# Buried alive **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 19, 2004, 11:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530 "2004-08-19T11:32:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Eats\_Crayons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/278dde/32.png) [@Eats\_Crayons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eats_Crayons)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2004, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/21 "2004-08-20T00:29:58Z")
Okay, I totally believe it’s impossible, but I remember something like… Scully maybe, on the X-files?.. talking about the kind of tunneling that gophers and similar animals do whereby they displace the dirt as they move through it. Or maybe I read it as an “explanation” in some vampire fiction or something similarly ridiculous. Anyway, the idea sorta goes like this: Oh, no! I’m trapped in a coffin! “Somehow” I tear through the lid of the coffin. I start tunneling and manage to displace dirt by filling in the empty space of the coffin. Hey, if the coffin is two feet wide and six feet long, that’s a decent tunnel. Utter rubbish, I still think, but that was the “explanation” I remember from whatever fiction it was. Again, it was fiction, trying to create some kind of plausibility for a vampire, or zombie, or accidentally-buried-alive person. But it was a decent attempt. I’ll see if I can google the source I remember. Maybe some plot outline will reveal my source. ---
**Author:** ![SCSimmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e495f1/32.png) [@SCSimmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCSimmons)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2004, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/22 "2004-08-20T00:38:24Z")
> [@Chotii](#): > > I don’t have an answer, but am I the _only_ person here who’s thinking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer digging her way out of her grave? No, **Chrisk** was. He kindly put _his_ comment inside a spoiler tag, though. :wally ---
**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/23 "2004-12-01T14:01:48Z")
> [@wolvie](#): > > I saw this in a movie, and I was just wondering… > Suppose a woman were buried alive. She is buried in a plywood coffin, cheaply constructed. I don’t know the dimensions of the coffin, but it’s big enough to hold a 6’ tall woman with some wiggle room all around. The grave is 6-8 feet deep. The soil used is semi-dry, only loosely thrown onto, not too tightly packed in. > So my questions are: How much weight would be on the coffin? How much pressure would be needed to punch a hole through the plywood? Any possible way she could dig out? The plywood thickness not being specified we can assume that it would either be too thin to support the overburden of the back fill or too thick to collapse and be very difficult to penetrate from within. The entrapped woman would be SOL. Sorry about that. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/24 "2004-12-01T14:16:01Z")
No need to exhume this thread - there’s already an active one in GQ on exactly the same subject: [Could you dig yourself out of a grave?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=289231) ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/25 "2004-12-01T14:56:32Z")
…I had to ask: how long does a body buried in typical American style last? On one of those history shows, they were trying to get some DNA evidence from a body that had been buried in 1920. They dug up the grave, and the metal coffin was in good shape-the lid was not buckled, and the hinges still worked. Anyway, they opened the lid, and the guy was perfectlt preserved! His face had patches of mold, but otherwise, he looked pretty good. His clothes (wool suit) were damp and rotting-you could see holes in the fabric. I understand that embalmers used to use all kinds of nasty chemicals-arsenic compounds, bichloride ofmercury, etc… With chemicals like these, would all of the bacteria (that cause decay) be killed? Would this guy have lasted centuries (like the egyptian mummies?) ---
**Author:** ![HPL](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3da27b/32.png) [@HPL](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HPL)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/26 "2004-12-01T19:43:55Z")
> [@Finagle](#): > > However, the fact that digging a grave means moving about 4 tons of dirt should make one skeptical of any movie that shows anyone besides a trained ditch digger digging one in the course of an evening. I know. I’ve buried dead animals(possum, cat) before and it takes hours to dig a decently sized hole to bury them with only an inch or two of padded down topsoil. And yet in movies, you have people who manage to dig coffin sized holes with a couple feet of topsoil in a rather short time. ---
**Author:** ![robcaro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/df705f/32.png) [@robcaro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robcaro)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/27 "2004-12-01T21:50:54Z")
> [@olpeculiar](#): > > My handy dandy Pocket Reference puts 1 cu meter of earth at about 1520 kg. Which makes 4 cu meters of dirt about 6080 kg. Or about 16,289.7 pounds. That Uma is one tough girl… 6080 kg actually amounts to 13404.17472 pounds, still too much weight to dig out of. (Taken from an English Metric Engineering Calculator) ---
**Author:** ![The\_Devil\_s\_Grandmother](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/74df32/32.png) [@The\_Devil\_s\_Grandmother](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Devil_s_Grandmother)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/28 "2004-12-01T22:03:10Z")
> [@HPL](#): > > And yet in movies, you have people who manage to dig coffin sized holes with a couple feet of topsoil in a rather short time. Because watching people dig is _boring_. For a shockingly bad example of instant hole, fast-forward through _Don’t Say A Word \* (it’s certainly not worth watching. At least in_ Young Frankenstein\* the characters complained about the amount of work it was. ---
**Author:** ![BMax](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bmax/32/4267_2.png) [@BMax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMax)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/29 "2004-12-01T22:31:45Z")
> [@olpeculiar](#): > > My handy dandy Pocket Reference puts 1 cu meter of earth at about 1520 kg. Which makes 4 cu meters of dirt about 6080 kg. Or about 16,289.7 pounds. That Uma is one tough girl. > > Parenthetically, during my landscaping days, I once had to shovel and move 3 yards of loam that had been dumped in the wrong place. I had a wheelbarrow, but still, moving 7700 pounds of dirt by hand made for quite a morning. > > I don’t remember if I felt it the next day. Come to think of it, I don’t remember the next day… Yeah, I drank like that when I was a shovel jockey. Lots of landscapers drink like that. ---
**Author:** ![bubastis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/d07c76/32.png) [@bubastis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bubastis)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/30 "2004-12-01T22:45:57Z")
hey, lets not forget that uma’s a pretty tall girl, too. six foot easy. i reckon if she pointed her hands like a diver and “dove” upwards through the soil, it wouldnt be too hard. nice calculations to work out the weight of soil on the coffin, btw. but its not as if the bride lifted all the soil out in one go, hulk style. she just wigled up through it, and as i said, uma’s fairly tall so it was basically standing up. ---
**Author:** ![Lazlo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lazlo/32/9678_2.png) [@Lazlo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lazlo)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/31 "2004-12-01T23:09:55Z")
> [@wolf\_meister](#): > > With all you folks doing these calculations, you can save a lot of work by going to one of my Ultra Calculators Great site, **wolf\_meister**. I’ve bookmarked it for future reference. Well done! ---
**Author:** ![duffer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/duffer/32/1026_2.png) [@duffer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/duffer)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2004, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/32 "2004-12-01T23:43:05Z")
> [@Diceman](#): > > I saw another movie with this theme that I liked. This guy’s wife poisoned him, but it didn’t quite kill him. (It was one of those poisons that’s supposed to make it look like a heart attack.) She buried him as quickly and cheaply as possible. He wasn’t embalmed, and the coffin was old and water-damaged. Also, it was pouring rain when they buried him, so the dirt on top of his coffin was essentially just mud. Added up, all of this allowed the guy to escape. Nothing to add to the OP, but **Diceman** , I’m guessing you’re referring to this [movie](http://imdb.com/title/tt0099188/). It’s pretty good if anyone hasn’t seen it yet. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ccd318/32.png) [@John\_Kentzel-Griffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Kentzel-Griffin)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2004, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530/33 "2004-12-02T00:58:21Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > No need to exhume this thread - there’s already an active one in GQ on exactly the same subject: > [Could you dig yourself out of a grave?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=289231) Since there’s an active thread on the topic, i"ll let this one sink back into the ground. **DrMatrix** - GQ Moderator [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/buried-alive/260530.md?page=1)