Can You Guess the Famous Person Who Was Afraid of Being Buried Alive?

Taphophobia (sometimes spelled taphephobia), or the fear of being buried alive, is a primal anxiety that has persisted throughout history. It was more common centuries ago, when the nascent practice of medicine had fewer tools or methods to confidently declare someone was dead. The fear was such that several inventors pursued special life-affirming coffins that would allow the faux-deceased to breathe or call for help; some came with bells that were perched aboveground and could be rung to notify passersby of a premature burial.

Some very notable people voiced their own apprehensions over being erroneously declared dead and buried. See if you can match the sentiment to the person in the quiz below.

There was so much skittishness associated with false diagnoses of death that physicians of that time offered advice on the best methods to avoid entombing their living patients. Author and physician Moore Russell Fletcher, MD, published the laboriously-titled Our home doctor: Domestic and botanical remedies simplified and explained for family treatment. With a treatise upon suspended animation, the danger of burying alive, and directions for restoration in 1890. In it, he offered guidance on what to do when one encounters the embarrassing predicament of premature burials.

But were these fears ever realized? Stories of unlucky souls that have been reportedly committed to the earth before their time abound, though it can be hard to know which are apocryphal. In 1867, a French woman named Philomèle Jonetre was said to have been pronounced dead of cholera and lowered into the ground. The man digging the grave heard some scratching from the coffin as he labored to pile dirt over it. Jonetre was alive, though not for long—she died the following day.

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