Tell-Tale Publishing Halloween Blog Hop! Buried Alive!

Could anything terrify you more than waking up to discover you had been buried alive? Edgar Allan Poe didn't think so. It is said that he had frequent nightmares about being buried alive. The Premature Burial is a story he wrote that demonstrates his fear.  Poe's short story The Casque of Amontillado  is about a murderer who buries someone alive he feels has wronged him. As in The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart, Poe writes from the murderer's perspective, proving that fear is PORTABLE from one narrative to another.  

A popular theme in the 19th century, many  BOOKS contained premature burial themes. There's a good reason for this, many people were, quite literally, buried alive. Going to a doctor with the flu would get you leeches and heroin for cough. Heroin? Oh yes, and that does tend to make one, um, sleep. Remember, this was back in the days when leaning over a body and yelling wake up! was the only means of seeing if an unconscious person were alive. Safety coffins were all the rage at that time. They contained some sort of mechanism for would-be corpses to signal that were still alive. These often included bells, or some other signaling device. Of course, this wasn't fool-proof. They required someone to be in the cemetery listening for such a signal. These days the odds are less likely, though there are occasional reports of corpses waking up during autopsy....

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