The spookiest week of the year brings us this 1844 broadside from Baltimore, which advertised the invention of a "Life-preserving Coffin in Doubtful Cases of Death".
Being buried alive was a common fear and fascination during this time; the same year this broadside was created, Edgar Allen Poe also responded to this public interest with the publication of "The Premature Burial" in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. At the time, medical science offered few options for conclusively confirming death beyond waiting for bodies to decay, and reports of errors made fueled this fear.
Inventors like Christian Henry Eisenbrandt (1790-1860) sought to allay these fears with inventions of what became known as "safety coffins", which were designed to provide recourse to unfortunate souls who awoke after being prematurely consigned to the grave. It's not clear if Eisenbrandt himself was a client of his own invention; when he died at age 69 on March 9th, 1960, Baltimore's The Daily Exchange noted that the "well-known citizen" was buried by his loved ones a few days later on March 12th in the city's Zion Cemetery, where services of a "very interesting character" were conducted.
This item is part of Hagley Library's small broadsides collection. To learn more about it, click here to visit its page in our Digital Archives.