The Strange Story Of Essie Dunbar, The Woman Who Was Allegedly Buried Alive In 1915

The History of Fear: From Poe to the Safety Coffin

The Essie Dunbar story is not an isolated curiosity.

It is one entry in a long catalog of premature burial fears and alleged premature burial incidents that stretches back centuries and that reveals something important about the history of medicine, the history of death, and the particular anxieties of specific historical periods.

The fear of premature burial reached its cultural peak in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coinciding with a period when medical knowledge of death was advancing but still incomplete, when the pace of urbanization was creating new anxieties about the impersonality of death and burial, and when Gothic literature was both reflecting and amplifying cultural fears about the boundary between life and death.

The nineteenth century produced a remarkable array of cultural responses to this fear.