Safety coffins

As a psychologist, I dig phobias. The fear of being buried alive is probably as old as burials, but during the 18th century Cholera epidemic things took a turn for the weird when grave robbers - that's right, grave robbers - started noticing more and more that the corpses they dug up had made obvious struggles to escape. Vampire believers went crazy of course, and morticians started examing the bodies more thoroughly before burial. What they found was that about 2% of the bodies they assumed to be dead were in a coma or some other kind of suspended animation.

As usual, the public freaked the fuck out. And then safety coffins started coming into play. Most of them were like this one below - you wake up in your coffin, and after having a good old scream and cry you simply give a little rope in your coffin a good tug, and a bell above you rings for the graveyard worker to come for your rescue.

They didn't all have bells. The bells gave off a lot of 'false positives' from corpses accidentally giving them a tug when really they were just shifting during decomposition. So people tried all kinds of things.

The safety coffins all had one important aspect in common: absolutely none of them have ever actually helped rescue a person buried alive. Which makes me think that safety coffins are really, truly, about a person's fantasy that they won't actually ever die than any kind of real fear.

Apparently every once in a while artists will make a homage to safety coffins. The one below has a computer screen that you can watch as the corpse, with the keyboard placed outside. It doesn't seem to be quite a functional safety coffin as far as being able to be rescued, but at least someone can chat with you while you slowly starve and suffocate to death.

I'm not sure I really understand this next one at all. It's a couch that's a coffin, I suppose. I have to say though, I like it.

By the way, I got excited thinking the expression 'saved by the bell' may refer to safety coffins. It doesn't. It refers to boxing.