Six feet from what though?
[li]Is the six feet: the distance from the base of the hole, to the ground surface?[/li][li]Or is it: six feet distance from the lid of the casket, to the surface of the ground, once the casket has been placed in the hole?[/li]
I have always believed it to be the latter, therefore making it “technically” more than six feet. Does the measurement also include the concrete “liner” that the casket is placed inside of?
Not being morbid here, just wondering.
Also, in horror films, zombies are often depicted digging themselves out and emerging. How much soil weight, cubic footage, and pressure would a zombie have to overcome to exhume itself? I’m guessing it’s going to be quite high numbers and if zombies were possible, they’d have one hell of a time getting out.
I read this somewhere, possibly in one of Cecil’s early books. He tends to cover stuff like this. I don’t remember the standard grave specifications, but the accepted standard for planting a gunslinger was to throw him in the deepest hole you could dig, down to 6’.
In Hawaii, before the 19th century, royalty were treated with special honor. The meat was boiled off their bones and the bones were broken up and hidden. Unfortunately, the Christians came along and stopped this excellent practice.
Zombies are buried in special caskets that do not allow them to lever their hands up from their sides, thus very few dig themselves out anymore, with the notable exception of my ex.
Simple (in thoery anyway): Fill half the coffin with dirt from the “ceiling”. Climb up into the hole you’ve made, fill the rest of the coffin. You now have a space the size of your coffin, one step up. rinse & repeat, eventually reaching the surface.
OK, I’ll bite. Describe the mechanics of doing that from a metal coffin locked from the outside. You can’t use your Swiss Army Knife. We frisk all zombies for metal objects before we fill the coffin with concrete.
FYI, based on the writings of Cecil et al. If you are embalmed and placed in a wooden (i.e. non-sealed) coffin you will decay to bones in a few years due to the activities of aerobic bacteria. A college friend of mine once described the contents of a broken coffin which he discovered while working in a cemetary. Appararntly a man was placed in the above ground tomb some 30 years ago and his wooden casket was significantly decayed when another casket of a dead relative was stacked upon it. The weight of the top casket broke the rotted casket open revealing (creepy music swells to a crescendo) --nothing-- but dust and a polyester necktie in near perfect condition. My friend’s conclusion from this experience was life changing, 30 years after he dies he wants more to remain of him than a cheap necktie.
If, OTOH, you are embalmed and placed in an air-tight metal casket then you will be consumed and liquified by less robust anaerobic bacteria. I saw a TV show which described a woman’s lawsuit against a mausoleum when she learned that the liquid that was dripping from her mothers tomb was not rainwater seepage but her own mother’s remains.
For obvious reasons, I want to be cremated (if my relatives want to have a grave site to visit they can still have my ashes buried).
If you want zombies to get out and stretch their legs, I suggest you follow the plot of an old made-for-cable-TV movie called Buried Alive.
In it, there’s this young couple. The guy owns a lucrative construction business. His wife is having an affair with her doctor, and she concocts a scheme to kill her husband, inheriting the business, and then sell the business for $$$ and marry the doctor. The doc gives her one of those poisons that’s supposed to make it look like you had a heart attack. She poisons the husband, and it seems to work. She sells the business for millions of dollars. Noone suspects foul play. The burial is really ultra-cheap. No funeral, no marker, the absolute cheapest coffin, etc. Because of this, the funeral director cuts some corners. He doesn’t bother embalming the guy, and he has his worker use an old, water damaged coffin that they have lying around. They bury the guy, and there’s a really heavy rain right afterwards, which soaks the ground.
Tcburnett might like what happens next. As the title suggests, the guy wakes up in his grave. All of the convenient circumstances add up to allow the guy to escape his grave alive. He then spends the last half of the movie sadistically terrorizing his bitch of a wife and her doctor boyfriend. Eventually the boyfriend dies, and the guy traps his wife in a wooden crate and buries her alive in his grave :). He then leaves town before people find out he’s still alive. It really was a pretty good movie.
If this is turning into a symposium on funerary customs, let me chime in with an example from the highland tribes of Madagascar.
They consider the dead ancestors as fully participating members of the family. And since the Malagasy people love to party, why shouldn’t the dead ancestors get to party too? They bury them not too deep, rolled up in a mat. There’s an annual holiday when they dig up the dead, hold them up over their heads, dance, sing, boogie down, and make merry. Then they rewrap the bones in a new mat and rebury them until next year.
But it reminded me of EA Poe’s classic short story “The premature burial”. Many people in the 19th century were terrified of being buried alive-is there any evidence that this actually happened? Also, there are some cases whwere peole are naturally mummified-I saw a show where a crypt in a church in Ireland (weird-Ireland is a pretty wet place!)was found to contain preserved bodies-some looked pretty good. Nobody could understand why this happened, as moisture usually causes rapid decay. An aside-the RC church usually considers the un-natural preservation of a body as proof that the deceased was a holy person-supposedly there were some cases of bodies centuries old-yet looking like they were asleep! has this ever been verified?
I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade here, but no one has answered any of the questions in my OP. Would someone at least attempt to answer them, please? I’m not in interested in the state of decay, mummification, embalming processes etc. All I am interested in is measurements.
The phenomena is called ‘incorruptability’ and there are several verified cases. A quick search on Excite didn’t turn up anything good, but there is one saint who’s body is so well preserved, that it is on public display in a glass case! They say that when she was dug up, her coffin and her clothes had completly rotted away, yet her body is perfect till this very day. Really creepy.
Lots of bodies (or, more precisely, skeletons) of saints are displayed under glass. A quick tour of European catherdrals suggests that no self-respecting house of God would be caught dead without one. However, I’ve never seen one in which the soft tissue was preserved. I’m not saying such a thing doesn’t exist, only that the saints I’ve seen displayed were down to bones and adornments. Really creepy, if you ask me.
Didn’t the OP ask about the depth of graves? I worked in a Roman Catholic cemetary from age 14 until I went off to college, then during the summers until graduation. I stopped counting how many people I’d buried after 200. I only tell you all of this so my answer isn’t seen as a WAG.
Graves are dug 6 feet from the surface for the ground to the floor of the grave. Why? So the grave digger can climb out when he’s done.
MSK, I am sure that a 6’ deep hole is dug, so the top of the casket is about 4’ from ground level. This is still deep enough to discourage scavengers from digging the casket up and also to prevent excessive settling of the earth.
This site tells the story of Saint Bernadette, who is said to have seen the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. There is a picture of her uncorrupted body (her face anyway), 121 years after her death. Here is everything else you might possibly want to know about the many so-called “Incorruptibles” of the Catholic Church.
I was grounds supervisor in a 2 cemeteries in S.C. and then 5 in Fla. over a period of 8 years.
Our standard grave depth in both states was 4’8" for single depth and 10’6" for a double depth grave.
If the OP is still around, there was an episode of Mythbusters in which tackled this. I think it was part of a “movie myths” episode.
I seem to remember that some numbers were offered pertaining to the weight and pressure of the soil.
ETA: when we are talking about zombies though, they are traditionally hideously strong and can’t suffocate so I don’t see why they couldn’t dig their way out after several hours of work.
