10. Leaving the Corpse a Bell
A German physician, Johann Taberger, patented a coffin with emergency release mechanisms that would allow those buried alive to ring a bell from within the casket that would alert graveyard caretakers that someone had been buried alive. Earlier models of “safety caskets” only included a key that would allow the buried to unlock the casket. It isn’t clear how they were then supposed to deal with the feet of dirt piled on top of their unfortunate resting place.
Taberger’s model had one fatal flaw: dead bodies were capable of ringing the bell too. As dead bodies begin to decay, they bloat and swell from the gases caused by decomposition. This swelling would cause bodies to trip the bells. Imagine being the poor grave caretaker and hearing the ring and assuming you’d just buried some poor soul alive. You quickly excavate the grave expecting to find an angry yet live person, only to see a rather gross decaying corpse. It isn’t clear that Taberger’s device ever saved anyone, but one could imagine that quite a few grave caretakers had several years taken off of their lives by false alarms.