I was eight when my parents took me to my Great-Uncle Bill’s home where he lay in state the day before his funeral. He was dressed in a dark suit and placed in a coffin of shining steel and red cherry in the living room. Friends, neighbors, and kin stopped by bearing trays of homemade food. During the wake, news circulated that my Uncle Sanford had volunteered to stay up with the body overnight. It was a tradition in our family, as with most others in the rural South at that time, that the deceased’s body never be left alone until burial. My cousins and I thrilled each other with speculations about what that job would be like. Alone, with a dead body? At night?

We agreed none of us dared attempt it.

That tradition, I discovered years later, arose out of the grim necessity of making sure the person about to be interred was in fact dead. Sitting up with the dead – or more precisely, the allegedly dead – was the custom in the days before mortuaries became common. Even though my great-uncle had been professionally prepared for burial, including the replacement of his blood with embalming fluid, the old tradition was still observed.

There are few terrors more gripping than the prospect of being buried alive. Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the horror tale, wrote a number of stories about that horrific yet fascinating topic, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Then there’s his less famous “The Premature Burial.” As Poe informs us early in the story, “To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.”

It’s an odd, somewhat rambling tale. It begins with three supposedly actual incidents of premature burial and proceeds to an account of the unnamed narrator’s own experience with that horrible fate. He suffers from a nervous condition that leaves him unable to move for long periods. As a result, he agonizes over the prospect that he, too, could be mistaken for dead.

Despite being otherwise healthy, he obsesses over his fear to the extent that it dominates his life:

“I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. … My fancy grew charnel, I talked ‘of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs.’ I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night.”

The protagonist appears to be headed toward the same grisly end as more famous Poe characters whose obsessions doomed them to suffering or death. Roderick Usher from “The Fall of the House of Usher” is so terrified of death that he turns into a fearful, sickly recluse. His obsession wrecks his mind, and when his sister falls victim to a cataleptic attack, he is certain she is dead, and buries her in the cellar. Similarly, Egaeus, the narrator of “Berenice,” is so fixated on his fiancée’s beautiful teeth that he loses touch with reality. When Berenice falls into a trance from a mysterious illness, Egaeus allows her to be buried alive. In a mad stupor, he digs her up and extracts her teeth, unaware she is still alive.

One night, the narrator of “The Premature Burial” seems to suffer the very thing that had long tormented him. He awakens in total darkness and discovers he’s confined in an odd, wooden structure. Surely his greatest fear has come true! But he eventually learns he has not been buried alive, as he assumed, but is in a tight berth in a sailing ship. The experience jolts him into a new sense of self-awareness. He realizes he has allowed groundless fears to ruin his life. Finally aware that his obsession had only fueled unnecessary misery, he becomes “a new man” now able to discard his old ways:

“… out of Evil proceeded Good; for their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone -- acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. ‘Buchan’ I burned. I read no ‘Night Thoughts’ -- no fustian about churchyards -- no bugaboo tales -- such as this.”

I stumbled over that last line the first time I read it. By calling “The Premature Burial” a “bugaboo tale,” Poe was admitting it was an overblown, preposterous story aimed at frightening the easily frightened. Had the supposed master accidentally broken the fourth wall? Or was he giving his readers a sly wink?

I would argue the latter. Despite his reputation as a horror writer, Poe also wrote humorous and satiric stories. During his short career, Poe perpetrated a number of deliberate hoaxes upon the public. The most famous, and most successful, was the Balloon Hoax, in which he duped readers of the New York Sun with an account of Monck Mason’s voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in a gas balloon. Poe exulted when a mob “besieged” the newspaper’s office clamoring for copies of the paper. After two days, however, Poe had to come clean and retract his story.

Poe was a literary trickster, and we should enjoy his works in the spirit in which he wrote them. His characters, including Prospero from “The Masque of the Red Death,” Montressor from “The Cask of Amontillado,” as well as those discussed above, all suffered needlessly because they took themselves too seriously. Many of Poe’s most famous characters obsessed over inevitable death to the point of making happiness impossible. Poe would have certainly agreed with the swashbuckling philosopher who advised, “Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out of it alive.”

M. C. Tuggle lives and writes in Charlotte, North Carolina. His fantasy, science fiction, and mystery short stories have appeared in several publications, including Mystery Weekly, Metaphorosis, and Little Blue Marble. He blogs on all things literary at https://mctuggle.com/