The Living Corpse

Hey there True Weirdos, we'd like to save a seat for you at the True Weirdos table. All you have to do to sign up is go to trueweirdstuff.com, wait for the pop up that says sign up for updates, fill out the info and you're in. And some lucky weirdos chosen at random are going to win a True Weird Stuff very high quality hoodie, fancy enough for wearing to a deposition, sturdy enough to wear for robbing a grave.

And I promise we won't spam you. And after the episode, we hope you'll stick around because we've got more to the story. Bonus content, little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff right after the episode. There's a fancy word for it, taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive. It does happen, though not so often in these days of modern mortuary science.

People are mostly good and dead and thoroughly pickled by embalming chemicals before we send them off to their eternal rest. Now if you hear a story about a person being buried alive, it's usually not a mistake made by an undertaker. It's a crime like this one in Washington State, November 2022. The court will order that the defendant be held.

No bail. 53-year-old Che Ann will remain behind bars awaiting charges of attempted murder, kidnapping and felony harassment. His wife asking for this message to be shared in front of a judge. These are her words, please no bail. I am really afraid for my life. I just want to emphasize that I fear him so much and he will kill me again if he is out.

It was this past weekend, probable cause documents allege Ann kidnapped his wife and threatened to kill her. Their daughter told police the two were going through a divorce and Ann would come by their home in Lacey to do laundry. Security camera footage shared by a neighbor shows a man, who authorities say was identified as Ann, pulling a minivan into the garage.

The van is later seen speeding out of the neighborhood. Those probable cause documents allege Ann attacked his wife, tying her up with duct tape. He then drove her into the woods not far from their home, dug a hole and placed her in the ground. The documents say Che told her she was going to die. She was so scared. However, before she was buried, she seized an opportunity to escape, wiggling out of that duct tape, climbing out of the hole and running for her life.

Che Ann was arrested a few hours later. The terror, the darkness, the knowledge that your air is running out, that no one will hear your screams, that you'll die like this, gasping to breathe, your fingers shredded raw and bleeding from all that useless, hopeless clawing to escape. Buried alive, it's a nightmare right out of a horror movie.

Unless, you know, it's your job. And they got a small beam of light. True. Weird stuff. Buried alive. Back in the day, it happened often enough that in 1908, the state of Massachusetts proposed a law to prevent premature burial. Don't you love that phrasing? Ten persons are buried alive in the United States each day in the year.

Each year, thirty five hundred persons in this country are buried alive. There were lawmakers in Massachusetts who didn't believe a single word of this and couldn't see the point of enacting a law to prevent it. So they appointed a committee to investigate. And I'll be damned if they didn't arrive at the insane conclusion that, yes, thousands of people in America were being accidentally buried alive.

The committee said nothing about the number of persons who are killed annually in this country by unskillful embalmers who cut open the arteries of living persons supposed to be dead and inject a poisonous fluid into the arteries. There is no way of knowing how many of these are killed each year, but that number is large. No competent embalmer will deny.

OK, first of all, what? Second, how about those good old days, you nostalgia freaks? Stand by for a future episode called The Inept Embalmer. Anyway, the Massachusetts committee compiled this information from multiple sources, including undertakers who had exhumed bodies and people who had been declared dead and rushed into their graves only to regain consciousness.

Every time the bodies in an old graveyard are moved, evidences are found that persons were buried alive. Hands are found upraised, fingers clenched in the hair, and in many instances, the hair has been torn out by the handful. Can't be, you say, urban legend. No way that's true. OK, that's fair. A healthy amount of skepticism can be a good thing when you're confronted with a seemingly wild tale.

But maybe you need to hear it from someone who's been there. In this case, a jeweler from Missouri named George Hayward. George Hayward was accidentally struck in the head with a pitchfork, and one of the pointed steel tines penetrated his skull. The man promptly fell over dead, or so it was thought. His body was immediately delivered to the local undertaker to be prepared for burial.

Well-known faces would peer down at me as I lay with my eyes half closed. Their tears rained down on my face as the burial shroud was wrapped around my body. Try as I would, nothing could break the spell which bound me. Every word spoken was distinct to my mind. And as soon as the undertaker arrived, I knew I was about to be buried alive.

What sort of medical condition can cause a person to seem dead while remaining completely aware? Catalepsy might be the answer. It's a neurological condition. And George Hayward had just suffered a traumatic brain injury. Hayward's rigid limbs, his inability to move or speak, the slowing of his bodily functions, including breathing, all added up to make a strong case for catalepsy.

One famous case of a person with catalepsy being buried alive is a 19-year-old cattle heiress from Argentina named Rufina Cambaceres. It was her birthday, May 31st, 1902, and Rufina suddenly collapsed. She was declared dead and her grieving family gathered to lay her to rest in the family mausoleum at La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

Rufina was interred. Late that night, the cemetery caretaker was alarmed to hear noises coming from inside the Cambaceres family crypt. As fearful of ghosts and grave robbers as the man was, he was even more afraid of losing his job. So he unlocked the mausoleum door. To his horror, he saw that Rufina's coffin had been moved.

Had robbers desecrated the tragic young woman's corpse? He carefully opened the lid of the coffin. The inside was gouged with deep scratches. And so was Rufina's face. Rufina Cambaceres had been buried alive. Whatever caused Rufina's catalepsy was never discovered. And here, just six years later, poor George Hayward is trapped in his body, unable to speak or move as his loved ones grieve his passing.

The time for the funeral arrived and the service was preached over my living but rigid body. The undertaker approached and the lid of my prison house was fastened down. The coffin was shoved into the wagon and the trundling of the vehicle sounded in my ears. Imagine that. Imagine the stifling darkness of the coffin, the rattling and jostling of the wagon, the knowledge that your next stop is the grave and you are utterly helpless, powerless to stop it.

I soon heard the clods of earth falling heavily on the lid of the casket. There I was, being entombed alive, unable to speak or to stay in the hands of my friends. Suddenly, the shoveling ceased. And the silence of the tomb was complete. Weirdly enough, George Hayward didn't panic. He said that he just didn't feel the fear he thought a person would have under the circumstances. What could he do but just lie there in his grave waiting to die for real? But what George Hayward didn't know was that a fierce dispute was being waged in his honor six feet above.

It was regarding the cause of death. The doctor disagreed so vehemently with the undertaker that the two men ultimately hatched a plan. They wait till dark and then they dig up Hayward's grave and examine the body in hopes of coming to an agreement about the cause of death. It seemed a long time. And then I heard again the scraping of a shovel on my coffin lid.

I felt myself raised and born away. I felt the light as it struck my closed eyelids and then I heard someone say, look out, you fool. He is alive. In a few moments, I was fully alive and awake. I owe my life to the doctor's dispute about what caused my death. And just like that, the catalepsy that had frozen George Hayward in a living death released its grip.

The jeweler was shaken, but alive and above ground. To be buried alive is beyond doubt the most fearful fate that can possibly befall a human being. The very mention of it is enough to make the blood run cold and the heart beat more softly in dread anticipation. The fear and risk of being buried alive was so real that inventors stepped in with a few ideas to help the premature corpse get out of the ground.

One proposed a button be installed in the coffin directly over the chest of the deceased. One press of that button would ring an alarm bell in the cemetery office. Another inventor suggested rigging the coffin with springs so that even the slightest movement indicating life would cause the lid of the coffin to fly open.

And then there was the famous graveyard bell invented by Dr. Johann Gottfried Taberger. A string was tied to the hands, head and feet of the corpse and ran from the coffin to a bell mounted to a tubular rod installed above ground. A housing was attached to the bell, both to prevent false alarms and to protect the coffin from rainwater running down the tube and soaking the remains.

A cemetery night watchman who heard a bell chiming from a gravesite was instructed to immediately rush over with a bellows to pump air into the coffin until the poor prematurely buried individual could be dug up. The horror because there were false alarms, movement of the corpse causing the bells to ring. What movement?

Oh, you do not want to go there. Trust me. Let's just leave it at natural processes of decomposition and never, ever, ever speak of it again. Okay. The medical establishment had other ideas beyond bells and springs, like slicing open an artery to make sure the person was deceased or plunging a needle straight into the heart.

That sort of thing. Maybe require a physician to sign off on the death certificate. Believe it or not, that wasn't even a thing until the 1930s when all U.S. were required to report birth and death registrations to the Division of Vital Statistics in the Census Bureau. Prior to that, it seemed figuring out who was actually dead versus those who just appeared to be dead was a little bit of a crapshoot.

Cremation solves the matter, but does it in a rather unsatisfactory fashion. While it presents no way of determining whether the subject about to be cremated is alive or not, it precludes the possibility of his ever returning to life. The temperature in the furnace ranges from 1,500 to 2,000 degrees, creating an atmosphere the slightest inhalation of which would, even in a healthy being, cause instant death.

You think? If being buried alive is your worst fear, where do you stand on being burned alive? This is America, though, and that means you can count on one thing for sure. No matter how horrible or crazy any given thing is, there's always somebody out there figuring out how to make money from it. Enter Charles William White, who bills himself as the Living Corpse.

Bill to his friends. Coming to the Twin Two Drive-In Theater in Fort Worth, Texas. See Bill White, the Living Corpse. Brought in by Brumley and Owen's funeral home ambulance. Placed in a coffin and prematurely buried alive under six feet of dirt at 815. Now that's entertainment. He is a man who can cheat death, and his brain won't die.

You can talk to and see him through a scope for one week. Plus on our screen, five horror hits, including Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory. In my report from the coroner, he said the girl was assaulted by wolves, and she died as a result of the injuries inflicted. But she could have had a meeting with a man a little before her death.

I don't believe it could have been the wolves. A girl who wanders out at night into the forest. And professor, she was alone, mind you. Not to mention the probable rendezvous with someone could very easily have been attacked by wolves. Poor girl. Bill White, aka Country Bill, was inspired by a chance meeting in 1964 with Herbert Digger O'Dell.

Digger O'Dell was a burial artist. When he wasn't having himself voluntarily entombed, he ran a combination gas station, market and gift shop in Phenix City, Alabama. In September 1968, at age 54, he set what he insisted was a new record for being buried alive. 78 days, 20 minutes and 10 seconds. The previous record was held by a 60-year-old bartender from San Jose named Mike Shannon.

Shannon had snatched the record from West Virginia's Patricia Haverland, a 38-year-old divorcee who put herself six feet under just to prove that a woman could. Digger passed the time underground by conversing with callers on the phone installed in the box and by chatting with visitors through an air vent. He had one meal per day sent to him through the vent.

The box was equipped with a chemical toilet. The box was buried seven feet underground at a mobile home sales lot on the Phenix City bypass. When it came time to dig Digger back up, a half a dozen off-duty soldiers from nearby Fort Benning volunteered for the job. Digger swore that this was the last time he intended to be buried alive, that he'd done it to protest the Vietnam War, the first and only time he'd performed the stunt for any reason other than advertising his business.

And with Digger O'Dell bowing out, Bill White saw his opportunity. He would take Digger's place as America's most famous burial artist. It was in 1964 when I met Digger O'Dell. He was a sort of grandfather of this sort of thing. He was buried at a car dealership in Columbus, Georgia. And I was coming through on a Greyhound and had a three-hour layover.

I walked on down from the bus station to the dealership and talked to him. And I said, how big is that place down there? And he said, it's four by four by eight. And I said, hell, I got enough room down there to raise a family. It all began as, well, almost a joke. White just wondered whether or not he could even tolerate being buried alive.

He, Digger, told me if I thought the box was so big and comfortable, I should try it myself. So I did. And on the very first try at it, I stayed down there longer than him. Forty-nine days I stayed down. All it took was breaking that record. Country Bill was hooked. His burial box was made of plywood measuring three foot by three foot by six foot.

The standard casket you can buy today is a foot longer, but half a foot less wide and more than half a foot less deep. Still, Country Bill's box had to feel every bit as tight and confining. He made a few modifications to his custom coffin. Ventilation tubes, of course, and a clear plastic window through which spectators could look down and see his face.

And they could talk to him, too, via a wired telephone setup that ran a line down into the box. Tonight at the King Center West Drive-In Movie Theater in Houston, it's a double horror show. Lon Chaney in witchcraft. Bad Boon stars in the horror of it all. And Bill White, the living corpse, has been buried alive for 18 days.

How much longer can he stay down? Come out and visit him or call him at RE33660. Then a crazy thing happened. One time I was buried in Houston. Larry Butler and his band came by. Back then, of course, it was Larry Butler and the Sunset Playboys. They had just finished doing a show with Loretta Lynn and they decided they wanted to sing with me.

So Larry came down to the car dealership where I was buried and dropped down a microphone to me and we went to it. We made up a song to the tune of Jailhouse Rock. Only we called it Graveyard Rock. It was something like buried in a hole about six feet down, sucking on a beer way under this ground. And so began country Bill White's musical career.

Oh, hey there, buddy, leave my gal alone. Keep out of my way if you don't want broken bones. I'd give you the shirt right off my back, but she's my baby. Stay out of my track. Oh, hey there, buddy, leave my gal alone. A musical career that would end up being overshadowed by his Buried Alive performances. An entrepreneur that country Bill was, he leaned right on into his newfound literal underground fame.

Here's a taste of his original song, The Living Corpse, released in 1969. I earned my living in a curious way. People come from miles around to look me over. Living down under, living in a hole in the ground. People call me summer happy, summer lonely, filled with tears. There's war and kill in the world out there. I may be dead all down here.

I'm a head of shopping center owners, and I'm never really alone. They keep looking down the people that live in the corpse. In this box with a telephone. People call me summer happy, summer lonely, filled with tears. There's war and kill in the world out there. I may be dead all down here. I set records for spending low like an ostrich in...

Bill White was born in 1934 in the Florida panhandle. His father worked as a laborer with the WPA. That's the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to employ Americans during the Great Depression. They say that it was an accident in Bill White's childhood that robbed him of his fear of death.

It's not clear if the accident happened on a WPA job site, but a blasting cat that the boy was holding exploded in his hands. The nine-year-old Bill White had to endure multiple surgeries to save his eyesight. After that, the kid lived like he might be immortal, fearless. He coaxed tourists into paying him to wrestle alligators.

He learned how to ride a motorcycle and became a trick rider. He did wing walking stunts on biplanes and performed trick parachute jumps. When there wasn't an audience handy or a pack of sun-stunned vacationers with cash to burn, White ran moonshine to make his living. And his big break in the buried alive business came in Galveston, Texas in June 1964.

The slender young man from Clearwater, Florida, will be buried between 10 a.m. and 12 noon in a five-foot, eight-inch wooden box inside the Pete the Talking Porpoise Pavilion next to Christie's Beachcomber Restaurant. I won't come up for any reason other than my health. If anyone believes I come out at night and sees me, he can collect a $500 reward.

When I come up, it will be to stay. At 5'11", Bill White was taller than the box was long. Cramps, he said, were his only medical concern. If it gets so bad I can't stand it, then I'll have to come up. Remember, I can't stretch out to my full length. The box was equipped with air tubes, telephone line, a microphone, and a couple of blankets.

A large glass plate was fitted into the lid. Curious spectators could peer down the hole and see Bill White for themselves. You might not think it possible to stay busy buried in a tight box next to a trained porpoise tank, but you'd be surprised at all that Bill White accomplished. He has a phone in his box and receives calls from many cities.

A lady in Pittsburgh called to congratulate him on his plan to break the 60-day record for being buried. She said it is the American way to break records. Kids by the hundreds call him daily, and on Friday he sent 30 get-well cards to ailing children at John Seeley Hospital. With people calling you from all over, you don't get much chance to sleep.

White traded his beloved Florida for Texas, and by 1966 had booked burial gigs all over the state. Businesses caught on fast that having the living corpse at your grand opening all but guaranteed crowds. Car dealerships and country music bars and strip clubs hired him. He had the drive-in movie market all but cornered.

Saturday and Sunday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. see Bill White, the living corpse, buried alive in person. Special daytime admission, just 50 cents a car. Refreshments stand open all day just for you. So come on out to Bordertown in the daytime. By now, he'd learned a thing or two about being buried alive. He had a new coffin, six feet long to accommodate his height, 32 inches wide and 32 inches deep.

He even worked out a way to exercise while underground. I do isometrics. It was rumored that the living corpse worked with a physician to come up with a special diet for the ordeal. But as Bill White told the Orlando Sentinel, nah, no fancy food regimen needed. It's hamburgers. When I'm above ground, I hate them. But I crave them when I'm in the box.

Hamburgers with onions and ketchup. You know what I'm saying? Glamorous as it sounds to be buried alive in a plywood box at a strip club in suburban Houston, it wasn't all adoring fans and local glory. Weather could be a real challenge. You know, once I was in a hurricane while I was underground. It was somewhere in Texas.

I basically got washed out of the ground. Water started leaking in and they had to haul me out of there. At first, when I was really new to the business, I had a few cavemans. But I worked out all those problems with experience. There were bugs. You guessed that, right? Snakes, too. Sometimes mice burrowing into the box alongside Country Bill White.

He told a fan that he usually fended them off with a can of spray deodorant. And if you're breaking into a sweat right now at the mere thought of being entombed at a Texas Chevy dealership with only a can of right guard as protection from snakes and scorpions, congratulations. That's proof you're not out of your mind because who other than Country Bill White could ever be cool with that?

Let's don't linger on all that creepy crawly nastiness because the story of Country Bill White, the living corpse, is also a love story. One that began in February 1966 at a legendary live music venue in Fort Worth called Panther Hall. White's goal was to break his own record and remain underground for at least 50 days.

The first couple of days are the hardest because as the dirt settles over the coffin, the coffin creaks and pops and it makes you nervous. They buried Bill White again, and he sure did look natural. You can phone at his hole in the ground. The number is Jefferson 69221. But be forewarned, he answers by saying the living corpse, with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?

That phone rang day and night. White said that the average interval between calls might be about seven seconds. I'm on the phone the whole time. They put out my number all over the world so people can call me. I usually got five rotary phones going and I get calls from Guam and Scotland, Northern Ireland, Italy. I had some pretty wild conversations.

You'd be surprised what people will say talking on the phone to a stranger who's buried six feet under. One of those callers was a woman named Lottie Howard. At first, she called only during the day and White found himself looking forward to the sound of her voice. Soon, the two began chatting every night. More and more keenly, I anticipated her phone calls.

And though I couldn't see her, I soon knew I was in love. And in luck, because Lottie Howard felt just the same way about the living corpse. White didn't even wait to be dug up before he popped the question. White had already been married twice. And when you know, you know. Lottie, who was employed as a secretary, said, yes.

And Bill White, so smitten with his new fiancee, couldn't bear to wait. He cut his own stunt short and emerged from the ground at Panther Hall after just three weeks and three days in the box. Love will do that to a man. Even one committed to breaking his own record for being buried alive. But his good fortune in finding Lottie only got better when she declared her enthusiasm for becoming Mrs. Living Corpse.

As in, setting up a nice little coffin of her very own. The couple planned to marry in May 1966, but work hassles got in the way. White had been rained out of his tomb in Waco in late April and booked another gig in El Paso. His host there, the Bordertown Drive-In, arranged to deliver him to his temporary tomb via ambulance.

They lined up a slate of five horror movies featuring werewolves, zombies and fiends. And in a fun twist, they scheduled two dances for teenagers with country Bill White playing the tunes. Rock and roll records controlled by Mr. White from the grave. Cupid drew his little Bozingo, what a hit. I feel like a stick of dynamite after the fuse is lit.

Hey there, buddy, leave my gal alone. I'm easy going, but that's my danger zone. You can take my car and that's all right. But if you mess with her, here's where we fight. Oh, hey there, buddy, leave my gal alone. Shut up, that sounds like such a good time. The people were as besotted with Country Bill's love story as Country Bill was with Lottie Howard.

They had a gazillion questions for him, but a big one was, what does your future bride think of how you make your living? She's going to try it herself. I'm training her right now. Lottie settled into her own coffin for her very first burial performance on June 9th, 1966, at a drive in movie theater in Denison, Texas.

Six days later, Lottie and Bill exchanged their marriage vows. Their officiant was Justice of the Peace Leon Hayes, and this was the very first wedding the man had ever conducted. Lottie stuck her hand up through a slot in her coffin and Bill crouched low, reaching down to slide a wedding ring onto her finger. Then, with the groom at his side and the bride six feet below, Hayes pronounced them man and wife.

The six witnesses applauded and cheered, wearing, as the local newspaper described it, their very best, this is normal, faces. Lottie was then dug up, removed from her grave, and the couple headed off for their honeymoon. With no time to waste, Bill was due in San Antonio in just two weeks for a burial of his own. It was the world record.

That was the big prize Country Bill had his sights set on. Even though the Guinness Book of World Records no longer acknowledges the whole buried alive phenomenon on the grounds of how dangerous it is, they sure used to, and Bill wanted those bragging rights. He broke his own record in 1967 in Largo, Florida. Tonight at 930, in front of the huge screen at the Thunderbird Drive-In Theater, a world crew will dig up a coffin, pry open the top, and out will step Bill White, holder of a new world's record for being buried alive underground for the most consecutive days.

The new record is 56 days. It was a rough 56 days. Heavy rainfall meant water seeped into the coffin. Boards were cut to fit and slid down the opening so that White could build himself a new floor six inches above the old one. He was dry, but now his face brushed against the lid of his box. His bride Lottie was camped out in a small trailer next to his grave.

It was she who brought him his meals and clean sponges so that he could bathe. It hasn't been easy. Someone squirted a fire extinguisher down the ventilation shaft a few weeks ago, but it only contained water, so no serious harm was done, I guess. But the Largo police are keeping a close eye now. As for Lottie, White explained that one year into their marriage, his wife had decided that he would be the family's only living corpse.

She'd given it a try and decided it just wasn't for her. March 1968 found the couple in Austin, Texas. Country Bill White is now buried alive at the Chief Drive-In Theater, attempting to break his previous record. Call Country Bill White on the phone 4547661 for fantastic and unearthly features. The Deadly Bees, The Skull, Die Monster Die, and Planet of the Vampires.

Austin was a mixed bag for Country Bill. Country Bill White, sporting a heavy black beard, emerged from his underground burial site at a movie theater in Austin, Texas, Friday night to claim a world record. 62 days, 22 hours, and 23 minutes. A world record and a heartbreak. Because while Country Bill lay entombed, chatting on the phone with admirers from around the world, his wife Lottie was meeting with an attorney.

Country Bill White, who was living underground in a casket, found that even the grave is not proof against woman troubles. Deputy Sheriff Howard Herron served him Tuesday with a court order involving support payments by dropping the papers down the six inch wide pipe through which food is normally lowered to White. White was ordered to pay Lottie $75 a week in support until the divorce was finalized.

It was a dramatic ending to either A, a dramatic love story, or B, a poorly thought out stunt by a pair of attention junkies. Or maybe C, marriage is hard enough when you're in the same room, much less when one of you is buried in a box at a drive-in movie theater. Who can say? Losing Lottie may have been a blow to Country Bill's heart, but it didn't slow his role as the living corpse.

Just a few months later, he made his way to a parking lot in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, for an attempt at a 102 day underground stay. But this time, he wouldn't be alone. He'd be sharing a special custom coffin, partitioned to accommodate three living corpses. Country Bill, a 23-year-old go-go dancer named June Estip, and a 34-year-old grandmother named Mrs. Betty Jones.

The girls are pretty excited and anxious. They've never been underground before. For me, it's the same old thing. There are a few things the girls are concerned about, like washing their hair and so forth. No one expected what happened next. Not five days after the last shovelful of dirt hit the top of that three-way coffin, Country Bill White asked to be dug up.

He complained of stomach cramps. Stomach cramps, heartache. Whatever was ailing him, Country Bill White managed to bounce back fast. By February 1969, he had a new home in Arlington, Texas, and a new wife. They met the same way Bill had met Lottie, on the telephone, while he was six feet under. Isn't love a miracle? But competitors were now coming hard for Country Bill.

The stomach cramps that cut short his West Virginia three-way left a wide-open opportunity for that divorcee, Patricia Haberlin, to set a new world record for being buried alive. 64 days, 18 hours, and 41 minutes. And if that wasn't enough of a blow to his ego, four topless dancers in Houston announced that they'd be buried alive in the parking lot at the Chantilly Lounge on October 4th, with every intention of leaving Country Bill's former record in the dust.

Now, the newest Mrs. White, Diane Moody, was as dutifully devoted as Lottie had been. But she wasn't crazy about the gig. Girl, listen. He was the living corpse when you met him. Did you think he was going to quit that and go work for a state farm or something? But then again, it's not every new bride who has to watch her husband be lowered into a grave, alive, at a beer hall in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Oh, sure, she could see his face smiling back at her through the special plexiglass lid on the box. And she did have to watch every night as that same face beamed up at the topless go-go dancers performing atop his tomb. This sure beats being buried in a used car lot. That nightly performance might have been the last bit of good luck the living corpse would get.

Two years later, a stunt in Tallahassee went terribly wrong, when after just 10 days underground, he had to be pulled from his grave at the Superior Mobile Home lot. A crack had split the side of his coffin, threatening to dump 3,000 pounds of dirt on him. It was Alvin Vickers, the owner of Superior Mobile Home, who ordered White to vacate his box.

Vickers said he didn't want to be responsible for his or anyone else's death. And then things didn't work out with Diane. But Country Bill could always fall back on his music. And he still had his career as the living corpse. He just slowed it down a bit. All that courting and marrying and divorcing can really take it out of a guy.

Eventually, he set his sights on performing a summer 1977 record-breaking stunt at Niagara Falls. Because of Belgium, it just set the world's newest record for being buried alive. 101 days. For Country Bill, the Niagara Falls stunt would be his 50th burial. After a 21-day training burial at Fat Man's Barbecue in Tallahassee, where he was lowered into his coffin wearing handcuffs, White slammed a beer and challenged motorcyclist Evil Knievel to a tandem jump.

I'll jump over anything he thinks he can handle. I'll be sitting right behind him. Cocky, confident, and once again, in love. The newest Mrs. Living Corpse was named Kay. That night, he brought over some flowers and wine and told me that he was a living corpse. I didn't believe it. But then he showed me his scrapbook.

I tell you, he throwed me for a loop. She's thrilled with this whole thing. She says at least she knows where I am. When it came time for Country Bill to climb into his coffin for his 50th burial and his attempt at the world record, he and his wife didn't make it quite as far as Niagara Falls. They had to settle for their second choice, the parking lot of a mobile home dealership in Dover, Delaware.

That occasion called for something special. An all-electric custom 8 foot by 4 foot coffin built by a mobile home manufacturer. By God, I could raise a family in that box. No kidding. It was equipped with carpet, heating and air conditioning, a color TV, three telephone lines, plus AM FM radio and CB radio. Huge crowds swarmed the parking lot for a look at the legendary living corpse.

Trouble was, the crowd was so big that the lid of Country Bill's coffin began to cave in from their weight. Once again, the living corpse had to be prematurely removed from his grave. He'd lasted just 12 days. I don't know why he quit, said Hal Marques, a salesman at the mobile home dealership. We did have a problem with the walls caving in, but I don't think that was it.

You don't, huh? Listen, don't rush to count a guy like Country Bill out. Just like he never gave up on the idea of marriage, he never gave up on the goal to set and then break his own world record for being buried alive. In 1978, he successfully clocked 134 days, two hours and 53 minutes in the backyard of a radio station in Massachusetts.

A few years later, after being told he was too old for these crazy shenanigans, White accepted a bet and in 1981, was buried in the parking lot of a Country Western bar in Killeen, Texas. White managed to stay underground there in a plywood box for 140 days. He was unearthed just before Christmas 1981. He was now 47 years old and all those long hours spent in the living grave were catching up with him.

It's gonna take an awful lot to get me to go back down there again. This time, Country Bill's world record held. Could the living corpse finally relax and enjoy his legacy? Sure didn't seem like it. In 1987, the same year the Guinness Book stopped acknowledging burial artists due to the dangers of the stunt, White talked about climbing back into his coffin for one more epic run at his own record.

I've been crazy as hell all my life and I'm gonna stay that way. But that last burial never came to pass. Maybe because he landed a music gig that summer at the Grass Valley Bluegrass Festival in California. Or maybe because he just couldn't face even one more day confined in a box under the earth. Or it might have been that he was disheartened when a British man named Jeff Smith, aka the human mole, beat his world record by seven days.

Like Country Bill, Jeff found love while entombed. But unlike Country Bill, Jeff was hauled out of the earth weak and temporarily unable to walk. In a wheelchair, Jeff was satisfied that he had restored his family's honor by snatching White's record because, check this out, Jeff's mother Emma had lost her world record for being alive to Country Bill.

As the living corpse, Country Bill White spent about two and a half years of his life underground. He died for real on December 21st, 2006. 14 years to the day after he set that world record in Killeen, Texas. When he died, he left yet another Mrs. White behind. Annie Lou Connell White. She would be the first Mrs. White whose graveside vigil would last forever.

Or at least until her own death in 2018. Country Bill was asked back in 1987 how he'd like to be buried once the day came when he was truly and finally dead and gone. Doesn't matter to me so long as they put a phone in the box. Come over the wire and there's sunshine in the dark. People call me summer happy. Summer long lived filled with fear.

There's more wind carrying the world up there. I may be better off down here. Next time on True Weird Stuff, we head to the high seas for an adventure that ends in a terrifying mystery. There are some who say it was a smuggling operation gone bad. Others who say it was an accident in the cargo hold. And then there are those who laugh it all off and say, that ship never even really existed.

All aboard the Orang Madan. Just don't expect to make it back to shore on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Sam Moore, Erin Cox, Lamar Richardson, Carla Richardson, Don Morgan and Kary "Doc" Bowser. So Sherry, you and I actually have met someone who was buried alive as a stunt.

Do you remember that? I debated. He's one of our colleagues in radio. And the reason I didn't reach out to him to ask him to join us for this is because he is so traumatized. He is. By that experience. And I didn't want him to ask him to relive it. It was horrific. It was. Very rare is the person that can be underground for two days, much less 134 days.

I mean, I want you to think about that. About what that was really like. And, you know, we we pointed out that there was there were bugs and snakes and mice and cave ins and water. It had to be absolutely terrible. And he he he had a full blown panic attack while he was down there and they had to they had to bring him up just because they were they were afraid for his his well-being.

And I can imagine. Yeah, he talked to us about it. And I mean, he was a mess just describing it. And so don't you feel kind of weird going, hey, we we have an episode coming up on the living corpse. Can we can we re-traumatize you for entertainment? Yeah, we can't do that. I mean, you're right about that because we were we were we were together when he was talking about it.

I remember when it had happened that he was buried and then had to be brought up. But you're right. He still has PTSD from that. So probably wise to not have done that. It is. You know, you have to be a particular kind of person to be able to do that. You really do. And Bill White, Country Bill White seems to be that kind of person.

The fact that he had the fact that his primary career was being the living corpse, but that he ended up having a music career, including, you know, live performances and radio airplay. This is to me, the story of Country Bill White is one of the most American stories that we have ever told. Everything about this story.

This story couldn't take place anywhere else on Earth, but in the United States of America at that time. Look at look at all of the things that converged. So we've got like he's a showman, you know, he's a carnies, a performer. But look at all the convergence, the the beginning of the heyday of advertising like that, the drive in movie theater, all of it.

It all kind of came together. He was he was he had huge success on CB radio in the beginning of CB radio, and he is an American character. He's larger than life. He's running a scam, but it's not really a scam because he really is underground. Right, right. And it's it's this crazy. Oh, that's my dog. Yes, Bridger. It's this crazy American larger than life.

Do you double dog? Dare me to do it. I'll do it like you wouldn't. This would not this story would not come to us out of Belgium or Denmark or France. This is an American story. No, what was amusing to me is the kinds of businesses that enlisted his services, used car lots, drive in movie theaters, strip clubs, mobile home sales, mobile home sales.

Yeah, there was there were there were a couple of things I didn't know that tap a phobia. I wasn't aware there was such a thing that you have a fear of being buried alive, that that's that's what it's called. I was also when you did the whole thing about being saved by the bell. I know that we have talked about this before, but one of the things was that I was unsure whether it was an urban legend or whether that was a real thing.

And as it turns out, it's a real thing. It's a real thing. I mean, so one of the things and it's so remember the grave robbing episode we did and all the bodies under the church. And it was absolutely horrible and how unscrupulous like when when you ran out of room, you would just dump the bodies in the river and break up the coffins and sell them to the poor for firewood and start over with new bodies.

Modern mortuary science is a relatively new thing. And we have the Civil War in the US to thank for the science of embalming. It's fairly recent that people were embalmed before they were the embalming process would start before they were fully deceased. And people were thousands of people were buried alive. So it was less than 100 years ago that you actually had to officially report deaths and births.

Yeah, with a physician saying, yes, that person's dead. It wasn't just it wasn't just some guy going, I think he's dead. Yeah, put it put a mirror under his nose. I'm not seeing anything. OK, fine. That's not that long ago. And it took them that long to be able to reach that decision that, you know, we're going to make this a law that you have to have some kind of an official certificate with us.

We you know, we live in an age where everything is super sanitized and death is a process that happens far away in hospitals and nursing homes. But at that time, death was a family matter and death happened at home and people were necessarily embalmed. So embalming began in the United States because of the Civil War. We had all of these soldiers on both sides dead.

And there was this desperate need to return them to their grieving families so that their families could give them proper burials and and have that that ritual that's so critical to being able to accept that this person has died and to go forward in grief. So embalming, which, you know, now you think of, well, everyone gets embalmed unless they're cremated or, you know, perhaps Jewish and buried, you know, within three days.

Right. Most people would take for granted that that's just part of it. But that's a new thing. That's a pretty new thing. And so you can see how at a period of at a period in time when, you know, somebody died at home and family members, typically the women, would wash and prepare the body and it would be set up in the home in a coffin for visitation and then it would be carried to the cemetery.

Or they were buried at home. Some homes, they had their own little graveyard at the home. Yeah, popped out in the backyard. So depending on what the cause of death was or what the affliction was. Yeah, it was it was fairly common to put people in the ground before it was time to go. And I know you're going absolutely impossible.

Even a person in a deep coma would show some signs of life, would they not? Well, I think so. And you think so. But we're standing here in the benighted hellscape that is 2025 with the benefit of everything we know and an entire lifetime of doctor shows and movies. Please, let's go back, shall we? Can we all go back together to 1901 when none of that was true?

Well, I mean, they thought strongly enough about it that they felt like they needed to have a law about it. And yeah, and they and they probably and they did. They needed to. It's it's interesting. You know, cremation has become so much more commonplace now that the idea of having a plot and all that sort of stuff, you know, it doesn't seem as common as maybe it did when we were kids.

Well, I can remember. So, you know, growing up in an old world right off the boat, pre-Vatican to Catholic Italian family, nobody would get cremated because how on Judgment Day could God restore you to your physical body if your ashes were scattered all over the Rocky Mountains or what have you? That people don't hold with that anymore.

And cremation is now I think in the United States we had the statistic in a different episode. It's like the most common choice now. But you heard you heard in the story that they were like, well, cremation is one sure way to prevent the corpse from knocking on the box to come back. Yeah, but, you know, well, it's gotten hot.

What the heck's going on? Oh, boy, this is not good. Go ahead. I just oh my God, do I just love a story like this one? This is the kind of story that it has every American ingredient. It's got show business and capitalism and some hucksterism and some gritty can do and some romance and some refusal to ever give up. He never gave up on the world record.

He never gave up on love. I mean, this guy is such a classic American story. And you did answer a question that I had. So as you were going through this, I was going, he's down there for so that when you first went, the first record he had, I don't know, was 49 days or something. So all I could think was, you're down there.

Okay, you've got a you've got a way to go to the bathroom. You've got a way to eat. What's it smell like in that little room? And then you said that they use sponges. I have to wonder how effective is that? Well, he had, you know, there was some pretty good ventilation, which carried its own risk because, you know, people would put objects in there in the episode.

We included the fire extinguisher, but people would drop things down. Kids would drop rocks into the ventilation holes. Rain was a problem. He did. He would have like little sponge baths to stay clean. He did do isometric exercises. One of the remarkable things about Country Boat White is that he would emerge from these graves in pretty fine physical shape, which is kind of crazy when you think about it.

He was asked repeatedly about how he went to the bathroom, and he said that that was a proprietary trade secret and he would not reveal it. But you have to assume, I mean, I get and he's down there eating hamburgers with ketchup. So it's not a liquid diet. I have to tell you that when I was a little kid, like about five years old, that was my biggest concern for the astronauts was how they were going to go to the bathroom.

Anyhow, but that's so real. Yeah. I mean, so there was, you know, there were different at different, especially the drive in movie theaters where crowds would just gather. And again, and this is so American. One of those drive in movie theaters was come in the daytime because who goes to a drive in movie theater in the daytime?

That's right. Country Bill White gave these businesses a chance to make money around the clock. And so it was a pretty good gig for everybody involved because you would have crowds of people showing up at some patchy drive in in the middle of Texas at two o'clock in the morning. And it was absolutely crazy. There was there was a lot of there were a lot of questions about the logistics of it.

And there were descriptions of, you know, bagged waste and food scraps would be sent back up the pipe, you know, so that he wasn't for 134 days surrounded by little baggies of his own. Yeah, that was that was, I guess, a question. Another question. You do wonder, you know, it's not it's not like me to spare you a delicious and disgusting detail.

But I did in this episode, what I wonder is, so he is there. Do they say, all right, fine, we'll pay you a flat fee. I don't know if you came across this in the research, but it was something that I was thinking about as we were doing this. We'll pay you a flat fee for coming if you stay a certain amount of time. But if you break the world record, I mean, that's going to bring more people there.

And so that will be worth more to them that they would pay him more is what I wondered. I, you know, I never unearthed I'm sure they're well, maybe I'm not so sure they're out there. I did. I wasn't able to unearth like contracts and agreements because I too wondered, I mean, you're getting paid. And of course, you're getting paid.

You're bringing hundreds of people, so many people to these strip bars and car dealerships and all that the ground is caving in right from the weight of the crowd. So yeah, he definitely was getting paid. And at that one music hall in Texas, I can't tell you how legendary that place is like a young Willie Nelson legendary, like anybody who's anybody has played Panther Hall in Texas.

And that was one of the locations where he was buried alive. The damndest thing for me is, and you know, I am a road tripper and I am looking for unusual roadside and markers and stuff. I've yet to come across a marker for Country Bill White. But again, that shouldn't surprise me because he did a lot of his work at drive-in movie theaters and those are kind of gone.

Yeah, they are. Yeah. The thing that I love about him, so he had already gone through two marriages before he became the living corpse, right? So he had two, yeah. Yeah, at least two. So he had five total is what I was, I think. Five or six, I think. Five or six, because he had a couple. He'd been married a couple of times before he married Lottie.

And you know, before you judge, it cannot be easy to be married to a man who does this for a living. You know, like not every woman is me where I'm like, is there any way you could go out of town or perhaps be buried alive for 134 days so I could have the house to myself? A lot of women are not like that. So I do like what the one woman said.

At least I know where he is. That's what they say about guys who are in prison. You know what I mean? If you are his wife, now the one wife, Lottie, she was tending to him while he was down there. Is that part of being the wife? Now, all of a sudden, you're kind of an unpaid servant for the guy. So I would imagine that would get old after a while.

He and Lottie had this whirlwind courtship where they fell in love before they ever met. And remember, she was like, you know what? I'm going to get buried alive too. She hated it. Their wedding ceremony is one of the craziest things I've ever read about. How she stuck her hand up from the grave to have the ring put on.

I mean, can you please imagine that? It's so nuts. It is so nuts. But can you imagine how many people would want to see that? I mean, what the spectacle is, people would pay to see that. Sherry, I would pay to see that. Today, I would pay to see that. If that were happening today at a mobile home dealership in Denison, Texas, it would break the internet.

A live stream of that would shut the internet down because it is such an unbelievable spectacle. But there was something about the guy. Look, he was charming and talented. Maybe not a good enough musician to have a full career in music, but he didn't miss an opportunity to get out there and make records, which he did.

Those were all his original songs. That was all country bill you heard in the episode. I think he was very appealing to women. And because he spent so much of his time just lying in his coffin, chatting people up on the phone, you know his game was strong. Well, it had to have been. I was wondering, you know, you do get to talk to all these people, and I suppose that it's great in passing the time.

But you know, Sherry, in everyday life, some people are more interesting than others. Can you imagine getting the uninteresting rambler type people on the phone with him? And you know, he did. I mean, they would install multiple lines. So he would have five, six, and sometimes it would be three. Sometimes it would be half a dozen landline phones dropped in there.

And like a little switchboard. And he was on the phone around the clock. People from all over the world followed these stories. And you heard at the one drive-in, it was about seven seconds between calls day and night. He said that one of the negatives for being buried alive was that he didn't get much sleep because the phone was always ringing.

It's so bizarre. This is one of those things where I hear myself say these things, and I'm like, girl, I think you're making that up. Well, I agree with you. This is the most American thing ever. It really is. All facets of it. It's just, and it's so delicious. I just can't help but enjoy it. This is the sort of thing that if we taught a story like this in school, this would fill people with patriotism because you would say to yourself, where else in the world could this happen but here?

This is what the Statue of Liberty was all about. You can come here. You can do any damn thing, including making a name for yourself as the living corpse. If you've got an idea and some guts, anything is possible. Welcome to America. I think that if people knew more of these stories, they would think about their country and their identity a little differently because we're in a spot historically where we're super, super divided, and we think of our American identity in political and ideological terms.

And that is really limiting. It's very narrow because it only takes in one tiny facet of existence. To be an American is to be born in a land where crazy shit is possible and you can become a star doing that crazy shit. It is possible to become a success in the wildest way. All of the things that Country Bill White touched were other versions of American success stories.

The guy who owned the mobile home dealership in Delaware, who brought the living corpse in, that's an American success story. The car dealerships, all the drive-in movie theaters, all of the people who saw what was happening and saw their own opportunity, including those musicians who showed up and said, we're a band. We just finished opening for Loretta Lynn.

We're going to play a song with you. What was that but seeing an opportunity to expand your own brand? That's what social media is. It's just a giant opportunity to expand your brand. But this idea of seeking opportunities to expand your own horizons is American. That is the American sensibility. This guy is as much a great American as George freaking Washington, and I stand by that.

He was kind of an influencer in his own way. He was an influencer before that was a thing. He was. The cool thing about Country Bill is that he had his moment, and when his moment ended, the whole thing ended. Nobody's doing this anymore. No, nobody is. So it's not like, well, you know, he's a magician. So I am very suspicious that he was actually buried alive.

Do you know what I mean? He's a magician. I find David Blaine wildly entertaining. He's got a reality show, a travel show. I'm not a magician fan, but I'm a fan of David Blaine's travel show. The difference between Country Bill and David Blaine is David Blaine might get buried underground, and he might submerge himself in a volcano or an ice pit or whatever.

But all Bill White did was get buried. That's all he did. And so this isn't a case where you can go, well, you know, there are a lot of magicians. There are a lot of rock stars. There are a lot of living corpses. No, there aren't. This was a flash, a brief, brief moment in American pop culture, and then it was over and gone forever and ever.

Digger O'Dell, what Digger O'Dell started, just to promote his own little convenience store in Phenix City, Alabama. And side note, Phenix City, Columbus, Fort Benning, we know that part of the world really, really well. So it cracks us up to think of Country Bill being buried alive in a mobile home dealership in Phenix City.

And back then in the 1960s, Phenix City, it was the Wild West. It really was. So he doesn't like Bill White looking down from or up from wherever he is, doesn't have to go, boy, the living corpses that followed me, boy, they sure were better. They had technology. It died with him. And that's pretty cool. You know, that's his he's not a household name.

And you probably had never heard of this guy before today. But he he owns a little piece of legendary status. That nobody can ever take away from him. Yeah. And I'm sure that he was proud of that through the course of time. Oh, sure. Yeah. What was him to be proud of? Because here's the other super duper American thing about Country Bill White.

A nine to five? No, not for him. Yeah. Yeah, you're buried alive, but at least you're not answering to the man. He wasn't bound by his family's name or identity. He wasn't bound by tradition. He he was Country Bill White was not afraid to fail. And because he wasn't afraid to fail, he had wild successes. Now, I would argue as a person with claustrophobia who doesn't like bugs or snakes, um, I would argue that I would rather work that square boring nine to five job than make my living being buried alive.

But in the 1960s, like late 1950s, 60s into the 80s, in America, guy like Bill White, he called his own shots and he made his own way. Yeah. And he and he did as he desired. And nobody ever fenced him in or held him down. Not a job, not a boss, not one of his half dozen or so wives. Yeah, I was going to say that as well.

But he had to. Did you think it was funny? He had to pay the one wife $75 a week. That's a lot of money back then. That was a lot of money back then, which is why I'm thinking he must have been doing all right. You know? Yeah. Well, I mean, he was he was very famous in a weird way for a pretty good long time. Now what?

And you can't say that it was regional fame, because, again, people from all around the world followed his exploits and called him on that phone. Now, the part of the reason that was so heavily publicized was because the drive in movie theaters. They knew an opportunity when they saw one and the drive in movie theater spent a fortune telling people how to talk to the living corpse.

And it paid off for them. And one of the things I learned working on this episode was that Pat Booth was in a horror movie. I didn't know that either. I had never heard of any of those titles. But, you know, the drive in movie theaters were just, you know, it was an excuse for a date. It didn't really the plot didn't matter, really.

I looked for a bunch of these movies on YouTube. Um, there's a clip from werewolves in the girls dormitory in the episode. That whole movie was let me tell you something, Dr. Grant, we cannot have werewolves in the girls dormitory. I think it was that kind of a vibe. And then then when I saw that Pat Boone had been in a horror movie, I went looking for the Pat Boone movie and thinking, oh, my God, it's like Pat Boone, who is synonymous with wholesome, white bread, you know, heartland decency.

Does he play a monster? No, he doesn't. He kind of plays. Pat Boone. Kevin White died not all that long ago, 2006. So it's, you know, almost 20 years ago. But, you know, he was alive for for a long time. Wouldn't you love to talk to him? I'll bet he'd be fascinating. And I'll bet he'd tell great stories. I, I wish that I wish that we had known of him.

We would have had him on our regular radio show. Oh, yeah, we would have. And he would have been a phenomenal guest. Someone I what I would love to know is how how he's wired. Because it's it's not like, well, who who doesn't want to be buried alive? That is a really scary proposition. Let's think about that for a second.

Well, I'm hearing. Did you hear what he said in the in the story? You could hear the earth settling around. No, no, thank you. I know myself well enough that I would not be OK with that. And I'm not particularly claustrophobic, but no, I wouldn't be all right with that. I would just I mean, I would just love to. A lot of the questions that he was asked were how you go to the bathroom.

How do you how do you take a bath? Do you get scared? But nobody really seemed to. And I feel like I found and read every word I could find on the guy. And every interview he ever gave, nobody ever said to him, so like. When it's quiet, it's four o'clock in the morning or whatever. Do you ever just have a like, are you ever at the verge of freaking out?

Do you allow yourself to think about where you are? Yeah, I mean, I think all he's thinking about when he's down there, is the wife he has or the next wife he's going to get. Wow. Do you know what I would like to see? And I have no idea. I'm sure it hasn't existed for a very long time. The custom coffin that the mobile home company made for him for the Dover stunt, the Delaware stunt with, you know, TV and radio and CB and carpeting and heat and AC and electricity.

And that was a pretty generous size. I mean, you're still underground in something significant. I mean, you're still underground in a box. But you're able to move around a little bit. Yeah, I don't think he was ever. He was a big guy. He was six feet tall. I don't think any of his boxes were tall enough where like he could sit up.

But he wasn't. This isn't, you know, a coffin out of the movie Tombstone, where it's real narrow and tapered. It wasn't that he definitely could roll over and he was in a position to use his right guard spray deodorant to kill snakes or whatever. Oh, it's horrible. Yeah. No, all of that stuff. The thing with the vermin and the snakes and the bugs and all of that stuff.

No, that wouldn't be worth it to me. It really wouldn't. There was one instance where he came out of the ground at a drive-in in Texas, and he'd been under for, this was one of his like almost three month stays. And they had newspaper photographers waiting for a country bill to come out of the grave. And the one thing that he didn't do underground was shave.

And so they captured this portrait of what looked like a wild man, you know, this heavy, long beard and stuff. I just, I can't. There's nothing about what this man did for a living that I feel like I could do. How about you? No, Sherry. I don't want to be in a confined space. Even, well, actually, I work in a confined space.

And that's enough. That's enough. You know, a windowless confined space. So maybe I've had training for this and just don't know it. It's just a real special person. And so I wanted to, in order, like, to me, it seems like, because we are also living in a cultural moment where people go, yeah, well, so what? I could do that.

Well, shut the door. No, you could not. Like, you could not be buried alive for 134 days. Sometimes I think that we need to have the whole picture of what it really was to be buried alive. And the thing that haunted me from this episode was the description about any time they would dig up graves to move them. And if you're wondering, why were they digging up graves to move them?

That's also a thing that happens. If you remember, we did an entire episode on the city of San Francisco. That's right. Moving all of its dead to Colma because you're not, there are no cemeteries that you're allowed to be buried in now in San Francisco. Well, most of them. Most of them. A lot of them got left behind. Digging up graves and relocating remains is a thing that happens all the time everywhere, including Team USA right now for all kinds of reasons.

But back when they would do that, they would find really unsettling and frightening indications that perhaps the person in that coffin had not been dead. Wow. How else do you account for exhuming a body and there are claw marks on the lid, the interior lid of the coffin, and the corpse has torn fistfuls of its own hair out?

There's no other explanation. If there are marks on the inside of the coffin, that didn't happen by itself. Yeah. So I think that this probably did happen often enough that they should have you know, made some sort of regulations for this. Heather, our digital witch and social media cult leader, as she's identifying the credit said to me a week or two ago, she's like, True Grid stuff tends to be a little gritty.

Well, if you're doing a story on people being accidentally buried alive, I don't know how it's anything but. I don't know how to make that fun for y'all. Let me do an episode called Kittens Are Soft, and I promise you there won't be anything gritty in it, but nobody wants to listen to true sweet stuff. So yeah, I mean, these people were buried alive and the cemetery workers, the sextons, I think they used to call them for people that worked in church graveyards.

That's right. What would be like pissing themselves. They're hearing bells ringing in the night. And a lot of times it was just because natural decomposition caused the corpse's body to move just enough to tug the string. But then they would also like in the case of the of Rufina Commissaris, they buried the girl alive and she tried desperately to get out of a grave.

And who discovered that? The night watchman at the cemetery. Yes, that one. That one was especially haunting. That's a real one. She was a beautiful 19 year old heiress to a cattle fortune man. She was a famous, famous story, worldwide news coverage on what happened to Rufina. It really did happen. And I don't know how to make that nice.

Look at George Hayward, the jeweler from Missouri. For a person, for a man who was accidentally buried alive, I thought he took that well. He was pretty chill about it. Kind of like, well, that's just how it goes. You know, I just thought that was it. The horrible thing for George Hayward, and not to give anybody nightmares, but stay with me here.

He was fully aware, fully conscious, could hear everything, could see everything, could feel the tears of his loved ones splashing. He couldn't move a muscle. He couldn't move his eyes. He was absolutely frozen. Would that be like? Oh, Sherry, have you ever had that happen in nightmares? Things are happening and you're completely paralyzed.

There's a name. That's sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis, that's right. But you're having something happen and you're completely paralyzed by it. That is the stuff of nightmares. It really is. I, you know, when I think about George Hayward and the only thing I could think about was, well, he was an older gentleman and he had faith and maybe he thought, well, this is just what happens.

This is what death is. God lets you see how sad people are that you're dead and then you get put in the grave. Like, I just don't even know how to make the man make sense. Like the level of Zen acceptance on the part of that jeweler is really dazzling, isn't it? It is. I mean, that was the thing that was most striking about it was he just seemed to be so easy going about it.

And of course, he's being interviewed afterwards about it. He didn't have any sort of animosity towards those people, you know, stupid doctor. I think, you know, most of us listening right now have lost someone. And you go through that, that terrible grief, the funeral, all of it. Now, I want you to imagine a knock on the door.

Miss Hayward, we made a mistake. George is not dead. What? Buried my husband in the afternoon. He's at the doctor's office. Like, everybody involved in this, everybody involved in this had to be tripping. Yeah, that would absolutely be crazy. When you first started talking about this with the living corpse with Bill White, I thought that what had happened was that he was the one that had been buried alive accidentally and then went around and, hey, meet the guy that was buried alive.

He was doing it for money. On purpose for money. It was very lucrative. Yeah, yeah. So you can file a story like this under the heading, America, you one crazy bitch. Because it is. I'm a crazy bitch of a country. I mean, but you got to love it. We're, you know, we're not perfect by any means. We're far if we couldn't be less perfect.

But if you if you could just get past these rigid political and ideological divides, you would go, this is a country full of some crazy creative entrepreneurial mofos. We should keep this going. We have more a little bit long. We have more in common than we don't. We really do. And we are our own thing. You know, we're not we come from all over the world.

But once we're here, we become our own thing. We become a culture where this a story like this is possible. Now, Guinness Book. This is I mean, this isn't the first or only category that Guinness Book stopped acknowledging. Because there were people who saw the fame that these burial artists were achieving. And and it didn't it didn't necessarily go so well for everybody.

No, and it was considered extremely dangerous. And at one point, the Guinness Book kind of shook itself like a wet dog and went, Wait a minute, what are we encouraging? And so that was a disappointment for country Bill White, because he he like so many people like this wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

So that was a bummer. Yeah. And the evil Knievel thing never came to pass. Evil Knievel did not take the job. Now that really would have been perfect. That would have been perfect. So what do you think it was my guess or my theory that after that blasting cap blew up and that kid had to have all those surgeries to save his eyesight and spent a pretty significant chunk of a very formative stage of his childhood fighting for his life in the hospital.

After that, he just didn't have any fear of anything. Either that or he was born that way. I mean, it's possible that it was the accident that caused him. But some you know, some people are just born. They're just kind of born a certain way. And as you were going through this, I thought that could have been what caused this.

You know, he thinks, oh, well, I'm immortal now. But at the same time, you have to be wired a certain way, too. I mean, it seems like this just wasn't about this buried alive business. This seemed to permeate all aspects of his life, including his personal life. Yeah, he didn't build it and overthink it. And he didn't he didn't judge himself.

And he did not worry. Like, do you think he gave a damn if you thought he couldn't keep a wife? No, he didn't care. He was he was a very impulsive guy. That's for sure. And the women he was attracting were apparently pretty impulsive themselves. I you know, I like a bad boy, but this would be not something I could do.

I could not date the living corpse. I mean, he's gone for long periods of time trying to break the record. And you've got the house to yourself. I mean, I I do love that. But here's the problem. Yeah, I've got the house to myself, but he expects me to sit on a folding chair next to his grave and send down soup and clean sponges.

And, you know, I wonder how the wife felt about the fact that he was down there with topless dancers. She didn't love that. And that, again, you want to tell me a more American visual than a stunt performer buried alive at a strip club while topless dancers are dancing on his grave. And he's looking up at the plexiglass window.

You can't you can't top that. That is the most American visual. Somebody should paint that. I'll tell you another thing I loved in this story. It is not every day that you get that you sit in front of a newspaper headline about a living corpse, a go-go dancer and a thirty four year old grandma having a three way buried alive thing.

Did that not blow your mind? Everything this guy did was so amazing that you just want to sit and think about it. And I don't know why the go-go dancer and grandma three way didn't pan out for him. He said he got stomach cramps and he just got the hell out of there. Maybe, maybe Country Bill's thing wasn't that he couldn't be buried alive.

Maybe Country Bill's thing was that he couldn't be confined with other other people. I I think that I think that because he's in as long as he's by himself, he's in control of the situation. When there's somebody else there, he's not in control of the situation or is as much control. I'm glad you because I thought that, too, like, oh, on paper, go-go dancer, grandma, Country Bill.

This sounds spectacular. But in reality, and we don't know how that's happening. You know what I mean? It sounds a certain way, but nothing's probably happening. There's not enough room. Here's what I wondered. Those two women, they were new to the buried alive game. Maybe they were just really struggling and he was down there for a while and went down with them.

I cannot listen to this for two months. I got to get out of here. This is not working for me, which is another kind of admirable thing about Country Bill. When something wasn't working, he cut it. He ended it. He did not even in his own pursuit of a record. If it wasn't working for him, he climbed out of the grave and then tried again another day, which is probably why he survived so many close calls with water and cave-ins and whatnot, because he wasn't afraid to walk away from a stunt that wasn't working.

And that was another thing in this story that I loved. It's been a hot minute since the phrase go-go girl showed up in anything I was reading. It's just such a snapshot of a moment in time. You know, it really is. It was a different America back then. It was. Not a better or a more innocent America. Just different. Yeah, it was just different.

Just different. We didn't have the internet. We needed to have live spectacles. And because I think of the internet, something like this would live online and be huge. Yeah, it would be a harder thing to draw a crowd. You'd get clicks, but not maybe crowds. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Well, if there was a camera in there, I'd imagine that people would want to watch it, at least for a little bit.

Well, that would be a piece of it that Country Bill could do today that he couldn't back then. He could live stream. Yeah. Life underground. I just, oh God, the claustrophobia, the horror of it. That's the thing. Yeah. No. No. The divorce papers being served through his ventilation pipe. She's kind of like, yeah, I don't want to have to deal with this in person.

Just put it down the pipe. I love this wacky, deranged, goofy, campy America. I never got to visit that America, which might be why I like it so much. Seems like such a cool place to me. Don Morgan was just happy he could voice a character that wasn't some sort of racist, misogynist, sex fiend, cult leader. I know. And I'm a little, I was a little worried when you sent him the script, because the poor man has been every flavor of terrible.

And he's like, Don, can you play the living corpse? That doesn't sound as good as it's going to be. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. No, he did it the last time, and I think I left it in there. But he's reading through the script, and he's doing the parts. He's going, good Lord. When I found Country Bill, I had that feeling that I get, that feeling.

And I was like, oh, Don Morgan, I have one for you. So it was super fun. It was super fun to write that for him. And our next episode next week is a ghost ship story. And this one is a real puzzle, Max, because on the one hand, people will say the entire thing is a made up story. It never existed. It's not true at all.

And on the other hand, if you know where to look, you find international press coverage of what happened to this ship. Hmm. So what's and we're going to answer it, I think, in the story. I think we're going to answer it. Really looking forward to this, because you know that I am absolutely fascinated with all things abandoned.

This is a real conundrum. Like, I'm fascinated by the Marie Celeste, which is one of the most famous ghost ships in the history of humanity. And I did not do a story about the Marie Celeste. Not that we might not at some point in the future, because everyone agrees the Marie Celeste is real. There are a bunch of really scary and mysterious abandoned ghost ship stories out there.

The terror and the Erebus locked in the Arctic ice. That's a scary story that we don't really know everything that happened. There have been all sorts of like wild theories and really fun speculations. But the ship that we're going to pay a visit to next week on True Weird Stuff, what makes that ship interesting to me is the possibility that she never, ever existed at all.

And not in a supernatural way, like in a humans are lying liars who lie way. But there's another detail about this ship that is what makes everyone in the world pause and go, yeah, but this ship is connected to. So go back to World War Two before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Imperial Army was hell bent on world domination, right?

The Japanese Imperial Army that specialized in chemical and biochemical biological warfare. And did the most unspeakable things like you don't even know half of the unspeakable things, because you may just be hearing for the first time that the Japanese Imperial Army had this unit in it. And there's a connection between this ship and that, that stops that just when you go, it's all it's all bullshit. It's creepypasta. It's made up. It's an urban legend.

But then you come across a couple of these other kind of historical markers. And you're like, but maybe not. And that's why this remains an unsolved mystery. Yeah. Even though I suspect and when you hear the story next week, you know, I suspect the answer is in the story itself. But whatever the truth is, it's a good one. And who doesn't love a good scary story at sea? No, I do. Yeah. Of course, I love a good scary story in the ladies room at Kmart if you have one, but it's pretty easy to find. I love me a ghost ship. So that is on the next episode of true weird stuff. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this. And coming up in a future episode, probably in September, one of our true weird listeners wrote an episode for the show and said, if you don't want to use it, that's okay. But we're gonna we're gonna create his episode into a story. Yeah, very good. And I just want to say in my whole life, I have never ever, ever experienced anything like the delighted fit of giggles I had when I opened that email and started reading and went, Oh, my God, he's written. He's written an episode, just the same way we would. He cast the he cast the voices. He was like, this should be done.

So, and we're gonna see, we're gonna see if Matthew would like to join us on that episode of true weird stuff. So hey, if you're out there and you're a creative person, if you write an episode, we won't say no. We appreciate that. We appreciate the assistance. Anything to listen below to be great. Yeah. So thank you so so so much for listening to this one. We'll see you next week on the high seas for a ghost ship mystery. Bye. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and and bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media.

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