Discovery Channel, 1998

Throughout history people have been buried alive for the purposes of sacrifice, punishment, and natural disaster. But at the heart of this program is the question of how many people were buried alive under the assumption that they were dead. Given the inability of physicians in the 17 and 1800’s to distinguish between death and its imitators -- coma, catatonia, and even fainting spells -- people were, in fact, buried alive. Until the invention of the stethoscope, the tests of death were notoriously unreliable. For centuries, the only sure sign of death proved to be when the body began to putrefy. Had not embalming also become standard practice at the close of the 19th century, the fear of being buried alive might well have become a national obsession. It does still happen today -- in war, in kidnapping, in natural disasters, and its specter still horrifies on the level of being eaten alive or burned alive.

This program examines a crossroads of horror, history, science, and man's inhumanity to man.

Directed and Co-Produced by Holly Stadtler; Written and Co-Produced by Eleanor Grant.