Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Safety Coffins

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Back in the 1800s, people had an outsized fear of being buried alive. Enter... THE SAFETY COFFIN!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Oh, my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. Dave's here in spirit, so this is a short stuff that we can begin now. That's right, Josh. Let me set the stage. It's 1799.

Founding Father George Washington is on his deathbed. he calls over his secretary, Tobias Lear, and says, I am just going. Have me decently buried. But do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I'm dead. Because you never know. That is the last part. But that's basically what he was saying.

Yeah. So, yeah. And that was a great George Washington, especially dying George Washington. Thanks. The reason why he said that is because at the time, there was a chance, let's call it a non-zero chance to get nerdy, that you might be buried alive accidentally. There's all sorts of different conditions and stuff that we understand now. If you hook somebody up to like an EKG or an EEG or some sort of G, you'd be able to detect their heartbeat that you wouldn't be able to, say, palpitating it with your fingers or like watching somebody. to see if they're actually breathing, you might not even have a decent doctor around at the time,

and you may end up being buried alive, in which case you are effed. Yeah, I wonder when they started checking pulses. I don't know. Let's say 1800 on the dot. I did a quick, rare lookup, and if we trust the AI overview. I do not. All right. National Institutes of Health? Sure.

They're talking like 4,000 plus years they've been checking pulses. Okay. Well, apparently some people were better at it than others because there do seem to be documented accounts of people who were found like entombed who had like scratch marks on their coffin or they were actually out of their coffin in a tomb. Yeah. That seemed to have been buried alive, came to, and then actually did die. Yeah. Like they said, I feel betcha. Right. And they got up.

And so, you know, let's say it didn't happen that much because it probably didn't happen enough to the level of which people were scared of it. Sure. Like a plane crash. Yeah. It seems to be an outsized fear back then of being buried alive. That is an actual phobia. it's called taffophobia, T-A-P-H-E is Greek for burial. And, you know, because where we're going with all this,

and we may have mentioned this briefly in our coffins episode. I know we have. We had to it, but this is a deeper dive into what was known as a security coffin or a safety coffin, which was, you know, for a while there, a lot of people got patents to build coffins that had all these little kind of ingenious ways to either get you out of there or alert people above ground that, hey, I'm feeling better. Right.

Come get me. I got some life left in me, right? Yeah. These patents date back to the 1790s. I think in Central Europe, at least, there's a guy in this House Stuff Works article that they interviewed named Adam Bisno, who's a historian at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, so he would know about patents, even ones in Central Europe from the 18th century. And at this time, the argument that's made for the kind of sudden appearance for them is that this coincides with the popularity of romanticism, which kind of came as a backlash to the rationalism of enlightenment, the enlightenment. And romanticism is like, no, there's stuff beyond this life that we can't see.

There's beauty in nature. There's like all of the stuff that you can't just think your way out of or think your, like, things that you can't see that actually do exist. And there's probably some sort of afterlife. And who knows whether the people are fully gone. This eventually led to the rise of mediums and spiritualism. And there was just this kind of zeitgeist that the dead could conceivably still be in some sort of contact or communication, which doesn't directly go to taffaphyph. But if you're already thinking, like, I don't want to be buried alive, this would probably goose you into potentially buying a safety coffin. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, the sort of a popular idea at the time was that the veil was very thin between life and death. Ah, yes. And, like, how thin could it be, like maybe so thin where you bury me by accident? Yeah, like poor Bill Pullman and Serpent and the Rainbow. Oh, yeah. Or, uh, Kiefer Sutherland's. wife in that movie, which was a remake of a foreign film. So good.

Both of them were... It was one of those rare films where the American adaptation was just as good as the European original. Both of them are worth seeing. What were those called? The vanishing? Yeah, vanishing. Yeah. So, yeah, and then also that poor guy who almost got buried in the Twilight Zone, but he started crying because he was so sad and

scared and some nurse one of the nurses noticed his tear and was like doctor he's still alive right before i think they um did an autopsy on him yeah or like umma thurman and kill bill that's a great one too sure i think also barnabas collins you can make a case for in dark shadows the tv show not the terrible terrible terrible terrible movie i didn't see that i saw 20 minutes of it and was like oh boy like these people should be individually shamed for this. It was Tim Burton, wasn't it? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So we're going to take a break and call Tim Burton. Tell him to think about what he's done. And we'll be right back with safety coffins. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should.

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I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, doubt the case of Lucy Lettby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it. to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Lettby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life.

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starting on February 24th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you use. listen to your podcast. All right. So more than 100 security coffin patents were granted in the United States alone in the 19th century. And they got a little wacky. Like each one had its own sort of spin on the best way to either get someone out or to alert people above ground. Yeah. One way was like you could just do something as simple as a bell to basically and put the cord in the person's hand and they could just like pull the bell. It's pretty simple and straightforward. others that had like, I guess they would put a tube in that led and connected to the coffin

and then buried the person, buried around that stuff. So if the person came to, they could actually crawl, use the ladder to crawl out of their own grave, which talk about a story to tell at parties. It's like, you guys aren't going to believe this. Yeah. Are you the guy who climbed out of his grave? Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, that starts at, dinner party and when anyone's like, I've been really lucky. I haven't lost a lot of close friends. Like, has anyone ever lost close friends and had to, like, preside over their funeral? And the guy just puts his napkin in his lap. That's pretty good.

Yeah, the life-preserving coffin, I believe, is what the patent file was in 1843 from Christian Eisenbrant of Baltimore, Maryland. And this had a spring-loaded lid where if you, the quote was, the slightest motion of either the head or the hand, would spring this thing up. Of course, that's no good if you're buried under six feet of dirt. Sure. So his suggestion is like, hey, this coffin only works if you're in a tomb, like an above-ground vault. And you've got to leave a key on the inside of that thing. So if you pop out of the coffin and you're still locked in the tomb, that's no good either. Can't you see a loved one, like, sitting up in the middle of the night, like, I forgot to leave the key? Yeah. There's another problem with that, too, if this thing sprung open at the slightest movement of the person, Um, corpses move and shift around during decomposition.

And I'm sure that that has accounted. Like, I think there's accounts of corpses flipping over and being found face down. I'm sure that that accounts for a lot of the stories of people being found and suspected to have been buried alive. But I don't think corpses, like, leave claw marks on their, their coffins. So there, there seem to be some that are legit. Yeah, for sure. Uh, Edgar Allan Poe didn't help things much when in 1840s. he wrote a short story called the premature burial,

where in it he says, to be buried alive is beyond question the most terrific of these extremes, which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality, that it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. And then he talks about the boundaries between life and death being shadowy and vague, kind of playing into that. He was writing of the times, you know,

because that's like we talked about, That's kind of how people thought of things. So after that, I think there were even more people coming out with these things. Yeah, there was a guy named Franz Vester, who in New Jersey, I guess it's where he was from, he had an improved burial case. And you could essentially climb out of it, I think. This was the one that had the tube with the ladder. Yeah.

And if you were too weak, you could pull on a bell. So this was like, you know, it had a fail safe. And he gave demonstrations of his coffin. where he would be buried under like four feet of dirt and would make his way out of the coffin back above ground. Yeah, he's not the only one. It seems like the big showman, because this was sort of around the snake oil time

where you would put on a big show to try and talk people into buying your thing. Sure. And in the 19th century, there was a guy, Count Michel de Carnice Carnicchi, such a great name. He dubbed himself as the chamber,

to the Tsar of Russia, whatever that means. It's the high-ranking manager of a royal household. Oh, okay. So he was like, yeah, like a butler. Essentially, but he was in charge of everybody. Like the head butler. Yeah, I guess, sure. Or the Chamberlain.

Yeah. I mean, hey, I'm not trying to degrade him because he was quite the showman. He would travel through the Europe and the United States trying to sell his unit called the Carnice. and there was an article from the Chicago Tribune in 1899 that they would read before his big show where at the Academy of Medicine in New York City, Dr. Henry J., how would you pronounce that one? Garagus, Garagus, where he startled his fellow members

with the assertion that one of every 200 people buried in the U.S. was actually in a lethargic state and is buried alive. Yeah. So very dubious numbers, obviously, but he would use that as prelude to take the stage and do his own demonstration where he would bury somebody alive. Yeah, and Le Carnice had an own, had like a bell again. This is pretty low-hanging fruit, and it makes a lot of sense. But he also put in a tube that you could breathe through. You could also talk through it and be like, what's been going on in the last few days while you wait for help?

And he didn't, he wasn't himself buried alive like Franz Vester. He would get volunteers to do it. And there's a guy named Faropo Lorenzo, who is Italian, believe it or not. And he volunteered to be buried alive in this Le Carnice casket. And he stayed there for nine days back in 1898, which apparently still the record for being buried alive. Yeah. I think at one point on day like seven, he spoke through the tube and he was like, I'm going to put my mouth around the tube now and just drop a couple of tick tacks. Right.

Yeah. And then the next day he shouted, I got a poop through the tube. Nine days, Chuck. Let's think about that. Yeah. That's a long time. And that seems verified. Yeah.

There's one other thing, too, that we can't not mention. We've definitely mentioned them before. but I find it so fascinating. Timothy Clark Smith, whose grave in New Haven, Vermont, not Connecticut, back in, I think, 1893, was fitted out with a window that looked down the six feet to his face

that was exposed so that Pastor's by could check on him to make sure that he wasn't alive. Oh, man. And it's still there today, except you just can't see very far because the window's kind of, well, it's more than 100.

years old. Yeah, that's too bad. You got anything else, man? I got nothing else. You can say it. Then I guess short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app.

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