No Coffin for the Corpse

1

Burial Alive. — Dr. Franz Hartmann, Boston, 1895; Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented, with special reference to trance, catalepsy, and other forms of suspended animation. — William Tebb, F.R.G.S., and Colonel Edward Perry Vollurn, M.D., Swan Sonnennschein & Co., Ltd., London, 1905.

2

Leaves from a Psychist’s Case-Book, Victor Gollanz, Ltd. London, 1933.

3

For accounts of Rahmar’s one-hour burial see New York papers for July 28, 1926. For Houdini’s Shelton pool experiment see August 6 papers.

4

The “contest or record-breaking” type of burial in which the customers paid so much a head for a look down a glass-covered shaft at the buried man was something else again, and always, since they ran up from weeks to a month or more depending on the ticket sale, phony. In some cases the performer knocked off work each night, made a surreptitious exit, and returned just before the first showing the next day. In others he remained underground the full time, receiving food and water through the observation shaft. Sometimes he pretended to be in a trance. The visitors, looking down, saw half the man’s face and a closed eye; the other out of sight was engaged in reading the latest edition of the daily paper!

5

The answer, in which Ross doesn’t seem greatly interested somehow, is three miles per hour. Since the current hinders the rower when he goes upstream just as much as it later aids him going downstream, its effect on the boat cancels out and does not need to be considered. Therefore, if he rows ten minutes away from the hat, it also takes him ten minutes to row back down to it. Total rowing time: twenty minutes during which the current has carried the hat one mile — a speed of three miles per hour.

— Merlini