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A Man Called Freud Can't Keep His Phobia Buried

One of Our Oldest Fears Leads a Brazilian To Build a Crypt With Air, Food, Megaphones




Buried Alive

See Mr. de Melo's burial vault, outfitted for survival in case of being buried alive.


Mr. de Melo's life-affirming burial chapel has become one of the most talked about features of the eccentric tourist park he operates in Brazil's central hinterlands.

While Mr. de Melo's phobia may be over the top, fear of premature burial is one of the most chilling and persistent terrors. Fans of Halloween movie thrillers and people who relish a classic buried-alive story like the 1988 Dutch film "Spoorloos" ("The Vanishing"), have something in common with the ancient Greeks and Romans, who repeated tales of warriors and consuls, mistakenly thought dead, who rose up during their own funerals.

Fear of live burial crested in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when medicine was comparatively unsophisticated and diseases like typhoid, cholera and plague sometimes caused people who were still alive to appear dead, says Melanie King, author of "The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death."

Overheated fiction stirred public fears about being buried alive. Edgar Allan Poe vividly evoked the claustrophobic terror of being trapped in a casket. "We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth -- we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost hell," he wrote in the short story "The Premature Burial."

See Mr. de Melo's spooky way of coping with his fear of being buried alive.


In Germany around 1800, apparent death and premature burial were "given more attention than almost any other medical topic of the time," writes Jan Bondeson, author of the book "Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear." The Germans even set up a system of waiting mortuaries, or Leichenh&auml;user, where presumed corpses were laid out for observation for two or three days before burial, Dr. Bondeson writes. In one Munich mortuary, the bodies' fingers and toes were attached with strings to a great harmonium that would play if they stirred. The only time the bodies moved and the music sounded was when putrefaction set in and the corpses swelled up, he writes.

The era also saw the emergence of the "security coffin," built, like Mr. de Melo's chapel, so that an erroneously interred occupant could survive and call for help. One of these coffins had a flag that could pop up above ground when triggered by the inhabitant, Dr. Bondeson writes.

By the end of the 19th century, the panic over live burials was fading, as medical innovations like the stethoscope helped doctors determine death with greater certainty, according to Dr. Bondeson. Meanwhile, science was eventually able to offer explanations for odd occurrences in cemeteries that had given credence to ghoulish stories. For instance, noises sometimes emanating from coffins are usually built-up gases escaping the corpse -- not people crying for help.

But even today, albeit rarely, erroneous death declarations reawaken ancient fears.

In January 2001, emergency medical technicians in Ashland, Mass., could find no signs of life in a 39-year-old woman who had evidently committed suicide by taking a drug overdose in a bathtub. She was taken to funeral parlor in a body bag. But the parlor director, John Matarese, later heard a gurgling sound coming from the bag. "This girl we took in as dead isn't dead!" he said in a frantic 911 call. This year, around the seventh anniversary of the incident, Mr. Matarese says he received an email from the woman's grateful family saying she was doing OK.

Freud de Melo

Given the low probability of live burial nowadays, cases of taphephobia are "pretty darn rare," says psychologist Jonathan S. Abramowitz, director of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Mr. de Melo says he can't remember when he started having nightmares of being trapped in a casket or buried under trees or rubble. But his wife of 52 years says he has been worrying about it as long as she has known him. The chapel is the second burial place with escape features that Mr. de Melo has built in the past 15 years, and he's already working on a third, more advanced, crypt design. He says he isn't sure which one he will be laid to rest in, but wherever it is, there will be food, ventilation and the means to communicate with the outside world. Any tomb he doesn't use, Mr. de Melo says, "will be given to humanity."

Mr. de Melo's fixation hasn't stopped him from making a name for himself as an entrepreneur, newspaper columnist and ex-mayor of the nearby city Aparecida de Goi&acirc;nia. He runs a quirky 3,000-acre resort featuring 37 stone castles and a bewildering array of big sculptures, including a nativity scene, the Loch Ness Monster, Joan of Arc, and a 200-foot cement and iron replica of Noah's Ark.

The burial chapel, inaugurated this year, has brought TV crews trooping out to the park -- though some are less animated when they leave; one TV newsman became faint after just a few seconds in the crypt.


The little girl's face suddenly wrinkled up like a prune. Her mother led her away. The husband offered Mr. de Melo a polite no thanks, and said the family was going to check out Noah's Ark.

Write to Matt Moffett at

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