If Only The Dead Could Talk

Most of you readers know that I am a consummate sucker for cemeteries.  The older the better.  I just love walking around imagining the lives of those interred or entombed underfoot or around me.  While traveling last month through the low country of Charleston, Beaufort and Savannah I scratched my cemetery itch on several occasions.  A walk through Bonaventure Cemetery included something special.  

Taphophobia - the fear of being buried alive as a consequence of being incorrectly pronounced dead.

This was a thing back in the 19th century.  The horror of burial alive  was rampant in port cities like Savannah, Georgia who had the plague of yellow fever epidemics visited-upon them.  The comas of the stricken could be so deep that the sick were sometimes mistaken for dead.  Ghoulish tales written by contemporary author Edgar Allan Poe put nobody's mind at ease.

Naturally, entrepreneurs and inventors capitalized on this and produced any number of gizmos to facilitate the resurrection of those buried before actually dead.  Many of these solutions involved some sort of alarm that could be triggered by the entombed to alert cemetery staff of their need for rescue.

At Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah there is one such device that is present at the grave of Charles F. Mills.

Mills was a prominent and wealth Savannah businessman operating a steamship line on the Savannah River and served as president of the Marine Bank of Georgia.  He was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery on April 11, 1876 at age 74.  The vault is below this magnificent monument and his grave bell sits atop a pipe rising several inches from the ground immediately to the left of Mill's tomb.

The bell was connected to one of more strings or wires tied to the occupant's fingers or toes.  If the deceased woke, his movements would ring the bell and sound the alarm.  Cemetery staff could then pump fresh air into the pipe until the occupant was disinterred and rescued.

Naturally, by the time the 20th century rolled-around the widespread practice of embalming obviated the need for grave bells.  Nevertheless, these were a common sight at the graves of Bonaventure's wealthy occupants.  Most of them were later salvaged as scrap for wartime use during the first world war.  Because Mill's bell was cast in bronze it persists to modern time as the last intact grave bell at Bonaventure.

True story.