So, happy 124th anniversary of the day 78-year-old Faroppo Lorenzo was buried alive. Deliberately. For science.
The aim of it was to demonstrate Le Karnice, a ‘security coffin’ created by Russian nobleman Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki who wasn’t just 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”.
The box on top is particularly clever. Karnice-Karnicki had visited mortuaries, so he knew dead people… exuded an aroma, shall we say, and the box stops gases escaping. If you should find yourself underground and not dead, though, it will let air in.
(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 was (a) a statistic he had entirely invented, but (b) can’t have helped.)
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 78-year-old 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 fucking cowards
(Also, I’m afraid I don’t know whether Karnice-Karnicki ever gave anyone a hickey, but I like to think so.)
