Don’t question the specifics, whether you’ve been kidnapped or unfortunate enough to fall victim to poorly trained pathologists and morticians, for either way you’ve been entombed in the cold earth while still breathing. Just imagine it—you’d abruptly awaken in the darkness, a blackness that’s so all-consuming that your eyes could never adjust beneath the earth’s chill frost line.
Deprived of the sense of sight, but able to hear the shifting of ground on the other side of the coffin’s thin wood, you’d of course panic, but you wouldn’t be able to sit up, or even necessarily raise your arms. You’d fruitlessly knock and scratch at the hard maple less than a foot, maybe only a few inches, from your face. The six feet of dirt separating you from the fresh air of freedom could weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds so that even if you tried to break through it would be futile.
At best you’d breach the lid, and all of that dirt would cave in and suffocate you quickly, which might be merciful. A person could survive between five and six hours after being buried alive, though panicked scrambling and hyperventilating would deplete the available oxygen quickly.
Eventually, assuming that you didn’t have a heart attack, you’d be suffocated by the increasing carbon dioxide. All of that dirt wouldn’t entirely dampen the sound of your screaming, so there’s always the chance some benevolent gravedigger could save you. Unless he’s the one who buried you to begin with.
There was, as with many of those living in the gloaming aesthetic twilight of Romanticism, a tendency to confuse the characters with their creator, a narrator with the author.
“There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are entirely too horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe in his 1844 short story “The Premature Burial,” first printed in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. Poe himself wasn’t buried alive. A common misconception, of the sort that was spread about the cadaverous-appearing Southerner by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, rival writer and self-appointed literary executor, who fervently maligned Poe in his obituary.
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead” wrote Griswold in an 1849 edition of the New-York Daily Tribune, “but few will be grieved by it.” The author of “The Raven” and “The Bells,” of “The Masque of Red Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” portrayed as an incurable dipsomaniac married to a child who also happened to be his cousin, a fevered laudanum addict, an itinerate madman wandering the streets of Baltimore.
Read the full article: https://lithub.com/to-haunt-and-be-haunted-on-the-exhumation-of-edgar-allen-poe
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