Graves

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Eternal Rest in Peace and Comfort

Graves of course, are places where the bodies of deceased are buried. Because many religions have believed for as long as man has been on Earth (and continue to believe today) that a person’s soul remains in someway connected to his physical body, great care is traditionally taken to assure that bodies are properly prepared and laid to eternal rest in comfortable graves.

But all of that is common knowledge. There are a lot of intriguing, and sometimes little known, facts and folklore about graves, and we have assembled some of the more interesting pieces here:

The word graves, probably has a frightening, mysterious connotation to many people, but that may not necessarily be the case in France, where Graves is a region of suburban Bordeaux that is famous the world over for its delicious wine.

A number of blues musicians made their living digging graves before hitting it big on the music scene. Among them are the legends James “Sonny Ford” Thomas and John Jackson.  Also, members of the famously mysterious Pappenheimer Family were diggers of graves for various periods of their lives. And, finally, the legendary British writer Sid Smith also dug graves while waiting for his writing career to take hold. One writer that, apparently, did not dig graves although many would have suspected otherwise was American horror pioneer Edgar Allan Poe. The modern American horror writer Stephen King, has also, reportedly never had a job digging graves.

While the vast majority of graves have been for the intentional burial of deceased people, history is filled with numerous eerie cases of graves accidentally or not encasing people who were alive. In the 1600s, for example, unconscious people were occasionally mistaken for dead and placed in coffins that were prepared for graves, only to suffer a mishap, such as a drop, that would stir the “deceased” and, undoubtedly, cause quite a scene. And, as late as the 1990s, sleeping patients in American hospitals were occasionally being mislabeled as deceased and moved to morgues before, fortunately, being discovered breathing by startled-but-observant hospital employees. And, finally, in ancient Rome, virgin women who were thought to violate vows of celibacy were often tossed into a tiny tomb and buried alive in shallow graves. They were usually provide a small amount of bread in water in their graves so they could stay alive for several days in the event that a special goddess might deem them innocent and decide to save them.

And finally, a number of people throughout history have voluntarily put themselves in graves while alive. Perhaps the most famous case of this occurred in 1840 in India, when a famous Indian religious figure showed he had no fear of graves by entombing himself for 10 days in a wooden box buried at least 10 feet under ground. When the man survived his adventure very well, an untold number of other Indian people mimicked him in their own self-made graves. Unfortunately for most of those people, the graves ended up becoming permanent.