BURIED ALIVE.

Evening Post, Volume XII, Issue 132, 2 December 1875, Page 2

BURIED ALIVE.

A somewhat singular experience yras that of an English artillery officer who, in a fall from a horse, had fractured his skull and was trepanned. He was in a fair way to recover, when one day he fell into a lethargy so profound that he was thought to be dead, and, in due time, was buried. The following day, beside the grave in which he had been interred, another citizen of London was buried, and at last one of the* assistants chanced to stand on it. Suddenly the man cried out that he felt the ground move under bis feet as though the occupant of the grave would find his way to the surface. At first the man was thought to be the victim of an hallucination, but the earnestness with which he persisted attracted the attention of a constable, who caused the grave to be opened. They found that the officer had forced the coffiu lid, and hail made a partially successful effort to raise himself up. He was entirely unconscious when they got him out, but it was evident that the effort to extricate himself had been made but a short time before. He was carried to a hospital near by, where the physicians, after a time, succeeded in resuscitating him. He stated that, for an hour before his last swoon, he was fully conscious of the awful situation he was in, The grave had fortunately been very hastily and lightly filled with clay, and here and there the continuity of the mass had been broken by large stones, which allowed the air to penetrate as far down as the coffin. He had tried in vain to make his cries heard, and finally, partly in consequence of having an insufficient supply of air, and partly in consequence of the mental agony he suffered, he had fallen into the unconscious state in which ho was found. Another Englishman describes what he experienced, while lying in a coffin in a perfectly conscious state, in the following words :—": — " It would be impossible to find words that would express the agony and despair that I suffered. Every blow of the hammer with which they nailed down my coffin-lid went through my brain like the echo of a death-knell. I would have never believed that the human heart could endure such terrible agony and not burst into pieces. When they let me slowly down into the ground, I distinctly heard the noise the cofhn made every time it rubbed against the sides of the grave." This man also woke under the knife of a doctor. He, like Stapleton, had been stolen and carried to the dissecting-room of a medical school. At the moment the professor made a slight incision down the abdomen the spell was broken, and he spraug to his feet.