The bodies of Tibetan Buddhist Monks are left undisturbed for at least 7 days after death ~ and the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read for the benefit of the deceased for 49 days.
Admittedly, the latter is to help the soul transition from this life to the next, but there are those rare stories of people who "return" their body in the mortuary, with amazing tales of the "afterlife".
The bodies of Tibetan Buddhist Monks are left undisturbed for at least 7 days after death ~ and the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read for the benefit of the deceased for 49 days.
Admittedly, the latter is to help the soul transition from this life to the next, but there are those rare stories of people who "return" their body in the mortuary, with amazing tales of the "afterlife".
Metta Zetty: Maybe that's the cause of some people's fear of being buried alive: perhaps in a past life they returned to their body after they appeared to have died, and their body had already been buried. This reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe's story titled The Fall of the House of Usher. In that gothic tale, the sister of Lord Usher is interred before she has died. What ensues is terrifyingly cataclysmic. It reminds me, too, of the medieval physician Paracelsus. He did an autopsy on a body which was apparently dead, but he found that the heart was still beating, ever so faintly and subtly, once he cut the body open. He was found guilty of murder and spent the rest of his life in prison.
OMG! I had never heard this story about Paracelsus. What a tragedy! This possibility (or at least the fear of it) was also the reason for the surge in "safety coffins" in the 1800s. They included bells the interned could ring on the off chance they "woke up" after being buried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
The bodies of Tibetan Buddhist Monks are left undisturbed for at least 7 days after death ~ and the Tibetan Book of the Dead is read for the benefit of the deceased for 49 days.
Admittedly, the latter is to help the soul transition from this life to the next, but there are those rare stories of people who "return" their body in the mortuary, with amazing tales of the "afterlife".
Metta Zetty: Maybe that's the cause of some people's fear of being buried alive: perhaps in a past life they returned to their body after they appeared to have died, and their body had already been buried. This reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe's story titled The Fall of the House of Usher. In that gothic tale, the sister of Lord Usher is interred before she has died. What ensues is terrifyingly cataclysmic. It reminds me, too, of the medieval physician Paracelsus. He did an autopsy on a body which was apparently dead, but he found that the heart was still beating, ever so faintly and subtly, once he cut the body open. He was found guilty of murder and spent the rest of his life in prison.
OMG! I had never heard this story about Paracelsus. What a tragedy! This possibility (or at least the fear of it) was also the reason for the surge in "safety coffins" in the 1800s. They included bells the interned could ring on the off chance they "woke up" after being buried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
The story about Paracelsus isn't so. Perhaps Truthbird was thinking of someone else...