10 Urban Legends That Turned Out To Be True

10. Premature Burial

The legend: Like Ryan Reynolds in the aptly-titled movie Buried, a number of people have been committed to their eternal rest prematurely. Scratch marks and other signs of desperate escape bids have been found inside exhumed coffins, suggesting some poor sods suffered the nightmare of being buried alive.

The truth: Not only has this happened, it used to occur on a frighteningly regular basis. In the 19th Century, Dr. William Tebb conducted a study into premature burial and discovered 149 instances of it, as well as 219 cases of near-premature burial and a handful where dissection or embalming was attempted before death.

Although this sounds shocking, it's important to note that health care obviously wasn't what it is today back in the 1800s. Methods to establish death were barely more scientific than shaking the patient really hard to see if they woke up.

Surely such a thing as premature burial could never happen in the modern age? Well, that's almost true. There are many recorded cases of people waking up in metal boxes in mortuaries. According to news reports, this is what happened to Sipho William Mdletshe after he was involved in a traffic collision in Johannesburg.

Sipho is said to have spent two days in storage at the mortuary before hospital staff heard his cries for help.