This is the memory pass, I'm Nitta Mao. In a word of warning, this is our annual Halloween episode, and it gets grim.

And then mocked home from work through a graveyard. It was laid, and it hadn't been a long day.

The man was a verger, a layperson who helped the ministers perform their ceremonies and the dark stone church that loomed beyond the cemetery wall.

He would light candles for a holiday services. He would draw the water with which babies would be anointed and brought into the light of the Lord.

And he'd help bear the coffins of the dead parishioners, as he had that day. It was a particularly hard one for the man, because the woman who died was young.

The only daughter of the man who owned the ironworks that groaned and smoldered on the other side of town, and she was pretty, and she was pregnant.

And they buried her in the ground in the late afternoon, as the spire cast a long shadow across the church yard.

And that night, as he wove his way home through the headstones, the man thought he heard a ghost crying in the darkness.

The girl's voice, calling for her mother, for God, for someone to help her.

And the man started running, and he didn't stop until he was home in his bed, with his head under the covers.

Terrified, and praying for sleep.

The next morning at work, the man told the minister about the ghost, because the minister should know about a ghost in his graveyard.

And the minister ran, shouting for the groundskeeper, grabbing a shovel.

And they dug the coffin up, and they cracked it open.

And they found the pretty young woman, her clothes ripped, her fingers bledied, the nails torn off and embedded in the scratch marks she'd made inside the wooden casket.

And they found the baby, she had born right there in the coffin, after she'd awoke and defined that she'd been buried alive.

Neither mother nor child survived.

And one that people read often in the 18th and 19th century, one that kept them up at night, one of dozens of true stories of people accidentally being buried alive.

This is what scared them, to have some doctor pronounce them dead when they were not, and then to wake up in a pine box six feet below the ground, to claw at boards until the oxygen ran out, or the dirt came in.

Like in the story they read about the butcher in London, who was interred when his heartbeat had grown too faint to hear, but whose cries were heard from beneath the ground, though not in time.

He died just before his family managed to dig him up again.

He shattered his skull trying to smash his way through the casket.

...