We’ve all heard stories of people attempting to claw their way out of coffins and seen patents, granted for alert mechanisms should one find oneself prematurely interred after a quick siesta. I don’t find it implausible that this happened, but a friend of mine recently suggested that, in the past, this happened with alarming frequency. I said I doubted it had ever happened to more than about 100 people, but she assured me that it was in the millions and she is usually much better informed than me on this type of thing. What’s the score? (I’m specifically talking about accidental live burials here, not the ‘Kill Bill’ variety.)
I would imagine that, at least in the developed world, the number approaches zero. I expect that very few people who have been accidentally declared dead have survived the embalming process.
I recommend the excellent book Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson. His research suggests it *occasionally *happened, but much more rarely than the horror stories and urban legends suggest.
Certainly more than 100, but millions seems a bit high to me. I doubt you are going to be able to find good statistics on it as we are not in the habit of digging up corpses later to verify that they were actually dead when buried.
Snopes does have this to say about it:
Rest of article here: Have People Been Buried Alive? | Snopes.com
Great info on Snopes. Probably should’ve looked there first.
Accidental alive burial - not too common.
As a method of mass execution and to instill terror, etc - yes, millions. Many many people have been buried alive. Mongols did this routinely. Japanese did it to tens of thousands in Nanking. Etc etc.
Not exactly what you probably meant, but within the constraints of the OP, hundreds of thousands were probably buried alive in loess cliff dwellings in the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake in China.
If you define the term “buried alive” to mean being trapped underground with no escape, then you have to include miners caught in cave-ins, etc. Maybe that doesn’t get to millions, but between that and the burying of prisoners who may not yet be dead in mass graves, and I’ll bet we’re into the hundreds of thousands.
I suppose you could even expand the definition to include shipwreck victims.
Men were buried alive, in the trenches of World War One.
And the Iran-Iraq War.
And Desert Storm.
The original, by Edgar Allan Poe:
This book is a true story about a merchant ship during the first world war:
The crew become infected with “blackwater fever” which resulted in deep comas, to the point that some (perhaps 2 IIRC) were buried at sea before they realized that some of the “corpses” were not actually dead. Apparently this disease had been rampant in one port where they called, and they fled, but not soon enough.
I think I shall start a thread and see if any of our medical dopers can offer an opinion on what this disease may have been.
Quite a lot, in the Holocaust. Mass graves that were bulldozed over. Sometimes the guards had to kick someone back in who wasn’t quite dead yet. Same scenario with burning rather than burying.
Possibly Encephalitis lethargica, a.k.a. von Economo disease after the neurologist who studied it.
My candidate for the most number entombed (and presumably dead) are the 300 Germans and collaborators trapped in the Mimoyecques V-3 underground site after RAF bombers attacked the site with tall boy bombs in 1944.
I’ll bet you could get a fair idea if you did a little digging. 
Don’t watch Kill Bill.
Or Blood Simple.
Or Casino.
I must be missing a few. Quicksand scenes? Ah,
The Mole People (also if you’re scared of mole people in general).
By that score, that movie with Harrison Ford and crime in the Amish country where a bad guy is buried in grain.