Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear

"A necrobibliac classic: it may keep you up all night—not from fear but from fascination."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Readers of Edgar Allan Poe's tales—just think of The Premature Burial—may comfort themselves with the notion that Poe must have exaggerated: surely people of the 1800s could not have been at risk of being buried alive? But such stories filled medical journals as well as fiction, and fear in the populace was high. It was speculated, from the number of skeletons found in ho...