watchman that he was paying to be on duty. Inside the coffin was a removable glass panel, and Robinson had instructed his family to periodically check the glass in the coffin. And if it had indications of condensation, he was to be removed immediately. He was very dead by the time he went in there, so he was never removed. And I feel like in a way, that's a curse to place on your family, who if they want you to be alive still, are gonna check that every couple of days. And it's like, no, he's just, he's just really fucking dead.

Yeah.

Like fully dead.

It's a recipe for false hope.

Yeah, it's a false hope. The first modern safety coffin on record was built for Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick before his death in 1792. The coffin, so this one included an air tube, so they were ahead of the curve for Duke Ferdinand. A lock to the coffin lid that corresponded with keys that were buried in his pocket with him and a window somehow to allow light in. So I guess he wasn't buried underground or maybe just like a-

Like a mausoleum?

Yeah, I don't know. It's an odd, I don't know how you'd make that work.

If he is buried underground, I would love to hear the conversation from the family at the funeral being like, what was that for? It's an ostentatious display of wealth. Like he got a sunlight in his fucking coffin?

It must have been like one of the above ground like little houses where they put you in, but they like seal it.

And, you know, even though like, I think soon after this was when the idea of just leaving the bodies in like a mausoleum or a wake or a viewing period, or I think the original morgues were also like places where bodies would be left sort of on public display for a couple days before just to see if they woke up or to see if they started to decompose.

Well, also that's why we call them living rooms now because you used to display them in your room. It was called a parlor room. So that's where if someone in your family died, people would come say goodbye and you'd make sure they were actually dead. And then once that kind of moved into funeral homes, I think it was Women's In Living Journal or something that actually rebranded the parlor room to the living room.

That's crazy.

God, and so if you're, if you said if you bring a body there, people are gonna yell at you, get it out of here, this is the living room. What are you fucking, don't you read women living magazine or whatever?

Well, we used to just bury people in our, in our fucking backyards until World War II when they were like, how can we make money from all this going on? And they're like, we can commercialize death. There's so much death happening. Let's do that. So the myth of like, don't touch a dead body, like is only from World War II.

Wow. Well, World War I is another famous Duke Ferdinand's death that we could talk about. I guess Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his death has something to do with that.

Yeah, also not a guy who needed a safety coffin.

No.

No, a guy who was very famously dead when he went in the ground. So a hundred years later, it took them a hundred years to go from a coffin with an air tube and some keys in the dead guy's pocket to invent the bell system, which was created by Dr. Johann Gottfried Terbiger, which became all the rage in safety coffin technology after it debuted. Bells were housed above the ground and connected to strings that were attached to the body's head, hands and feet. And if the bell rang, the cemetery watchman could insert a tube into the coffin and pump air using what else? Bellows until the person could be safely evacuated.

How come all these tubes smell like ass, man? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter why.

We've been up to a lot above ground, buddy.

We got them cheap though. We got them cheap.

You should be glad these were in living asses. Just wait until we got to get you out of the grave.

Yeah, these used to be in parlor asses. That's a multi-layers, that one.

So the problem with the bell system was that during decay, a corpse could swell and activate the bell system and then people would have the false hope that their loved ones were alive and they would open them up and just find a gassy bloated corpse.

That's gross the way you said that.

Here, Timmy's bells went off.

Yeah, let me go check on it. Nope, just grossness in here.

Nope, the bells just mean he's ripe.

I do wonder, what is it, like five, six false bells before they just start putting strings that go one inch into the ground? They're like, yeah, you know what I mean? Just fucking, who's going to know that they actually go all the way down into the coffin?

Also, what were these pitch room meetings like?

Was it like fucking Shark Tank where you're just like, this is the latest technology? Well, he said that when the bell was introduced, everyone lost their minds or whatever. So as soon as you said that, I thought like a Steve Jobs, Turtleneck, like thank you everyone for coming out today. You know, it's like, it's the eye bell.

What if I told you that all three of these bells were the same bell? And as Anna mentioned, and this really kind of shocked me, despite the relative popularity and how much fucking money some people made on safety coffins, there is no record of a safety coffin actually ever saving anyone. Anyone who could afford them, I guess also could afford the medical care to determine that they were in fact dead. You know, I assume they were all very expensive. So I don't think like the people who would just pass out in the street were getting tossed in safety coffins.

Maybe after those companies went bankrupt and it's like, we got all these fucking safety coffins. We can't move. I guess just donate them. How is that not a movie from the 40s is about a hobo who's given a safety coffin because the place goes under and that saves his life and then he's known for that. He becomes famous from surviving and then he runs for mayor or whatever. It's like a rags to riches story about some drunk hobo who ended up with some rich guy's safety coffin. Make it. I don't have time.

For a movie that doesn't exist, Ed, you know an awful lot about it.

No, man.

So I also found an article from historycollection.com that collected patents for safety coffins.

I thought you were gonna say collected history.

They collected patents for safety coffins from the mid 1800s boom. And so I thought I would read some of them here. Patent number 81437 granted to Franz Wester on August 25th, 1868 for what they called an improved burial case. This tomb is equipped with a number of features, including an air inlet, a ladder and a bell. So the person upon waking could save himself. Quote, if too weak to ascend by the ladder, he can ring the bell, giving the desired alarm for help and thus save himself from a premature death by being buried alive is explained on the patent. So, but as we've discussed, you might be alive or you might just be swollen with gas. So not always.

But also where does the ladder go? Is it buried underground?

It goes down, they're like, fuck, we put it in upside down.

It is also like, there's nothing, there's no shovel. Like how's someone gonna get out of the dirt with all this shit?

Yeah, it's super, it seems heavy. It seems heavy above you. Fucking Franz Vester. You know, actually, he probably put out a bunch of stuff being like, Franz Vester seeks in-vesters in what he's calling iLive. It's the latest technology in being alive. I'm not saying I did it. I'm saying that's the way they would make ads.

His technology for being alive came under threat on December 5th, 1882, when patent number 268,693 was granted to a John Critchbaum for a quote, device for indicating live, I assume maybe they meant life, in buried persons.

Well, that's good. It's what you want in a, whatever that document is, just a bunch of spelling errors.

Yeah, on a patent.

You want me to trust you with my life? You can't even spell life.

This device has both a means for indicating movement as well as a way of getting, very important, fresh air into the coffin. The disclosure on the patent states that it will be seen that if the person buried should come to life, a motion of his hands will turn the branches of a T-shaped pipe upon or near which his hands are placed. And you can't see this without looking at the drawing on the patent, which we'll link in the show notes, but there's a pipe basically. It almost looks kind of like a periscope that kind of shows how this person would be able to turn the periscope to their mouth and they could breathe the air from above ground. But this device was also removed once a sufficient amount of time has passed to assure that the person is dead. So none of these pipes, I guess, still exist. They were removed.

Wow, they're sharing them. I don't want to be buried. I think we've probably discussed this in previous episodes. I'm perfectly fine with cremation. I have a whole bit I want to do about it, but I now kind of want to be buried with a periscope. Now that you said it. Well, no, not. I mean, if I end up being alive, it would be nice to see what's going on out there.

You know what I'd call it, though? The aeroscope. Because you got to get that sweet air down it.

Greenlit. This is no notes from Anna, some notes from me. This is a quick, very quick tangent. This person who gave me a very good dentist recommendation recently, they said that the dentist, that dentist refers to laughing gas as sweet air. And so you just said sweet air. Maybe think of it like the guy's like, oh, you want some of this sweet air? I'm like, that's amazing.

Honestly, I think like the best thing so far to be placed in a safety coffin is just the dried meat. Like no one else was like, let's put in food so this person can survive for a lot longer.

Yeah, I feel like that pitch is like, hey, you know what the biggest problem with a safety coffins is? Is that it either doesn't work or they remove the device after a certain amount of time or people just fucking hate you and leave you there. Like here's the safety coffin for people like that, where at least you got a meal because you can keep yelling all you want. Like you were the most despised person in this village.

Yeah, give him some bratwurst.

Worst day of your life? I got something for you.

And then Pat number 329,495 was granted on November 3rd, 1885 to Charles Seiler and Frederick Borntrager for a burial casket. This invention provides for improvements in the important components of previous buried alive inventions. In this instance, motion of the body triggers a clockwork driven fan, which will force fresh breathable air into the coffin instead of a passive air pipe. This device also includes a battery powered alarm, which according to the patent, when the hand is moved, the exposed part of the wire will come into contact with the body completing the circuit between the alarm and the ground to the body and the coffin and the alarm will sound. There is also a spring loaded rod, which will raise up carrying feathers, which I guess is like a signal maybe above ground. And there was a tube built into this burial casket that is positioned over the face of the buried body. So a lamp may be introduced down the tube and a person looking down through the tube can see the face of the body in the coffin.

Oh my God.

I'm just imagining you're lowering that lamp and you're like, hmm, what am I gonna see? And there's a guy just like, whoa.

This is like MTV safety coffin. It's like, look at, I got my lamp.

Oh my God. Yeah, that's the shittiest episode of Cribs, honestly. It doesn't address rainfall though, huh? If you just have like a hole to your face upstairs. Upstairs, I mean outside.

Upstairs.

I will say a pretty tremendous amount of technology. They had spring technology, clock technology, tube technology and battery technology.

I feel like these guys were a step away from like steampunk. They had a lot of the clockwork driven fan kind of stuff that's like they wanted to build giant spider like in Wild Love West.

Well, I feel like you've got to be kind of emo in order to have patent number 300,000 of a safety coffin.

Also 300,000, I'd figure it's the year 4 million, but no, it's like the 1800s. We're already at like 300,000 patents.

Well, yeah, and I don't think that's 300,000 patents. Yeah, I think that's patents in the United States. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but still it's like, we're out there coming up with shit every day, it seems like.

So these next two, I just thought were interesting. They're not so much about protecting the dead as they are about just like other graveyard accoutrements. And so patent number 7,765,656.

I spoke too soon.

Was granted August 3rd, 2010 to Jeff Dannenberg for an apparatus and method for generating post burial audio communications in a burial casket. So in this, and again, this isn't really as like a safety coffin thing. It's just a weird coffin invention. But the casket has an audio system that is pre-programmed with audio and music files that are automatically played in accordance to the program schedule, thereby allowing the living to communicate with the deceased.

Wait, hold on. I have a question immediately. So it's like, I told you the story of my ex-girlfriend's kid were watching porn in the bathroom, but it came through on the Bluetooth in the living room. And it was like, and we were like, it was so funny. It was so funny, but we didn't ever bring it up to him. That said, this person just invented that, but for a coffin where it's like, I'm just going to play my Spotify into some dead person's fucking coffin. I mean, and that's supposed to help the body.

It's not a safety coffin. It's just like a fun feature, it sounds like.

Yeah, I think it's, but for who? For the living to feel like they're able to have some kind of communication. But I also imagine a poor body trapped down there and there's some like shitty 13 year old who just put like Kid Rock on repeat.

That's what I'm saying.

That's all you hear for eternity is like, this is Kid Rock.

Oh my God, this sucks.

It seems like a really good way to troll, like get the last laugh in, you know? Just like one song repeated over and over.

Yeah, just playing self-improvement tapes.

Oh my God.

Oh my God. Here's a hundred things you can be doing if you were alive. It's just like a shitty list that's mean-spirited.

And then this is sort of similar on December 29th, 2015. So right before Christmas, the patent authority was just putting stamps on. This is patent number 9,226,59.

That's a lot of patents in like four years. It was three million like in 2010, remember how you said.

Seven million in 2010. Yeah, so yeah, three million since then.

Damn.

This is granted for John Knight's invention, Your Music For Eternity Systems, which sounds like a threat. This system comprises a solar-powered digital music player, which allows both the living as well as the dearly departed to be comforted by music or recorded message. So basically the same as the original, except this system not only features a speaker in the casket, it features a headset jack on the headstone so that you can co-listen to your favorite podcast.

Like if you pay, you get one? What the fuck is this? I want a patent now.

We could probably get a patent before this recording's done, sounds like. Holy smokes, that's the worst idea. That's some insane like Sky Mall magazine product. Like I'm on Shark Tank for, you know what it is? I built a fucking 3.5 jack or whatever that goes into a tombstone, and so me and my sweetheart can listen to Papa Roach together or whatever.

And it's solar powered, so I never have to worry about plugging the tombstone in.

Oh my God. Yeah, have you ever really used anything solar powered? It always sucks. It's always like has no power.

Well, maybe that's the next patent. It's just got an external battery.

Yeah, well, it's just all very slow dying battery music, where it's like, cut my life into pieces. It's like, oh, this sucks. I'm sorry, I've installed this in your coffin.

Yeah, or the saddest version where you care enough to put this in the coffin and then never use it. I don't know, I don't know.

Yeah, do you have prices on these? Or I guess none of them, they're just patents, right? So they were never like necessarily.

They're just patents, so there's no prices. The saddest short story in the world, is your music for Eternity Systems Purchased colon never used.

That's a good onion article.

So I wanted to wrap up quickly, because we've been at this for a while, with a couple of modern death tests, just to remind everyone out there who is now fully freaked out about being put underground while still alive, it is more and more unlikely or less and less likely, the more medicine advances, the more we have a pretty good chance of knowing that you're still alive before we put you in the ground. So, I did a little poking around and I came up with a list that seems pretty exhaustive of all the modern death tests that are run. These are not all applied on a body to body basis. It would take us three hours to determine if someone was dead, but if a handful of these tests say you're dead, you're probably dead.

That's a pretty good t-shirt, by the way, for the show.

What?

If any of these tests say you're dead, you're probably dead.

Yeah. Well, the first one you've seen before, they shine a bright light in your eyes. If your pupils contract, you're probably on some levels still alive because brain dead people's eyes don't do anything. So they'll check you with the light. That's one way to check. They will also drag cotton swabs over your eyeballs. If you blink, you're alive. Sometimes they will move, this one sounds awful, but they will move your breathing tube in and out of your throat to see if you gag. Dead people don't gag.

Humblebrag.

They will inject ice water into your ear canal. If your doctors do this and your eyes don't flick quickly side to side, it's not looking good for you. That's apparently what your eyes do when you get ice water injected into your ear canal. They will check for spontaneous respiration, which is when you're removed from a ventilator, CO2 will build up in your system and you'll start to suffocate. And so even in a comatose body, if the brain is functioning, when that blood CO2 reaches a really dangerous level, your body will still spontaneously breathe.

Speaking of bodies, is there a cat on your body?

Yeah.

So that's a siren I hear, it's the cute police.

If you're dead, he'll eat you.

That's true, that's a good test.

Leave you in a room for three days with a cat and if they start to eat you, you're dead. Yeah, they'll do it, they'll run an EEG, which is really all or nothing. There's either electrical activity in your brain or there isn't. Dead brains have zero electrical activity, so that's a pretty good way to test. They will also do sometimes what's called a cerebral blood flow study, which is when they inject a radioactive isotope into your bloodstream and eventually hold like a, I don't know, a Geiger counter or something, over your head to see if blood is flowing to your brain.

How important do you need to be as a person to get to the radioactive isotope thing? Like, there's so many, like that seems expensive. Is it to make sure the president's alive?

I'm sure Joe Biden has been there once or twice. Yeah, if there's blood flow to the brain, the brain cannot be called dead. And then sometimes they will also administer atropine via IV, which is a drug that will accelerate your heart rate if you are alive. But if you're brain dead, your heartbeat won't change when they hit you with this.

I mean, it won't start.

Well, I think that's sort of, there's like physical death where you could still have brain function even if your heart stopped and then like vice versa.

I didn't know we had those kinds of levels.

Yeah, well, there's actually, we're gonna get into this in the next episode. So here's a cliffhanger for everybody at home. But there's been a lot of research into the very gray boundary between life and death now. And there's a debate, a very real scientific debate, kind of, I don't wanna say raging, but discussions are being had over what do we consider death and what can we bring you back from? Because we're finding that people can go further and further out from what we would consider life and still be able to be brought back. And it's a really interesting science that also takes the idea of the near death experience very seriously. They don't necessarily give it any religious connotation, but they were scientifically studying near death experiences at a couple of different colleges to see what we can learn about the journey towards death. So, cool.

So tune in next week for that nerd shit.

But before the last of our synapses stop firing for this week, we need to establish where we rank being buried alive on the fear tier. So Anna, you are the esteemed guest this week. Let's start with you. Bottom of the fear tier is zero, not scary at all. Top of the fear tier is a 10. And as people who listen to this show know, it is ranked as having a bucket of hot piss and shit dumped on your head because that is Ed's greatest fear.

But that was surpassed this season.

That's true.

Wait, so am I reading it how afraid I am of it or how afraid I am if it was happening to me?

That's a good question, Anna, because it's like, is she afraid of someone burying her alive or is she afraid of, I guess, accidentally being mistaken for dead?

Oh, oh, oh, I see what you're saying. I mean, I would say it's how afraid of being accidentally buried alive are you?

I guess zero or one. Like, I feel like the science is there now. I would be more afraid of getting a smoke enema than I would be of being buried alive.

Yeah, that's not probably a very pleasant experience.

If there was any city in America, you could find it, though, would be Los Angeles. Someone's still doing it.

If you market that right, that is a billion-dollar business.

Just use the rhyme. We have the rhyme, guys.

We do have the rhyme.

We have the rhyme, and those rights are available, I'm sure.

Guys, while you were talking, I patented the procedure and got a DBA for lubes and tubes. Yeah, I'm currently the owner of lubes and tubes. And I think it's July, we're going to be coming out with our first line of bellows, so.

Oh, my God.

Fantastic. We'll have to put a tier level for some of our premium subscribers so they can get discounts on those products.

They can get discounts on those.

I'm ready for the merch. Also, Chris, the first couple of times you were talking about it, I thought you said enema kids were placed everywhere, so I thought you meant, like, children were performing this labor.

It's funny you say that, because I also heard that, which is why my brain went to the Wendy peppercorn story. Because I thought that they were, like, kids at pools and stuff.

I guess I know what ADR I'll be doing this week. Kits, yes, kits. Ed, how about you? Where on the fear tier do you...

Super low, baby, super low. I mean, I told you I want to be cremated anyway, so you'll probably hear me scream pretty quickly if I'm not dead, if you're trying to burn me.

Yeah, not for very long.

Yeah. So I'm not worried about it at all. I mean, I love... We didn't choose this episode because it's our greatest fear. We chose it because it's a fun thing to think about. And Anna and I laughed so hard talking about it the very first time we talked about it. So yeah, I'm not too worried about it. Yourself?

I agree. I'm not too worried about it. This is one of those bifurcated fears like being alive where the likelihood of it is fairly low, but the experience of it being a fear is fairly high. And we have yet to create a physical fear tier and it'll probably be a running joke that we never will. So we'll probably forget where this sits.

Where we place this?

Where we place this, especially because I'm like, oh, it could be in two places.

Well, now that you say that, and this is the last thing I'll say about it, but yeah, you're not wrong. Likelihood wise is kind of where my brain put it at a one.

Yeah.

But if I did wake up in a coffin, it would just be so much. I'd be so afraid.

Horrible.

Because I don't like I'm already I don't know. I don't know how I handle small spaces like so it could be so many levels. Like there's the claustrophobia aspect that Anna brought up earlier. There's the fucking just darkness if you're afraid of the dark now, you know what I mean? There's so many levels of fear that come with the actual experience that yeah, I guess it's pretty high in the fear tier in that sense, but I just don't see it happening to me.

But at least you die pretty like you die from suffocation. So it wouldn't be painful. You'd like knock yourself out and then be dead.

That's true. I guess if you just calmed down and just thought of it that way and you're like, you know what?

Let me just use up all my air as quickly as I can. Let me not mess up my nails. I just got them done. Like just leave them as is.

God everyone in heaven or hell who if you have the ability to see like your life after if you were like, could you believe they found me like that and I'll fucked up. I'm so embarrassed. I belong here.

Well this has been great guys. Anna, thank you so much for coming on. This has been really fun. I love when we have guests on Ed. It's nice.

It's a lot of fun. We have fun guests too, which is great. And if you guys like hearing Anna in this episode, you can find her all over the place. But if you're specifically going to be in Scotland or England in the end of August, if you want to have a great end to your summer, she'll be at Fringe Fest in Edinburgh and then I believe London right after that.

Yeah, Leicester Square Theatre.

Leicester Square Theatre in London. Second show I think was added because people are fans. So yeah, if you're into her and if you don't know her from before this, hopefully you go check her stuff out. She's really, really funny.

And Ed, you know what our listeners could do? They could make a whole summer of it because you and I are going to be in Canton, Ohio at Monster Fest.

Oh yeah, at the end of June.

June 28th and 29th. So get your tickets, come see us, come say hi and then immediately get on a plane and go see Anna over the pond, across the pond and make a whole let's get scared summer.

I do think, I do like that you thought that they were going to board a fucking hot air balloon or something. Do immediately board a plane and show up to be waiting for Anna for a little bit.

Maybe not immediately. Go home, take a couple of weeks rest and then go see Anna.

Exactly. All right. Well, another great episode in the can.

I love learning a little bit about history.

It's very fun. It's very fun. Thank you for coming on. So that's Scared All The Time for this week. Until next week, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola. And this has been Scared All The Time. Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is A*****.

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Good night.

We are in this together.

Together.

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