So, happy 125th anniversary of the day 78-year-old Faroppo Lorenzo was buried alive for science.
The aim was to demonstrate Le Karnice, a ‘security coffin’ created by Russian nobleman Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki – who wasn’t only responding to a fashionable obsession with premature burial. He’d once witnessed something nasty.
That’s an excerpt from Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive, which is indeed an entire book about “our most primal fear”.
Apparently, Karnice-Karnicki first came up with a coffin with a large window in the lid which could be broken — but this was only useful if you were buried in a vault, and the Count wanted his invention to be available to poor people, too, so he eventually came up with the 3.5in diameter pipe “emerging above ground rather like the periscope of a submarine”.
Apparently, George Washington’s last wish was that he be
decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead
and 100 years later, people were still worried about this.
Mind you, in December 1899, the Chicago Tribune reported on a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in New York, where a Dr. Henry J. Garrigues said one in every 200 people buried in the US was actually “in a lethargic state”, which can’t have helped.
This was what an actual scientist would call an unevidenced assertion. The Count, however, was not a charlatan, and had put some thought into his invention. The box on top was particularly clever. Karnice-Karnicki had visited mortuaries, so he knew dead people… exuded an aroma, and the box stopped gases escaping. If you should find yourself underground and not dead, though, it would let air in.
Le Karnice impressed people as varied as “influential Parisian … Professor Charles Richet, … the prefect of Milan, and the inspector of cemeteries”, but it didn’t catch on. Mind you, the Count didn’t really help himself.
The biggest problem, though was that the mechanism was too sensitive. The bell, telling you someone was alive, could be triggered by the slightest movement — and the slightest movement might be down to… well, putrefaction.
Faroppo stayed buried for nine days, which means three things:
- he emerged on Christmas Day
- this septuagenarian was made of stern stuff (his only comment was that it had been “damned smelly down there”), and
- he still holds the Guinness World Record for longest voluntary burial. Which suggests to me that all those people going for ‘most toothpicks in a beard’ and ‘fastest chug of two litres of soda’ are bloody cowards.
(Also, I’m afraid I don’t know whether Karnice-Karnicki ever gave anyone a hickey, but I like to think so.)
