10 Chilling Stories Of People Who Were Buried Alive
2. Virginia MacDonald
From a story published in Premature Burial: How It May Be Prevented, Virginia MacDonald was a young girl living in New York during the 19th century.
In 1851, she fell severely ill, and after fighting her sickness for quite some time, she finally succumbed to it and passed away. Or so everyone thought.
After her "death", Virginia was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Throughout this entire process, her mother had been repeatedly insisting that she was, in fact, alive, a claim that fell on deaf ears and went entirely ignored.
Virginia's other relatives attempted to convince the mother that her daughter was gone, but she didn't believe them in the slightest. After a lot of back and forth between the two different points of view, Virginia's family finally agreed to investigate the matter further by opening up her coffin and examining her corpse.
When they did so, they were met with a horrific sight: Virginia's body was rolled on its side, and her hands were bloody and bitten, both indicators that her mother was correct and she had indeed been buried alive.
It's not known why Virginia chose to bite into her own hands, but this was possibly an attempt to stave off starvation by eating her own flesh.