People, back then, had a terrible fear of burial alive. WHY? Because it did happen!
Both Poe and Nathanial Hawthorne, to name but two of America's best writers of that era, wrote undeniable great fiction in the GOTHIC style and true "classics", which many other later authors have been influenced by.
I too have been a huge fan of Poe's works, from the time I first read them win 7th or 8th grade; when schools actually required kids to read and know great literary works.
Wow! You must really be old to have had to read Poe. I suppose Kipling, Shakespeare, Zane Grey, and others were forced on you. O’Henry, Cooper, and such were there too. I had this kind of brutality thrown at me back then. It’s probably why I find myself comparing today’s authors coming up short to those back then. I blame it on mom, she read Hitchcock stories and Ellery Queen novels to me. It has almost ruined me to modern story telling. We can’t let the left burn books. They’ve screwed up most other things.
Yeah, it was about 7th or 8th. Cute little English teacher dedicated October to EAP. We were bathed in that and “The Devil and Daniel Webster”. And Texas ghost stories.
Usually there is a thread on here somewhere of ghost stories about this time of year......
People did have a fear of being buried alive. Prior to 1900, embalming was not practiced and I have read of some studies that, judging by the scratching on the lids of exhumed coffins, suggest that about 100,000 people a year could well have been buried alive in the US before the wide use of embalming. There are still tales of it happening in 3rd world countries.
And we know the old stories of ‘saved by the bell’ and the like.
Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce. Staples of my childhood reading.