When you’re listening to rock radio in Parkersburg, WV at 1:30 in the morning, you’re bound to hear something interesting. Whether or not it’s true is another thing entirely.
The jock told a little tale about the origin of a common phrase. Apparently, people back in the Middle Ages were really freaked out about being buried alive, so much so that the more paranoid among them would tie small bells to their pinkie fingers. If they were buried alive, they could ring the bell from their coffins. Of course, someone had to be around to listen for the bells in the graveyard overnight. This guy’s unfortunate job led to the coining of the phrase “graveyard shift.”
Now, forgive me for being skeptical, but my first reaction upon hearing this was to scream “BULLSHIT” at the top of my lungs. Am I right, or should I recalibrate my BS detector?
In victorian times there were many, many different devices to help the unfortunate people who were buried alive. It seems that an urban legend at the time held that people could appear dead and come back to life later. “the great train Robbery” deals with this practice.
There is a better explanation for the origin of “graveyard shift” , but I can’t recall. I will go look it up.
I visited New Orleans a few years ago, and the only super-touristy thing we did was go on a “haunted history” tour. The guide told us the same thing about some graves there, only in this case it was during the plague. Apparently there was fear that some people were buried alive because they only appeared to be dead, but were actually deeply unconcious. So some people were buried with bells, and some were buried with a tube that lead up to the surface, so that if they called out, they would be heard.
Of course, this was a haunted history tour, so who knows how true all that was.
“It says, I choo-choo-choose you. And it’s got a picture of a train.”
– Ralph Wiggum
“Penises don’t belong in the mouth, girls and boys. You’ve got the wrong hole there. Just like you wouldn’t shove pizza up your nose.”
-From the Brother Jed flyer-
Doh! I screwed up the quotes and omitted explanations…
Um… check out the site. But it basically states that tying a bell to ones corpse was not the norm, so the story is basically untrue.
Sorry for the confusion.
Someone sent me a whole e-mail of this sort of crap, they also claimed this was the source of the term “Dead Ringer” (ohhhhhhhh! It all makes sense now!) :rolleyes:
ALso included were terms like “sleep tight” etc. I rolled my eyes and deleted the whole thing, because even if it were true, who cares?
Adrock, light up the place
And if you pull my card you pull the ace
And if you ask me turn up the bass
And if you play Defender I could be your hyperspace
The whole thing doesn’t connect the nightnessof a graveyard shift to the job. What, is the guy in the coffin only going to ring the bell at night? How does he know what time it is? Shouldn’t the graveyard shift be 24/7? Or was it expected that family members and the like would be hanging around the grave all day soon after burial, and they could listen for the bell?
I always assumed that the term graveyard shift came from kind of the same lines as “they [freaks] only come out at night,” i.e., on the 11 pm-7 am shift, you’d be dealing with some pretty strange customers/zombies.
I don’t know about its accuracy, but I recently read Mary Higgins Clark’s Moonlight Becomes You, and it has that exact theme as the basis for the mystery. I know that authors will often research historical information and then create a fictional story about it, so perhaps it is true. It was pretty good for that type of book, too.
Jill (hoping I got the UBB code right)
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank