The UnXplained

Sacred practices

that transition the dead

into the afterlife,

special coffins that prevent,

people from being buried alive,

and substances that can bring the deceased

back from the grave.

For over 100,000 years, humans have practiced

surprisingly similar methods for laying the dead to rest.

Graves, tombs, cremations

are all considered respectful ways to provide

the deceased with a final resting place.

But, is it possible, as many people believe,

that some of these practices can preserve the soul

for eternity?

Or perhaps, even bring the dead back to life?

Well, that is what we’ll try and find out.

It’s an inescapable truth of human experience

that we’re all born, we all live, and then one day

we all eventually die.

For many cultures, the proper way to honor the deceased

is to provide their body with a permanent resting place

by using the sacred practice of burial.

65 million people die every year.

And depending on where they die, depending on what they believe,

different cultures, different religions,

bury people in different ways.

However, all of these burials,

regardless of where they occur, have a few things in common.

Perhaps the most important is you don’t mess with the dead.

Whether you believe in Heaven and Hell or not,

whether you believe in a god or not, there’s something about

honoring the deceased, that is common throughout history.

Our earliest burials are about 100,000 years old.

Probably some of the initial reasons for burying the dead

weren’t about ritual religion, but practicality.

We find a lot of early humans buried in caves,

places where people were actually living.

So, burying them as a way to mark territory.

This is where my ancestors are buried.

A lot of burial traditions revolve around the idea

that this is not just decaying flesh.

This is a person. This is someone whose life mattered.

And this goes all the way back to the Stone Age,

where basically cave people have been bound

in the fetal position and buried

with tools that they would’ve used in life.

So, these traditions are really as old as humankind.

Over the course of tens of thousands of years,

burial practices started to reflect

the principles of organized religion.

Ancient cultures around the world believed

that a proper burial involved showing respect,

not just for a dead person’s body,

but also for their soul.

In antiquity, there were very specific rites

that were used to help the deceased’s soul

navigate its way into the afterlife.

For instance, in ancient Egypt, there was the famous

Book of the Dead, which is essentially

a set of CliffsNotes

that helps the deceased’s soul navigate

this series of tests and gates and booby traps

that are set to try to keep the soul

from entering into the afterlife.

The ancient Greeks believed that the spirit

left the body as a breath of air.

And it was important to get the body itself

to the afterlife as quickly as possible

to reunite with the spirit.

To that end, they were often buried with a coin in the mouth

as payment to Charon,

the ferryman over the river Styx,

to aid them on their journey

and help them locate their spirit.

Although many ancient European societies

like the Greeks believed in burying the dead,

oftentimes, they did not lay out individual graves with nice,

neat headstones for each body, like we do today.

Historically speaking, in Europe,

people of all classes were typically buried in,

uh, mass graves.

It was really only the people of the highest levels

of the aristocracy,

who would receive any kind of individual burial

and individual marker of their death.

However, eventually, as we enter into the early modern age,

the 1400s-1500s and forward, increasingly, people

want to be remembered.

Permanent burial for individuals

of even the non-aristocratic classes

becomes increasingly common,

and we see the rise of gravestones.

As individual graves became more common for the masses

European and American communities in the 19th century

created new, elaborate burial places

that were located far away from churches and residential areas.

They were referred to as garden cemeteries.

Garden cemeteries are an interesting development.

They come in, at least in the American context,

in about the 1830s.

They were a different place, a place outside of the city.

They have their own necropolis

that we can visit through big elaborate gates.

These cemeteries, such as Mount Auburn in Cambridge,

Laurel Hill in Philadelphia,

Greenwood in Brooklyn, and many others,

were much larger than the church burial grounds.

They were also landscaped, um, in a picturesque fashion,

with winding paths and hills

and all sorts of varied plantings.

So, you’re not thinking of the oblivion of the grave,

but rather, you’re thinking of the departed

as resting peacefully,

surrounded by beautiful flowers and those who love them.

Death became widely seen as a gentle sleep.

Today, it is estimated that there are 144,000

cemeteries in the United States,

in which over one million people are buried every single year.

Since the practice of burial is thousands of years old,

perhaps it’s not surprising that we have inherited

a number of superstitions about

how this ritual should be performed.

There is a superstition of carrying the body

out of the house feet first.

And the idea was that, if you carry the body out headfirst,

the corpse gets this backward glance,

and that glance could maybe invite someone

to come with the deceased into the afterlife.

Another is you can’t take the body

in the family car, you have to hire a hearse.

The hearse can’t stop on the way to the cemetery,

because if it stops, the house where it stops

could perhaps get some of that death energy.

There’s a superstition of having pallbearers wear gloves.

And this is the same logic that there could be some sort of

lingering death energy on the casket,

and, if you have gloves,

that will give you some protection from it.

All people are driven to ritualize

the process of death.

So, when we think about what are these rites and rituals

doing for us,

making sure that certain rules are observed

gives us some element of control

in a realm that is, by definition, uncontrollable.

Billions of people all over the world believe

that sacred rites and traditions

are the proper way to prepare a person’s soul for the afterlife.

But on the other hand, throughout history,

there have also been customs that were intended,

not to benefit the soul of the deceased,

but rather to harm it.

These practices are referred to as deviant burials.

The word "deviant burial" comes from archaeology.

When archaeologists look at dead people,

if someone has been buried in a way

that is different from everyone else,

that’s known as a deviant burial.

For example, in this village in Poland,

archaeologists discovered about six buried corpses

where there were sickles that had been placed

over the neck or over the pelvis

with the logic seeming to be, if this corpse tries to get up,

it will be cut with iron.

And one possibility is that these people

did something really bad while they were alive.

They practiced black magic or murder.

And the idea is that, if we can basically mutilate their body,

this will stop them from entering into the afterlife.

It’s a little unnerving to think that an improper burial

could actually prevent someone’s soul

from reaching the afterlife.

But perhaps even more concerning is a burial that’s gone wrong

because the deceased was actually buried alive.

All over the world,

human beings clearly go to great lengths

to ensure that the dead are buried in a respectful manner.

But on the other hand, throughout history,

people also took steps to determine whether or not someone

was actually ready to be laid to rest

in order to prevent people from being

buried alive.

The fear of being buried alive was a fairly common fear

up until 20th century medical practices meant

fewer people were, in fact, buried alive.

It was most common in 18th and 19th century

Europe and America,

mostly due to the medical practices

and the burial practices at the time.

This was when medical diagnoses could get things wrong,

and people were, in fact, buried alive,

and stories of that became sensationalized,

and therefore, the panic would spread.

In the 19th century, the great fear

of being buried alive

was partly because this was the age of cholera.

Cholera causes severe diarrhea,

which can deplete all the electrolytes in your body

and, in extreme cases, can induce a coma.