Dowbrigade

The
Dowbrigade is infamous among his limited circle of friends for his
squeamishness
when confronted with on-screen horror or terror flicks. We have been
known to leave the room or head for the popcorn stand at the first sign
of hair-raising suspense or even anticipatory scary music.

This pathologic fear dates at least to our first experience with
a really scary movie – Ray Milland’s version of Edgar Allan Poe’s "Premature
Burial",
to which we were involuntarily subjected at the tender age of 7 or 8.
40-some years later we can still picture the inside of Milland’s personally
designed crypt in blood-curdling detail. We can’t remember if our claustrophobia
predates this flick, but it hardly matters now.

Accordingly, we read with interest the following news item from Ananova:

A cemetery in Santiago, Chile is offering its clients coffins with a
sensor that detects any movement inside them after they have been buried.
According to the Camino a Canaan cemetery the sensor attached to the
coffin is to avoid anyone being buried alive.

Spokesperson for the cemetery told La Cuarta: "We want to be pioneers
and avoid catalepsy cases, in which a person gets completely paralyzed
for a few hours and ends up buried as if they were dead.

"We want families to rest assured that if a case like this ever
happens their loved ones will be immediately rescued."

Of course, as the Poe story and movie graphically illustrate, no
plan is foolproof.  In
the movie Milland, who also suffers from a pathological fear of premature
burial, awakens, of course, in his ingeniously designed mausoleum, chock
full of survival gear and escape alternatives. To his (and our)
increasing horror and desperation, he finds the interior deadbolt rusted
shut, the strong rope escape ladder rotted away, the velvet release rope
to the ceiling emergency hatch eaten by moths, his strategic supply of
water turned to dust and his emergency rations box full of big hairy
spiders. Oh, the horror…..

from Ananova