Lore - Legends 81: Undertaken

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

One of the most common fears we have is also the product of centuries of fiction mixed with a dash of truth. The result is a genre of storytelling that is truly horrifying. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Sam Alberty. ————————— PRE-ORDER EXHUMED TODAY: aaronmahnke.com/exhumed ————————— Lore Resources:  Get Ad-Free Lore: lorepodcast.com/support Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop ————————— Sponsors: Casper: Right now, save up to 20% on mattresses when you go to Casper.com. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 50% off a new SimpliSafe system. Chime: Chime is banking done right. Open an account in 2 minutes at chime.com/lore. Square: Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/LORE! ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. To advertise on this podcast please email: [e-mail]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2026 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

He was definitely not a cat person. In a world where the best and easiest way to learn about a person's likes and dislikes is by looking at their actions, he had sent a clear message. Cats, as far as he was concerned, were evil. Now, to be fair, judging between good and evil was sort of his forte. He was, after all, the Pope, Pope Gregory the 9th, to be precise, who sat on the Holy Throne from 1227 to 1241, nearly 800 years ago. In 1233, he issued a decree known as Vox in Rama, which was a condemnation of something known as

Luciferianism, a belief system that the Catholic Church had deemed heretical. And in the process of explaining why, Gregory described a satanic ritual supposedly performed in some parts of Europe. A ritual, he said, that ended with the appearance. of a black cat. The results of this decree were pretty complex, and it's led to a lot of misguided and inaccurate history. Simply put, cats and black cats in particular took on a bad reputation. But while it's true that they became one of many symbols of things like witchcraft and

the devil, the Pope's decree did not lead to the mass murder of millions of cats. That, my friend, is just internet rumor. Now, all that said, looking at the historical record, Mass panic has happened before, all too often, actually. But through the lens of Gregory the 9th and his mention of cats, it's easy to see why. We are, by nature, insecure beings who long for safety. We deeply desire security and comfort. And perhaps more than all of that, we want our fears to be left unfulfilled.

Which makes sense because there is a lot to be afraid about in life. And for many people in the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a lot of the 17th and 18th centuries, there is even more to fear in death. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore legends. I think it's fair to say that Quicksand has played a significantly smaller role in our lives than most of us thought it would. Growing up, we were inundated with media that made it seem like Quicksand was waiting around every corner.

Superheroes were constantly getting trapped in its sticky jaws. Protagonists were always unwittingly sucked into it. to the innocent, untrained eye, it seemed like a real crisis. But then we all grew up, and I don't know about you, but I have yet to stumble across quicksand even once. That said, fear doesn't just come out of nowhere. The stories we hear, the media we consume, they all lay the groundwork, telling us what we should and shouldn't be afraid of, and most of the time we listen.

That isn't to say that the threats we see in fiction aren't actually dangerous in real life. You really shouldn't go into a strange woman's house, whether the walls are made of candy or not. And quicksand truly does exist, even if it's significantly more rare than we were led to believe as kids. And back in the day, people truly were buried alive, often enough that for centuries on end, it was one of the most pervasive fears in Europe. But it didn't happen nearly as often as the literature of the day would lead you to believe. Here's the thing. Today we have tools to tell us when someone has really truly died.

There are machines that monitor a patient's heart rate or keep up with their oxygen intake. Thanks to our mechanical arsenal, when death comes to call, we know. That said, before modern medicine came onto the scene, people thought they knew as well. And sometimes, they got it wrong. Since the time of Pliny the Elder, there have been accounts of both medical professionals and family members mistakenly declaring people to be dead. Without a pulse, a heartbeat, or signs of breathing, they assumed the patient was gone.

Of course, even back then, they knew that there were plenty of conditions that could weaken a pulse or shallow out a breath. But without the proper tools, it was hard to tell when someone was really dead or when they just seemed to be dead. And if you're wondering how the medical field didn't find a way to untangle this mess faster,

then that's totally fair. But really, it wasn't. seen as a widespread problem until the early modern period. Most of the time, not all of the time, but most of the time, doctors were actually pretty okay at identifying who was dead and who wasn't. Sure, there were always special cases, but most of the time they had a pretty good track record. Here's the thing, though. Doctors were almost never the ones to make the final call. For most of human history, friends and family were the ones who decided whether or not their loved one had actually passed away.

And since they didn't have any kind of a medical degree, they messed up. A lot. The situation got even worse in the mid-19th century when an increase in approved graveyards meant that people were burying their dead significantly sooner, often without keeping the corpse in their home for a few days the way that they used to. Gradually, everyone's confidence that they could tell who was dead and who wasn't began to waver, and that opened the door for a brand-new kind of horror story, premature burial. In the 17th century, there was a huge uptick in publications about these still-living dead,

as they were once known. By the mid-18th century, people believed just about every story they ever heard about premature burial. But therein lies the problem. Stories about premature burial sold like hotcakes, chalk it up to horrified fascination, or just a plain old adrenaline rush. Whatever the reason, these things were crazy popular. And while live interment absolutely happened, it didn't happen often a new, for Europe's publishers. And so, they started to make up their own stories about it.

And eventually, people stopped being able to tell fact from fiction. Instead, they took all these stories at face value, and the panic began to spread. It was impossible to keep up. At one point, there were so many live burial stories out there that they made up their own literary genre. And like any other genre, it had its own set of tropes. Romance novels have enemies to lovers, Fantasy has the chosen one. Sci-fi has world-ending technological advances, and when it came to the still-living dead, well, they had a million ways to keep you up at night.

One of the more disturbing tropes to come out of this hyper-specific genre was that of the pregnant corpse. The broad strokes were usually the same. A pregnant woman was presumed to be dead and then buried. For some reason or another, her body was later exhumed, and when they opened the coffin, she wasn't alone. There was a baby lying next to her. her. These stories seem to suggest that she had been alive when she was interred, only to then

give birth while trapped six feet under. One story from 1893 told of a woman who had been buried in Austria. A few days after her internment, the neighbors began to whisper that her husband had actually poisoned her. When investigators became concerned enough to dig up her body, they discovered that she had given birth in her coffin. The physician who had declared her to be dead was actually punished with a short stint in prison. There is, however, no indication of her potentially murderous husband receiving a similar sentence. Now, stories like these were often dramatized versions of a real event, if not completely new ones fabricated from scratch. But interestingly enough, the phenomenon of giving birth after death actually can happen. If a pregnant

woman passes away, the gases that build up in her abdomen during decomposition can possibly expel the fetus. So if any women truly did have babies in their coffins, then it wasn't because they had been buried prematurely. It was simply because their bodies went through a completely natural process. Another common trope, though, involved an anatomist declaring someone to be dead, only to realize during the autopsy that they were still alive. Usually, though, by that point, it was too late. The doctor's knife had already pierced some vital organ, killing the patient for real. One legend that followed this plot line actually implicated one of the greatest medical practitioners in history, a guy named Vesalius. Allegedly back in the 16th century, Vesalius had been examining a Spanish man of his acquaintance who had suddenly dropped dead,

but no sooner had he opened the corpse's chest than he realized that the heart was still beating. Vesalius did what he could to save his friend, but the scalpel had already done its work. The man on the table died, and the doctor was taken. into court for his murder. Of course, none of this actually happened. It was a story at best, liable at worst. Now, another trope was known as the Lady with the Ring. In these tales, a woman would be buried with some valuable heirloom, a ring or perhaps a necklace. The jewelry itself wasn't important here. It simply acted as a siren call, drawing grave robbers to the body. In these stories, whenever a thief would try to remove the valuable item from the corpse, she would

suddenly wake up alive and well. And these stories were particularly popular because not only did the presumably dead victim go on to lead a long full life, but the thief was usually punished for their crime by receiving the jump scare of their life. One final trope can be seen in a French tale from 1810. And in typical French fashion, this one was centered around lovers. According to the tale, a well-to-do French woman was desperately in love with a down-on-his-luck journalist. Tragically, her parents forced her to marry a banker instead. The woman was so miserable as a newlywed that she fell sick and died, presumably of a broken heart. When her lover heard that she had passed away, he went to the churchyard where she had been laid to rest. Overcome with grief,

all he wanted to have was a lock of her hair. But after he dug up the body, the woman opened her eyes. The journalist kept her hidden while she recovered her strength, and then they moved to America. allegedly they came back to France 20 years later and were taken to court by her wealthy husband but thankfully the courts ruled in her favor after all the woman had quite literally been buried surely that counted

as till death do us part no matter what trope was employed though hundreds upon hundreds of stories followed the same general guidelines someone was declared to be dead other people were upset about it and then hallelujah the dead person

wasn't dead after all Sometimes they were rescued from their graves, other times they weren't found soon enough, and they died in their coffins, bodies usually displaying some kind of heartbreaking evidence that they had been buried alive. It was all a bit predictable, but hey, that's what tropes are, right? And that isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's comfort in knowing how a story is going to play out, beat by beat, as you hear it. No, the real problem was that very few people back in the day realized that most of these stories were, fictional. They never picked up on the tropes at all. Instead, they simply believe that this terrible

fate could happen to them at any moment. And because of that, they lived in fear. They didn't have a lot of nice things to say about her. Unfortunately for Alice, she has gone on in history as, and I quote, a fat, gross woman who liked to drink brandy. Even more tragically, though, that was far from the worst thing that she has been remembered for. One day in July of 1674, Alice Blundon made a bad call. You see, she had been feeling under the weather, and so she purchased a tincture from an apothecary. Now, back then, she would have called it poppy water. Today, we refer to it as laudanum, which, for clarification, was basically just opium

mixed with alcohol. For centuries, this concoction was tooted as a miracle cure for any ailment you could imagine. In reality, though, the potential mix of morphine, coating, and and ethanol basically just sent its users to another planet. After all, you can't complain of aches and pains if you are out of your mind on drugs. We're not sure what Alice was suffering from or how much laudanum she was given, but she must have felt that the recommended dosage wasn't enough because she downed the entire bottle in one go, and then she passed out. Nobody was able to wake her, so the servants sent for the apothecary. When he arrived and assessed the situation,

he announced that, considering the amount she had ingested, she would likely never open her eyes again. And that was all it took. With that declaration, everyone decided that Alice must be dead. One maid tried to point out that when she touched Alice's skin, the spot flushed red, meaning that her blood was still circulating. But the maid was ignored. Alice, they said, was gone.

Throughout this entire debacle, Alice's husband had been traveling out of town, When he was informed of his wife's tragic demise, he ordered everyone to delay her interment until he had returned from his trip. But Alice's family quickly grew tired of the stench that was emanating from, as they put it, Madame Blundon's huge body. And so, at an almost insulting speed, they prepared her corpse to be buried the very next day, completely ignoring the husband's wishes.

Alice's family afforded her as much dignity and death as they had in life, Rather than having a coffin specially made for her, they bought a standard-sized one, and then they used sticks to shove her ample form into it. And when one of the pallbearers claimed that he saw the coffin move, everyone just laughed him off. Within 24 hours of her initial collapse, Alice was buried in the churchyard of the Chapel of the Holy Ghost. The deed was finished, and she would now rest in peace. A few days later, a group of boys from the nearby school were playing near her

headstone when they heard a blood-curdling shriek. Someone was crying, Take me out of my grave. Take me out of my grave. Understandably terrified, the boys ran and told the schoolmaster what they had heard, but not only did the man not believe them, he berated them for lying. Later that same day, though, the boys heard the moans and shrieks coming from the grave yet again. This time, the schoolmaster humored them. He asked the church's verger to dig up Alice's coffin. Unfortunately, the man refused to do anything until the church wardens had signed off on it, which didn't happen until later that night. By the time Alice's body was exhumed, she was no longer screaming, or for that matter, moving at all.

She looked just as dead as she had when she was buried. Only now her body was swollen, and her skin was covered in purple bruises. She had been awake, and in her panic, she had beaten her body against the lid of the coffin. And you would think that by this point they had all the proof they needed that Alice had been buried alive, that maybe they should take her to a doctor, or at least into the church. But they did neither.

Seeing no obvious signs of life, the church wardens just shrugged and put the body back in its grave. Now, to give them credit, they left the coffin lid open and posted guards to watch the body throughout the night. But after the sun went down, it began to rain. So the men standing watch put the coffin lid back on,

and went to wait out the storm inside. When they came back out in the morning, Alice was covered in bloody wounds. From what they could tell, she had scratched herself in yet another attempt to escape. She had even beaten her mouth to the point that it was bloody and raw. And so finally, the church wardens did

what they should have done from the very beginning. They called for a doctor. But by the time he arrived, there was nothing he could do. Long after her burial. Alice Blondon, had finally died. It's a terrible thing to imagine, waking up in the dark with no freedom to move your limbs more

than a few inches, realizing that you are in a box. And that's what Alice's final hours on Earth probably looked like, cramped in a tiny coffin, bleeding and screaming, until the only thing stronger than her terror was the inescapable pull to sleep. At least that's what we assume. In reality, nobody was in that box with Alice. We can't say for sure how she reacted after she finally woke up. We can only guess. And the thing is, everyone might have guessed wrong.

Do you remember how the schoolboys heard Alice screaming, Let Me Out of My Grave? Well, historians think that those words may have been added to publications about the incident for shock value. In reality, the boys probably just heard some unintelligible shrieks and moans, which would admittedly be pretty scary. But scary or not, they may not have been intentional. Remember, when the coffin lid was opened for the first time,

she was described as puffed up and her skin spotted with deep purple bruises. The church wardens assumed that she had broken and bruised her body by throwing herself against the sides of the coffin. But modern historians believe that something else might have taken place instead. Alice Blondon, I just have already been dead. The description of her swollen, purple body, more closely matches that of a decomposing corpse than a woman who has harmed herself. The bloody wounds that they saw the next morning could have come from bugs burrowing into her skin.

And the terrible sounds that the boys heard inside her grave? Well, they just might have been intestinal gases escaping from her throat. It's more than likely that Alice had died when she overdosed on the laudanum. And then everyone else, so scared of being buried alive, allowed their fear, to cloud their judgment. I don't know about you, but I'm not a fan of small spaces, and so it's hard to imagine anything worse than being buried alive. The sheer terror of even imagining that experience

is enough to put anyone into an early grave. But if there's one thing that we humans are good at, it's making everything a lot worse. And as one last story will explain, people eventually added a lot more creativity to the problem, and a dash of capitalism. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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Right now, you can get 50% off your new system by visiting Simplysafe.com slash lore. That's half off at simplysafe.com slash lore. There's no safe like SimpliSave. I know the big question on your mind right now. What should you do if you are buried alive? Well, if you have cash to burn, you might prepare yourself by investing in a safety coffin. For years, the most famous coffins on the market came from France,

and the inventor, a man named Angelo Hayes, sure seemed to know what he was doing when he made this thing, as he should have. After all, the man had nearly been buried alive, himself. In September of 1937, 18-year-old Angelo was thrown from his motorcycle and sent sailing through the air before crashing headfirst into a brick wall. Now, Angelo lived in a small village, and the local physician who treated him didn't have the experience or the tools to accurately diagnose injuries like that. So when he couldn't detect a heartbeat or a pulse, he declared

that Angelo had been killed on impact. At this point in the story, accounts vary a little, Some versions claimed that an insurance agent started poking around after realizing that Angelo's father had insured his son's life for an unthinkably large sum of 200,000 francs, and as part of their investigation, they exhumed the body two days later, only to discover the boy was alive. Another version, though, ignores the insurance bit entirely. Instead, it says that Angelo's uncle was so distraught by his nephew's death that he begged to see the body one last time before burial. But when he touched the corpse's hand, he realized that it was still warm, that his nephew was still alive. Either way, the point of the story was that Angelo was miraculously saved from a horrible,

indescribable fate. And while a lot of people might process that relief by writing a book or giving a bunch of interviews, Angelo took a more creative path. He invented a safety coffin. Now, just to be clear, his wasn't the first on the market, but it did seem to have a lot more bells and whistles than the others. This coffin was equipped with comfy pillows, a library full of books, and a supply of dehydrated food. There were ventilation fans, a toilet, and a radio, you know, so the occupant could call for help after they finished reading all those books on the toilet. The basic model cost 4,500 euros, which at the time was the same price as a brand new car. But if you desired more than the base model could provide, fear not because there were upgrades.

For just a bit more money, you could also have a refrigerator installed, an oven, and even a cassette player. And for those of you who are trying to picture this thing, no, I don't know what the exact measurements were, but it certainly sounds a lot more like a mansion than a coffin. But Angelo knew that he was driving a hard bargain, so instead of waiting for his customers to come to him, he went to them. In the 1970s, he took his invention on the road. With all the charm one might expect from a traveling salesman, he wooed his clueled his clients. clientele with his coffin's features, and then when he really wanted to draw a crowd,

he would demonstrate it. Day after day, Angelo was buried inside his safety coffin. Within a matter of months, he became one of France's most recognizable stars. Heck, during one sales pitch in Bordeaux, he attracted over 25,000 people, all of whom had shown up to see him be buried alive. In another town, a television crew sent a camera down into the grave with him. And while he was in the grave, He sang a few of his favorite songs for the camera. I don't know if the audience liked it or not, but at least he got to prove his coffin had plenty of oxygen. In 2008, after a long and happy life, Angelo passed away.

By the time he died, it's safe to assume that he had been buried alive more than anyone else in history. But he didn't seem to want a repeat performance, because when it was time for him to choose his final resting place, Angelo decided to be cremated. This episode of lore legends was produced by me, Aaron Manky, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Sam Alberti. Just a reminder, I have a brand new history book coming out on August 4th called Exhumed, which explores the roots of the New England vampire panic and the story of Mercy Brown through the lens of centuries of folklore, medical advancements, and yes, premature burial makes an appearance. It's available for pre-order right now, and if you pre-order the hardcover, by publishers have a web page available where you can submit your research.

seats and get a free, gorgeous tote bag. Head over to Aaron Mankey.com slash exhumed to lock in your copy today. Don't like hearing ads on lore. Well, there's a paid version available on Apple Podcasts and Patreon that is 100% ad-free. Paid subscribers also get weekly mini-bonus

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