The stories Poe cites were drawn from the medical and popular press of his era, where premature burial cases were reported with a frequency that either reflected genuine incidence or reflected the appetite of a reading public primed to receive such stories with particular interest.

The fear did not disappear in the twentieth century.

It simply shifted — from the specific anxiety about being buried alive to broader anxieties about the reliability of medical diagnosis of death, anxieties that were sharpened by the development of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the recognition of near-death states, and the twentieth-century debates about the definition of brain death that accompanied the development of organ transplantation.

Taphophiles and the Organized Fear