Applying the prodigious erudition that is the hallmark of his genius, Valdemar had produced a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge concerning this most awful of subjects. His chapter headings alone gave ample indication of the enormous breadth of his undertaking: “Cataleptic Sleep and Other Causes of Premature Burial,” “The Signs of Death,” “The Dangers of Hasty Embalmment” “Cremation as a Preventive of Premature Burial,” “Resuscitation from Apparent Death,” and “Suspended Animation after Small-Pox,” among many others. It is scarcely necessary to state that the wealth of useful—nay, indispensable—knowledge embodied in these pages more than justified the somewhat exorbitant cost of the volume.

Still, the all-compelling interest of the book did not derive solely, or even primarily, from the practical information it contained. Rather, it stemmed from the many documented cases Valdemar had assembled from medical reports throughout the world: the all-too-numerous instances of wretched fellow-creatures whose fate it had been to suffer the supreme torments of living interment. Indeed, though Valdemar’s prose style (in his scrupulous efforts to avoid any taint of the lurid) verged, at moments, on the dryly pedantic, the mere recitation of these cases was sufficiently chilling to provoke in the reader an empathic response of the highest intensity.

At least, so it proved with me.

One particular instance, cited from the Chirurgical Journal of London, had transfixed me with horror. This was the case of a young English gentleman who had fallen victim to an anomalous disorder—a cataleptic state of such profound immobility that even his physicians mistook it for death. Accordingly, he was placed in his coffin and consigned to the family plot. Some hours later, the sexton heard an unearthly gibbering issuing from the ground. The gravedigger was summoned; the casket uncovered; the lid prised open. Within the box lay the young man, cackling wildly, his black hair bleached completely white by fear!

When, by slow degrees, he recovered the power of speech, he described the agonies of his experience. Though seemingly insensate, he had retained his auditory faculties throughout his ordeal. Thus, he had listened—with an acuity born of absolute terror—to every sound that attended his intombment: the closing of the casket; the clatter of the hearse; the grieving of his loved ones; the sickening fall of shovelled soil upon his coffin lid. And yet, in consequence of his paralysis, he had been unable, by either sound or motion, to alert those around him to the extremity of his condition—until, set loose by his utter desperation, a torrent of maddened shrieks had vomited forth from the very pit of his fear-harrowed soul.