Stuff You Should KnowSure, you've probably laid in one at the store or a funeral home, but how much do you know about receptacles used to bury the dead? We'll bet you'll learn plenty - like the difference between a coffin and a casket - in this classic episode.
How to everyone. It's Saturday morning, and this is your weekly Selects episode aka Stuff You Should Know reruns handcrafted and curated by me, Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and my lovely and handsome co host Joshua Clark. This week, I am on the hook for this one, and so I'm going to pick how coffins work. From May thirtieth, twenty thirteen. I feel like we kind of came down a little bit hard on the funerary industry on this one. These coffins are expensive. Boy, oh boy, who wants to pay that kind of money once you're dead? Not me to grind me up and plant me as a tree or something, or maybe just throw me on the woods and let the worms take care of it at any rate. That's my journey, not yours. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum. If you want a big, fancy mahogany coffin, go for it. The podcast is going to teach you all about him. Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast on Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff you Should know the podcast.
That's right.
This is part of our ongoing death Sweet, which is sweet.
Yeah. We've covered death a lot because death is multifaceted, sure you know. And this reminded me of the I guess we covered green burial not in its own podcast yet and like different ways to what to do with the dead body. There you go, That's what I thought it was into.
But I'm surprised we didn't do a podcast dedicated just to that.
Maybe we should. Yeah, I looked up because I'm interested in that for myself. And there are some lovely places right outside Atlanta.
To be buried Greenley, Yeah, where you can just.
Be wrapped in a shroud and buried in the field, which ripped to death by coyotes.
Left in a field.
They don't leave you, no, well they bury you in a shallow grade.
Oh okay for the coyotes to come get you.
No, they said they don't have a problem with that. But I'm not one of those people that cares about that.
Yeah, about what happens to your body, Like I would do a sky burial.
That wouldn't bother me for vultures to pick me apart, Like use the body if it would feed an animal.
Great, why not donate it to science.
Yeah, maybe I'll do that. I'm not precious about that my body after death. I'm not precious about my body in life. Why start then, exactly? Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. So anyway, Well, a shroud does kind of technically count as a coffin chuck, Yeah, back in the day if you didn't have a lot of money.
Right, or if you're into being picked apart by coyotes.
Right.
But the whole point of a coffin, or what constitutes a coffin is it provides a barrier between the body and the ground. Yeah, and technically a shroud does that. It's a really, really poor coffin. Yeah, but that's the whole point. It's that the body is encapsulated in something that just dropping a body into a grave is undignified. You might say even cremating a body without some form or fashion of a coffin is considered undignified. And you'll be hard pressed to find a crematorium that will let you just put your loved one on the conveyor belt and let them just kind of flop lifelessly toward the flames.
I don't think they flop.
I mean, if they're jostled, they're gonna flop. Okay, yeah, especially after Rigger's done.
The coffin the word coffin. We're not gonna do any Merriam Webster stuff because that's who would start an article like.
That or do it six times in an article.
But we will say we'd like to give root words. And of course Greek and Latin are involved here with the Greek koffinos and Latin koffin uts. M h. They're always like, oh yeah, I'll change that kto a C and that O too a.
U, and no one will ever even remember the Greeks happen exactly.
So that's where the word coffin came from. But here in the United States we generally refer to that vessel as a casket, whereas in places like England and Australia I'm sorry, Great Britain and Australia they might say coffin, even though a lot of people here think that's like a word you shouldn't use.
Well, yeah, their casket still means a place to keep your valuables.
Right right, your bubbles right yeah.
Here in the US, if you go to a funeral directorium also called a funeral home. You're going to find that they'd never use the word coffin.
No, and you know it's pretty subtle, but the language is definitely. They don't say, uh, we'd love to pick out for you to pick out a coffin for your husband's dead body, and then we'll dig a grave over there and put it in the ground. Wah that we'll say things like we would like you to pick out a casket for your husband and.
From our display area, from the display.
Area, and we will take you there in the casket coach, not a hearse, and and place him in the internment space, which is not.
A grave opened, and then we'll close afterward, rather than filling or digging the grave.
They don't say words like digging and ground.
Basically anything that brings to mind the guy from Phantasm.
Yeah.
Those the funeral industry avoids those words.
Yeah. And of course we've ruined six feet under and the Fisher and Sons the boys such a great Yoh, Michael always did such a great job of, you know, being the proper funeral director and using all the all the words that you should use, like casket.
He's good at it. And then he turned into a serial killer.
No, well, dexter.
Yeah, so there actually is a distinction beyond where you live with the word casket in coffin. Sure, there's a slight difference. Shape, Yeah, it's it's all. It's basically shape. A casket is a long rectangle and the top is usually split, so you can know that's a coffin. That's a casket.
Oh yeah, that's a casket. Coffin is the hexagonal a hexagonal box. Yeah, and that you know, back in the day he had the old pine box. Actually a lot of those were just rectangular, but some were you know, had that familiar sort of keyhole shape.
Well, back in the day, in the nineteenth century, the person who was responsible for carrying out your funeral services and building your coffin was usually the local carpenter, and he undertook your funeral service, hence the word undertaker from what I understand, Yeah, but it was usually somebody who built wagons and kitchens and whatever. They also built coffins too, and they built them to suit.
That sounded to me like our first casket. Fact. Well done, Chuck, wow, Yeah, thank you Jerry for going the extra mile there.
And if you like that, you're going to love this episode because this place is lousy with casket facts.
Yeah, we won't play the sound effect on this one. But I thought another interesting fact, because you know, I like origins of phrases and things. If someone casts a Pall over a room, yeah, a Paul was actually a dark cloth that they would put over the casket to I guess cover, you know, block out the bad juju of having the dead body in there. Right, So you would cast a Paul over the casket.
Yeah, Or if you're me, you cast a Paul over any room you enter. That's fun, no fun anymore, everybody can Can we talk a little bit about the funeral industry for a second. Yeah, about the casket industry, I should say specifically, there's still some furniture companies that make caskets on the side, like Lazy Boy.
Yeah.
I don't know if Lazy Boy does it, but there's they represent a very small shit of the casket that's an.
Ultimate lazy boy. You know your forever chair.
Right exactly. Well, they actually have caskets for those people. It's called Goliath Caskets. Oversized Caskets, Order Oversized Caskets dot com.
Huh. Anyway, of course, there's someone that does that, because that's a common thing. You know, caskets aren't you know some people of girth. Sure, that's pretty embarrassing, you know, when you can't fit in your casket.
Right, And I went and looked, and these are very dignified caskets.
They're just larger.
They're for the larger person.
Double widse. Wow.
There's also uh okay, so one of the largest casket makers, Batesville, originally started out as.
A furniture company.
So there's like this whole origin of yeah, I'll build your chair and I'll build your coffin for your uncle too.
That makes sense, it's carpentry.
Yeah, And then that's kind of the way it went. There were some some groups that started to consolidate and just make caskets around the late the turn of the twentieth century, the beginning of the twentieth century, and you know, that was fine. They kind of created the industry. And then it was like the fifties after the Korean War, when metal caskets became like all a rage.
Yeah, because that was mod looking and that was popular at the time. It was.
And you'll also find in the funeral industry it was easy to subtly exploit the grieving out of their money. There it was very cheap to mass produce metal caskets, and so they were sold, sold, sold, There was a huge profit margin with them, and I think by the seventies half of all caskets were metal.
Yeah. Well, because what better way to protect your loved one from the elements and the harsh afterlife that they may encounter than with a good old solid metal in casing, yes exactly, which also happens to be have greater profit margins, and it's cheaper to produce, so.
It is it's cheaper to mass produce the other aspect of a metal coffin. In the rise of the metal coffin, it changed the casket making industry because it's really expensive to get into metal coffin making. Apparently it costs about a million dollars just for the dies to make a standard metal coffin, just for the dies alone. So this kind of consolidated the industry down to fewer and fewer companies that were making metal caskets, so it became a real industry at that point. And then ultimately the casket industry started to suffer and decline thanks to advances in medicine there were fewer deaths, so their profits.
Dropped or the revenue dropped.
And then starting in the eighties, people said, you know what, maybe cremation isn't so bad, right, And so in nineteen eighty five, I think fifteen percent of people opted for cremation, and then by two thousand, I think, no, twenty eleven, it's like forty five percent. Oh really, yeah, and every time somebody gets cremated, the coffin industry dies a little bit.
Yeah, although you know, like you said, you can still have a casket to be cremated in I know, we covered this in the Cremation podcast.
Yeah, well you have to, like you can't find somebody who just let your.
But that can be super cheap. Like sometimes it's even cardboard.
Well it's supposed to because it's got to burn.
Yeah, but I mean at the very least wood will also burn. But you can you can spend a little bit more money, or you can get a temporary encasing, an outer encasing that is more attractive to show the family. And then when push comes to shove, they shove. They remove the outer casket and shove. Yeah, you in.
It's like a rental casket just for the service.
Yeah. Yeah, and it can actually rent caskets period, like even if you aren't being cremated, just for a more showy experience and then they'll, you know, then you get the pine box treatment, right because nobody loves you. Yeah, and it's expensive, man, people, a lot of people don't have the money to pay for a big funeral, and it's a lot of people really believe in that kind of thing. Is really sad for them, you know, it is.
Luckily there's such a thing as Walmart and Costco. Both of them sell caskets. Walmart has a casket for eleven ninety nine one ninety nine dollars, it's the Lady of Our Lady of Guadalupe casket model. And then Costco Yeah okay, and then Costco has the same same model for one hundred bucks more.
Really.
Yeah, I was surprised that it's not exactly the same. But it's nice to see that the big box retailers aren't price fixing coffins.
Yeah, it's great to see Walmart's on coffins.
But I mean it's like that, you if you need a coffin and they're attractive looking coffins, I think they're fiberglass.
Have you ever laid down in a coffin? Probably not, I haven't. I haven't either. I would just to see what it felt like. They look compy.
Did you see the thing about the six feet Under Club in San Francisco? There is a club where it's like, hey, you and your partner, life part swinging partner, shartner, whatever you yeah, your sex partner.
Let's just call it what it is.
Can Wright can come lay down in our coffin and will bury you and you guys can do it, and we are going to watch you on a night vision webcam that's going to be projected on the walls of the club above versus San Francisco, San Francisco six Feet Under Club, and you can email and reserve a space in their coffin.
Huh is there? I mean, is there any room in the coffin this preak.
I'd imagine it would have to be a larger, but maybe a goliath coffin double one?
Yeah, huh, Well I will never do that, but it's interesting to know it's out there. It is out there in San Franciscos, like knowing my options. Well, let's talk about the anatomy of a coffin, chuckers h. Well, you know, the most important thing, of course, is that it is a barrier too, from the body to the you know, the elements. No one, Actually I don't care, like I already said, but most people, most normal people don't want to think about their loved ones bodies like decaying and being eaten by you know, being worm dirt. But one thing they cannot tell you is that it's illegal to say that we have a casket that will permanently seal the body, Like it's against the law to claim any sort of permanence, even if it's one of these new gasket coffins. What are those called. It's called a protective coffin, yeah, which actually has a rubber gasket, so it sealed much tighter. But they still legally can't say like it'll protect them forever.
Right, because it will protect them from the elements. But there is such a thing as decay, like your body's going to decay in the nothingness. And apparently, I guess the funeral industry was selling coffins based on the idea that the body was going to survive forever. Yeah, and with this impermeable seal that the protective coffins had. I mean it wasn't letting anything in, but it also wasn't letting anything out, which is a problem. And in an air tight environment, anaerobic bacteria gets to work and as they start putrefying the flesh, they expel methane gas as a byproduct. And there's this thing called exploding coffin syndrome, which was most apparent in mausoleums, where a coffin would just blow up, and sometimes they would blow up so much that it would blow the mausoleum door open. Yeah, like a huge methane explosion from the gas built up from the decaying corpse in this protective coffin. So now they have ones that that don't let anything in, but they burp gas out.
Yeah, they're called burping coffins, which is a great name for a coffin.
Yeah, but so is exploding casket syndrome.
Yeah. Boy, could you imagine being a cemetery worker and seeing a mausoleum door explode wide open? Yeah, you're just like seeing it. Oh, I would quit my job that day. So it depends on where you are in the world. What you're going to get with your with your coffin and with regulations, you know, and less developed countries. Obviously they're less regulated. You could still be wrapped in a shroud in some parts of the world.
Right here in the US, in the West, they're basically public health regulations, which is why that that place for the green burial is designated a green burial place.
Yeah, so I'm sure.
You the body won't come in contact with the groundwater, I think is what they're trying to keep from happening.
Yeah, that was in their fac Yeah.
So that's pretty much the whole public health regulation, and it's gotten to the point where most most people are buried with cement encasement around them, right.
Oh, is that what they do these days? I think so. Yeah, I think I knew that.
Actually, it's so funny, like we're all still six year olds at our court.
It's like, ewe, dead body. Gross. I can't let that get into the water. Yeah, that stuff doesn't bother me. You gets bodies, no not. I wouldn't want to drink a dead body now, but seeing one, I mean, I'm the guy who poked a head floating in a bucket, you know, in the hospital that way. Yeah, yeah, I forgot about that story. I didn't poke it, but I mentally poked it. It didn't bother me. If you are in the Western world, you're probably gonna be dealing with wood or metal or fiberglass. If you live out in the desert, they may use things like local products like clay or stone, which is kind of interesting. I guess we got a lot of wood here in the United States though. Particle board yep. And like we mentioned the sad, sad cardboard cremation vessel.
Right, which, again, if you're being cremated, you probably don't care.
Yeah. I was also up for cremation, and then I thought, I don't know, is there anything that's in the green burial seems like a good option.
Sure, just become one with the dirt.
Maybe, but I like the idea being scattered as well.
Or again helping somebody helping other people.
Yeah, but they'll still like if you donate your body to science, did they not give you any sort of like.
No, you can't be EMBALMD or anything. I guess you probably could if like, say you're going to the body farm.
You wouldn't be able to be INBALMD. Sure, and I'm.
Sure there's like memorial services but I don't as I understand it. That's another thing that's eating into the casket industry's profits is body donation. Hey man, I think this is a perfect time to have a message break from our sponsor agreed, which means our jingle.
Fish. All right, So I think this is actually a great time for a second casket. Fact.
Oh, I like these already.
All right. Back in the day, in the early nineteenth century, that was sort of a they called it a grave body snatching period, and people were into snatching up bodies, digging up graves, exhooming people, if you will, and basically selling bodies for money for medical research. It was a way to make a buck or doing research on your own.
Medical College of Georgia was they found dozens of skeletons. I was like, I think it was one hundreds, dozens of skeletons of people who were dismembered, and they figured out that all of them had been stolen from graves.
I remember that. Yeah, of course that wasn't in the early nineteenth century, was it.
It was in the nineteenth century, Now, it was early, but it was.
It was in the nineteenth So they developed something well, various things to you know, protect bodies like locked mausoleums and vaults, and then something I think it's kind of eat called a mort safe, which is basically an iron cage put over the coffin. It's like sunk into concrete.
It's like what people used to protect their air conditioners today. Yeah, exactly, but over like a grave.
So that that was a mort safe and that kept people out. They had guards, sometimes staffed guards.
I think the money the caretaker doubles as a guard, but they had people who they hired as guards would protect a specific grave.
I think if you had enough dough, wow, you could have like, you know, the mausoleum with a guard. That's pretty cool. And that's you know, that's if you're rich and wealthy.
They were also if you weren't wealthy. The other way to thwart grave robbers was to put heavy planks, yeah, to backfill the grave with rocks instead of dirt, which might not have kept somebody out, but they would have made quite a bit of noise digging you up. Sure, and uh yeah, have you ever been to Oakland Cemetery?
Oh yeah, I go all the time, Well not all the time, but I go. It is BEAUTIFU couple of times a year. Yeah, you me and I went and just did like this, just walked around. Yeah, like there's some there's some mausoleums there that like there's no way you could have gotten into. Yeah, for those people that haven't been to Atlanta, that is what our probably oldest and like most famous cemetery. Yeah, it is our Parade de la Che.
It's a yes, it's our Nicholas.
I've been to that one too, actually, the one in Paris, what Parade de Lache? Oh is it the one with Jim Morrison. Yeah, of course nice, And I think Oscar Wilde is there and Chopin Well, but you know, Morrison's the one that you go by and there's like joints on the ground and like tabs of acid and stuff, and then you always see like the random guy kind of hanging out like waiting for everyone to turn their back, a bunch of dirty hippies, basically.
Jackets give me a break.
In Ghana and other parts of Africa, it is kind of cool because they will they have a very sort of a joyous way of celebrating death with their bright colored coffins and even odd shapes that would pay honor to what this person loved in life. I saw one that was like a giant shoe and this sky, this this Attacan dude was just like, you know, it must have been as relative and he was just so proud to show that they were bearing him in a giant shoe.
So it's like it's like to the dead in Ghana, what a pinata.
Is to like a kid in Mexico.
Really, yeah, they have like pinanas that are like shaped for they're like different specific Yeah.
Yeah, it's not always just a kooka burro.
No, Okay, there's like's a hello and like really yeah, yeah, there's there's some great piontas out there.
And then the other example they gave in here is like if it was a businessman, he might be buried in something that resembled his luxury car, Yeah, I saw. Or a fisherman, it might be a fish shaped coffin.
The fish finally got him back.
He's in the belly of it.
So, Chuck, you mentioned things that coffins may be made out of. Yeah, you mentioned like wood, fiberglass.
Elm oak, hardywoods.
Bronze is still used on occasion. Yeah, sure, And that's the shell of the coffin. Yeah, and then the inside you'll find the lining, usually some sort of rich fabric like taffeta or velvet or something that looks like that. Maybe valure if they like juicy clothes that.
Kind of thing, Yeah, silk maybe, Yeah.
And it's stuffed with batting, yeah, to keep the corpse nice and comfortable. Sure, And that's pretty much it. You've got hardware on the outside, and that's a casket.
Yeah, it's probably gonna be warm colors here in the Western world. Old, it's not Ghana. You're not gonna see a lot of like brightly painted coffins and stuff like that.
No, but also they kind of avoid like you're probably I can see a black coffin anywhere.
Yeah.
Those are called receding colors. They're they're dismal and of desperation and despair.
I feel like I've seen a lot of like light gray and things like that. Yeah, or just wood color. If you get like a really nice wood, like cherry, sometimes it'll just be in that, you know, that'll be the outer shell.
Right, And those are pricy, yes, they are. As a matter of fact, the average cost of a funeral in the US in two thousand and nine was six five hundred and sixty, which was less than I thought.
I think a green barrel is about half that.
Yeah, I can see that.
I think they're like two or three grand.
Because the coffin in that average funeral was two two hundred and ninety five dollars the average cost of a metal coffin in two thousand and nine, which in two thousand and seven, funeral homes and crematories pulled in eleven point nine five billion dollars, and one of the ways they pulled in that much was from cost casket sales.
Yeah, and I don't know if we even should say this out loud, because it sounds like an unfounded accusation that cheap coffins are purposely made ugly so they can upsell. Yeah, do you think that's true? Ah, that's probably true.
Well, I know I've read that the funeral home industry marks up caskets that they buy. They resell them for up to five Yeah, more than they paid for them.
Well, it's a business, and that's their product, you know it is.
It's a business in the the customers are in a really really uh easily exploited place.
Yeah, I just I don't know though, I just think it is a business, and because it deals with death, it's very easy for someone to say, like, you're exploiting these people or taking advantage of them when they're I just don't think that's true. It's not.
I think that you can't cast that net across the entire industry.
I think that that's that's sure. There's some shysters s, but they're also for everybody. Yeah, you know, bad apples, Josh. Well, you know, we have a lot of opulence here in the United States. Some people get into that, but apparently in Australia and Great Britain they're a little more reserved with what they'll spend on a casket. In some cultures, like the Jewish faith, it's very common to to not have any sort of garish thing. They want you to be buried in something very plain, so you're not distinguished as to your place in life, you know.
Yeah, apparently they'll even the hardware that they used to carry now is removable, so like.
When you're buried, you're buried in a plane box.
Yeah, I like that, that's yeah, that's cool. You want to talk about the bow people.
The hanging coffins of the bow not to.
Be confused with the Hell of the upside down centers in Big Trouble in Little China, right, although this is in Sechuan Province of China.
Yeah.
The Bo people are an ethnic group that populated the area, and they have this really neat tradition of putting the coffins of their deceased up on like three hundred foot cliffs. Yeah, just craigs, little caves, and for centuries, no one has had any idea how they got them up there.
Yeah, at one point they head close to three hundred Now it's only about one hundred and three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet. And you've seen did you see pictures? Yeah, it's crazy. I mean they're like, I don't see how they did it. They think now they might have lowered them down, but they still you know that they're on it looks like they're on wood planks that are sticking out of the cliffs. So how they do that, Yeah, I can't figure it out. It's pretty neat.
It's like a little village of coffins is kind of clustered on this cliff side.
Yeah, with the idea that having your relatives higher up is a place of greater respect to be looking up at them, because that's where the deities were, at the tops of mountains, and that would place them closer to the deities.
Yes, you go up here now, yeah, because you're dead.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
What about the Egyptians, They had the money coffins if you ask me.
Yeah, and we covered this with Tutt obviously, the big sarcopha guy. But they didn't they believe that you would just be sent to your you know, all this stuff would go with you.
Yeah, you needed in your afterlife for your journey to the after world, the underworld, and I guess the whole it was the opposite of what the Jews think.
It was.
The more socioeconomic status you can bestow upon a grave, the better off the person is going to be in the next life. Oh, you have a bejeweled casket, right, you're you're in our You're okay, in our book.
But dazzled. Yeah.
But they actually had texts. What we know called the Egyptian Book of the Dead was originally called the It grew out of what are called the Egyptian Coffin texts, and there were two the Book of the Dead, the Coffin Text that became the Book of the Dead was for everybody, regardless of your socioeconomic status, and it told you how to be buried. And we've done how mummies work, so we got into that a lot. Yeah, and that's basically what we relied on. But there was also one for the Pharaohs, the kings, the elite, and those are the pyramid.
Texts, yes, and that's the one that later evolved to the Book of the Dead, right, the Pyramid text. I think the Coffin texts, I don't know. Hey, yeah's a pyramid text.
Yeah, the Pyramid text is separate. That's the one for the for the elite.
Right, and that's what evolved to the Book of the Dead. Oh it did, okay, Yeah, but I think what was in the Coffin Text was contained within the Pyramid text, right.
Yeah, I think the Coffin Text was an umbrella, right, that gave birth to both. It was the original one and it actually had the first described cosmology ever recorded.
Yes, the Book of Two A's within the Egyptian Coffin Text was the first time they basically said here's what happens to you after death? Yeah, pretty cool. Could happen to you.
And it's basically you you cross from one part of the sky into a lake of fire and then across into another part of this s guy.
Yeah, And the coffin texts have spells and things to help you out as well in your journey.
Like check out my bejeweled casket. I'm okay in your book, O, Chuck. We couldn't talk about coffins if we didn't talk about a really interesting and neat trend of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, maybe even seventeenth, but I think eighteenth and nineteenth century called safety coffins.
Yeah, it was. It's a common fear for people to it's called the tapaphobia taphophobia, and that's the fear of being buried alive. Yeah, and that it's a real thing, and people had it then and they have it now.
Well, they had good reason to have it back then, because it happened.
Yeah.
There was a book called Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented. It's an eighteen ninety six book by a social reformer named William Tebb and a couple of co authors. Actually, one of the co authors was a doctor who himself had been prematurely buried.
Oh really.
Yeah, they went over like account after account, and they even had a chapter called Dubious Accounts. But they basically came up with two hundred and nineteen instances of narrow escape from premature burial, one hundred and forty nine cases of actual premature burial, ten cases of vivisection before death. So the person they thought was dead they started to cut open and they weren't dead.
Yeah, and then then six feet under club.
And then two cases of embalming before death. Wow, so like it happened before embalming. It was like there was no way to tell you were dead.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that was the problem. Is medical science had advanced to the point where you could always tell if someone was dead.
Exactly, and there was such thing as cholera, which apparently gives you the appearance of being dead even when you're not, So there was good reason to fear being buried alive. And as a resultless thing called the safety coffin came up.
Yeah, and there were I'm sure you've done some other research on this. They were all different sorts of methods that they had from a vault that had like a little window and a wheel you could turn on the inside to let yourself out, which would be nice. Sometimes it was just a breathing tube.
Yeah, the one that was patented in eighteen ninety six by a guy named Count Carnice Carniki, which is awesome. He had something that was there was a tube with a spring going all the way the six feet down and there was a little glass ball at the end of the tube and it rested on the deceased chest and if any movement of the chest happened, like you took one breath anything like that, it would trip the spring and this passageway would fly open to let air in and a flag would rise up above your grade they were still alive. So that one was one of the most well known safety coffins and actually in premature burial and how it may be prevented. There's a whole little chapter dedicated to it, and actually you can find the full text of that online really for free. It's really interesting.
There were also things that would trigger like a bell ringing. One that even had a long fused firecracker that I guess you could set off.
Yeah, I mean, that'll get the attention to somebody.
I guess.
So in that book, Teb and his friends they endorse to prevent premature burial, either safety coffin or cremation, whether like even if you are dead then or even if you're not dead, you're gonna be dead afterward.
So we guarantee you won't be buried alive exactly because you'll be creamy. We're not even going to bury the ultimate safety coffin.
And there's this guy named doctor Timothy Clark Smith in eighteen ninety three. He died in Middlebury, Vermont, and he's buried to this day, which is customary in Evergreen Cemetery. And if you go to his burial mound, there's a fourteen by fourteen inch of plate glass opens up onto what was once his face six feet down. Wow, so that people could come check on him and make sure he was dead because he had tatophobia and was very very much afraid of that fate.
That's got to be tied to claustrophobia somehow.
Well, yeah, they think the APA being they think that you've had some sort of early childhood encounter with an enclosed space yea, and either you developed tafophobia or you become the batman.
Oh, that's their that's their judgment that you know what that sounds like. That sounds like a casket. Fact, let's hear it, ah man, that sweetenectar.
Let's see what else. I got a couple more things.
You got anything else? I got nothing else?
So you can We said that the average kufsmin is like twenty two twenty three hundred dollars. You can also shell out thirty thousand dollars, of course you can. Batesville Casket Company makes the Promethean and it is the coffin that Michael Jackson and James Brown were buried in separately. They had their own coffins.
Sure, yeah, what's the deal was it? Just like?
It is nice looking, rich, luxurious like navy velvet interior lining this it looks it must be gold but polished to this high shine. It's a beautiful casket. I have to say. There is no reason in the world for anyone ever to be buried in a casket like this. But it's out there right. If you want to go the other way, you can go to di i y coffin dot com and there are schematics to build your own very plain coffin.
I saw that, I thought about that might be a nice thing to.
Do, build your own coffin that King of the Hill. There's a King of the where Hank builds his own coffin. He's talking about how he started. He's like, well, I looked into it and long story short.
I got the bug. Now he's made. He made, he made.
His first try was terrible, so he gave that to Peggy. And then his second try it's really nice. He's gotten it down pat and he Peggy gets the one where like the top doesn't close all the.
Way right, That's what mine would look like.
It's a good episode.
I'm not a skilled craftsman, but I enjoy it. Yeah.
And then lastly, you mean, I saw Mike Tyson do his little his little spoken word thing, but we saw him d C. It was great, and he talked about it was really sweet because I'm really ambivalent about him, because you know, it's just he's a really there's a lot.
To him, you know what I'm saying.
Sure, And but one of the things that he said he did was his mother was buried in a potter's field with an unmarked grave and like a just a cheap box. Yeah, and he said the first time he made money, he had her exhumed and bought like the most expensive headstone and the most expensive casket he could find, and had her buried in like this other night cemetery.
It's sweet. Yeah. You know there's a pauper's grave over by the drive in movie theater here in Atlanta. Yeah, is that right? Yeah, it's just yeah, it's a pauper's grave and lots of like bad stuff goes on there now apparently what oh like prostitution and stuff like that. It's way worse dragging. Yeah, I'm sure some teens are drinking.
That's probably not a good safe place to do that.
No, I wouldn't think so. Yeah.
And there's also Potter's Field pauper's grave in Oakland Cemetery. Oh yeah, it's basically like a big expanse of grass. Yeah, a bunch of people who were poor were bearing.
Yeah. I did Mount Vernon when I was up there, you know George Washington's place. Is it cool? Yeah, it's really neat because they still do stuff the old fashioned way. You know, like if they need a room painted, they grind up dye and mix it with water and that stuff. Wow. But you know there is like you know, he and Martha are buried in this like beautiful mausoleum, and then there's also like the slave you know, grave sites, and it's just, you know, definitely like he freed all his slaves and his will, which was a good thing to do, I guess. But anytime you go to one of those plantation type things and you see like the opulence of his thing and then this other little side area where the slaves are buried, it's just sort of like, yeah, yeah, all that happened. That's a sad reminder, it is. And no one was visiting like the slave area as much even, and I was just sort of like that kind of rubbed me a little bit.
Did you go over there and visit it?
Yeah? Absolutely good for you. Yeah. Nice. So you got anything else? I got nothing else.
That's coffins.
That's coffins. I was going to write this article a couple of years ago because it didn't exist, because I wanted to do this.
Oh good, I'm glad it came along.
I think that's just a lesson kids. If you wait around long enough, somebody else might do well.
Then, since Chuck gave wait, I think Chuck, that might be a casket backed.
What is that the last casket back? All right?
Okay, well since we had our last casket fact. Oh yeah, I gotta say. If you want to read this article on coffins, you can go to HowStuffWorks dot com and you can type in that word c F F I N in the search bar, and that means it's time now for listener mail.
Josh, I'm gonna call this very manipulative email from a Georgia tech fan. Here we go, Peter in Virginia, he knows it's coming. I want to tell you, guys how your podcast made a difference in my life. I recently found out that I have diffuse large B cell lymphoma. As a part of the testing process to determine what stage you are, they shoot you full of barium and then perform a CT scan. The cancer cells divide rapidly, so based on how much the barium glows during the CT, we'll tell them how much your cancer has spread. As part of the process, you have to remain still as possible for an hour prior to the CT, so as little circulation in the blood and barium as possible. Then you sit for another hour, also as still as possible, while getting the body scanned. Needless to say, you feel very woozy after the barium, and it's very anxious time. Your mind wants to wander into numerous worst case scenarios while you were alone in a cold, dark room. However, I was overjoyed when the nurses said I could listen to my MP three player. I am glad you replaced that. I spent both of those hours listening to your podcast. Actually, I even got one of the nurses to tape my phone next to my head during the scanning process to ensure I would hear. It provided a great distraction and really took my mind off what certainly would have been very gruesome two hours. Also, the doctor said that beating cancer certainly is partly mental, and the attitude and response from the treatment have a large part to do with your response. And I'm a graduate from Georgia Tech, and if I could hear a go jackets in the air seriously make my week and increase my odds of survival. Oh my goodness, I know you both went to Uga. However, I'm hopeful that we can put a side our differences and come together to rally behind something like cancer. And I emailed Peter back and said, you're very manipulative human beings. Yeah, and he laughed and thought that was really funny and gave me and you a go dogs in the email. Oh okay, and he thought that might be the like a carbon offset. Okay, So Peter, obviously, go jackets. Buzz buzz buzz, Go jackets. Go Jamblenreck from Georgia Tech, et cetera. And that's where it ends, my friend. Yeah, and we wish you all the best obviously in your treatment and let us know how it's going. We'll be thinking about you. Thank you. Peter.
Hang in there, buddy, good luck, and keep us posted. And we're never going to say go jackets again.
That's right. That's your one shot, yep.
If you wanted to try to manipulate me and chuck into doing something we don't want to, you can give it a shot. You can tweet to us at s y SK podcast That was a why by the way, You can go to Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know and you can join us at our home on the web. That is Stuff you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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