This episode contains discussions about death, embalming, and animal experimentation.

If these subjects are triggering for you, this may be a good episode to skip.

Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped millions of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. The Fear of Death is quite a natural thing.

The idea of ceasing to exist is quite unsettling, as is thinking about our flesh rotting

away in the pitch blackness of a small box buried six feet under the earth. But even more horrifying is the thought

of being buried in that box while still alive. Stories of premature burial, also known as

live burial or Vivi Sepulter, have circulated throughout history. Reports of people waking

up in a coffin as they're lowered into the

grave, or passers-by hearing screams and knocking coming from the cemetery, appear across history,

but proliferated from the mid-1700s onward. One of the most common reports was that after

someone had died and was buried,

the gravedigger, or perhaps a thief, attempted to rob the corpse of valuables by digging them up.

When they touched the corpse to remove jewelry, it sat up and screamed,

scaring the thief out of their wits.

The fear of being buried alive is called Taffophobia,

and it applies to all types of premature burial, by freak accident, as a form of punishment or

execution, which is known as immurement, and by medical mistake. Taffophobia is one of the most

common phobias among humans, and there's little wonder why.

Being buried alive completely takes away all agency, all control over our own fate, all while

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