Similar organizations existed in Germany, France, and the United States.

Their publications were a primary vehicle for the kind of case reports that Poe and later nineteenth-century Gothic writers drew on — collections of stories about people who had been buried alive, who had been found alive in their tombs, who had scratched at the inside of their coffins in the darkness underground.

The case reports published by these societies varied enormously in their reliability.

Some were genuine medical reports with specific, documentable details.