(Note: If you're buried alive and breathing normally, you're likely to die from suffocation. A person can live on the air in a coffin for a little over five hours, tops. If you start hyperventilating, panicked that you've been buried alive, the oxygen will likely run out sooner.)
Although still a rare possibility, mainly in situations where qualified medical personnel are not available, the likelihood of alive burial is nowadays fortunately rare.
According to Rodney Davies, author of The Lazarus Syndrome: Burial Alive and Other Horrors of the Undead (1998), the percentage of premature burials has been variously estimated as somewhere between 1 per 1,000 to as many as 1 or 2 percent of all total burials in the United States and Europe.
History shows that taphophobia, or the fear of being buried alive, has some degree of merit, albeit a small one. As early as the 14th century, there are accounts of specific people being buried alive.
The fear of waking up in a mortuary or, worse, a casket, endures. It even has a name: Taphophobia. This dread reached a crescendo in the nineteenth century, culminating in the 1896 founding of the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial.
Understanding the phobia can help you overcome it and live a fulfilling life. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is one of the longest words in the dictionary, and ironically, it means the fear of long words. It originally was referred to as Sesquipedalophobia but was changed at some point to sound more intimidating.
For those who are embalmed and buried in a coffin, five to 10 years is a more typical decomposition timeline, he said. At that point, the tissue is gone and only bones remain. The quality of the embalming job also plays a role, Wescott said.
If insects can be excluded, a body will decompose quite slowly, because maggots are the most voracious flesh feeders. Although an exposed human body in optimum conditions can be reduced to bone in 10 days, a body that is buried 1.2 m under the ground retains most of its tissue for a year.
In a hundred years, the last of your bones will have collapsed into dust, and only the most durable part of your body, such as teeth, grave wax and some nylon threads.
Modern humans might share little in common with the Stone Age hunter gatherers who, 78,000 years ago, curled a dead child into the fetal position and buried it in a shallow grave in a Kenyan cave.
A study carried out by researchers at Australia's first 'body farm' also found that corpses can move during the decay process. And it's more than just a twitch. They found that movement occurred in all limbs after death, including in the advanced decomposition stages.
Caskets made from either metal or wood will take an average of 50 or more years to decompose underground. The casket's duration depends on the type of wood used to build it and the composition of chemicals found on the grave.
In the classic buried alive scenario, asphyxiation is most likely to be the cause of death. The trick to slowing down the suffocation process is taking slow and shallow breaths, but that won't be easy once you start to panic. Conserving the air you haven't displaced with your body is key.
The smaller you are, the longer you'll survive.
Let's say the average casket measures 84 by 28 by 23 inches, so its total volume is 54.096 cubic inches, or 886 liters. We'll use that as the internal volume too, to give you a few extra minutes of life. And the average volume of a human body is 66 liters.
By 50 years in, your tissues will have liquefied and disappeared, leaving behind mummified skin and tendons. Eventually these too will disintegrate, and after 80 years in that coffin, your bones will crack as the soft collagen inside them deteriorates, leaving nothing but the brittle mineral frame behind.
In a temperate climate, it usually requires three weeks to several years for a body to completely decompose into a skeleton, depending on factors such as temperature, humidity, presence of insects, and submergence in a substrate such as water.
How Long Before a Body Must Be Buried? Decomposition begins once death has occurred, but embalming can slow it down for a short period of time. This extends the amount of time you have to plan an open casket viewing to approximately seven days.
As the blood pools, patches appear on the skin within 30 minutes of death. About two to four hours postmortem, these patches join up, creating large dark purplish areas towards the bottom of the body and lightening the skin elsewhere. This may be less apparent on darker skin. This process is called livor mortis.
The body takes between ten to fifteen years to decay to a point where you may just find bones, teeth and hair remaining in the casket. There may also be some excess tissue and clothing fibers that withstood the ten years of decay.
Not all cultures hold funerary memorials forty days after death. Some pagan traditions believe that the soul of a recently deceased person continues to wander the earth for forty days; other religious traditions believe the soul will rest in the Lord's hands after death.
666: Fear of 666 (hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia) is also widespread in Western cultures. The book of Revelation in the Bible lists 666 as the “number of the beast.” Many horror or doomsday films incorporate the number into plotlines as a mark of evil or the end of the world.
Aequeosalinocalcalinoceraceoaluminosocupreovitriolic. This is the longest word in English which is composed of seven words. This 52-letter word was coined by Dr. Edward Strother to describe the spa waters in Bath, England.