Buried Alive

"The Earth is suffocating. Swear to cut me open, so that I will not be buried alive."

— Fryderyk Chopin

The villain has the hero incapacitated. Does the bad guy shoot the good guy in the head? Cut his throat? Decapitate him? Stick them in an elaborate, above ground Death Trap? Nope. He's got something far worse planned: he's going to bury the hero. Alive.

Sometimes, he'll tie the hero up before dumping them in the coffin. If the villain's a sporting sort of fellow, he'll provide a flashlight or an air canister. If he's even more sadistic than usual, he may force them to dig the hole themselves. Regardless, the villain is going to kill the hero in one of the most appalling ways imaginable.

There's a wide range of reasons a bad guy does this. He might be righteously angry at the hero and is intent on making him suffer for past misdeeds. ("37 years ago you stole my Froot Loops at recess. Now, it's payback time!") It could be a matter of security; there's no murder weapon and you don't have to worry about disposing of the body, since, hey, you just did. Often, however, it's just a matter of the villain being a sadistic prick.

Of course, as with most forms of killing the hero that favor cruelty over efficiency, the hero manages to dig their way out, or a sidekick will pop out of the bushes and dig him up the moment the villain leaves. The exception to that comes when the hero blows up an ancient building or tomb while the villain remains inside. If the bad guy survives the blast and falling debris, he is technically buried alive. Usually this is a Sealed Evil in a Can situation. Another exception is when the villain has already done the same kind of thing to the hero or one of his friends, in which case it can be a form of Karmic Death.

Very popular because it really does touch on something that just creeps the living hell out of people. Claustrophobia is widespread, and the specific fear of being buried alive is just slightly less so.

Occasionally, cases like these will actually pop up in real life, though obviously not with the same frequency as they do in fiction. In the days before modern medicine, it would happen accidentally when the doctors made a mistake about whether someone was really dead.

Compare Sand Necktie, where a character is buried vertically up to their neck, with the intention of death from the incoming tide, dehydration, or nasty animal-related death.

Overlaps with Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere, Sinister Suffocation, and (sometimes) Quicksand Sucks. A beautiful example of Nightmare Fuel. If this is done to a character because he can't be killed, it's And I Must Scream. This isn't restricted to horror, as you can see in the examples.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Inadvertently happens to a young woman in this darkly comedic German fashion ad, who accidentally walks backwards right into a roadwork pit while flirting with a guy. The pit is filled immediately after she falls in, with little indicating of her existence afterwards except a small piece of her dress at the surface. Seeing as how she unknowingly causes several other accidents throughout the ad but ignores them all, this could be considered a somewhat Karmic Death.

Anime & Manga

• In Akame ga Kill!, General Esdeath, after conquering the Northern Tribes, has 400,000 Northerners buried alive.
• One later chapter/episode of Cardcaptor Sakura has Sakura trapped in the bottom of a magically-sealed pit (so no-one else can get to her). Then, plush sheep start to fill in the pit form above, threatening to bury her alive. Thinking quickly, Sakura escapes the trap with relative ease by adapting the Erase card to remove the sheep. It was all just another test to hone her magic skills and help her adapt more Clow Cards into Sakura Cards.
• In Future Diary, this trope is combined with Drowning Pit when Yuki's friends, in their effort to rescue Yuki from Yuno's lair, where she has him chained up, find themselves in a Death Trap room that's slowly filling with liquid concrete.
• In the manga Goth, one of the chapters has a murderer who buries his victims alive in his backyard with a bamboo pole connecting the coffin to the air above. After keeping them alive for a little while, he sticks a hose into the pole and floods the coffin, drowning the person below. As seen by the number of poles sticking out of the ground in his backyard, you can be sure he's been doing this for a while.
• In Hell Girl, this is how Ai Enma and her parents died. More specifically, Ai once was chosen to to be a Human Sacrifice but managed to escape, and when the villagers found out, they captured her and her parents and then buried the three alive.
• Inuyasha:
  • Happens to Sango in her first appearance, though not on purpose. She claws her way out by herself like the badass that she is, though it certainly helped that it was a rather shallow grave because she was buried en masse with a bunch of slaughtered villagers.
  • Being through it as a Human Sacrifice is what drove Saint Hakushin to fall in despair and then to join Naraku.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Golden Wind: Diavolo somehow managed to retrieve his mother, who was incarcerated in a prison, and then buried her under a house with her mouth stitched shut.
  • Steel Ball Run: Upon being hit by Johnny's Infinite Rotation, Valentine gets sucked into the ground beneath him. Even when he tries to escape by hopping into another universe, he will always get trapped, forcing him to go back to his home universe to bargain with Johnny.
  • JoJolion: One of Jobin's bullies ended up severely injured when Jobin tried to defend himself and accidentally manifested his Stand for the first time, and then the child got buried beneath a shrine by Kaato, who took the blame for the incident to protect Jobin.
• Mazinger Z: The Dragon and Two-Faced Cyborg Baron Ashura were two persons buried alive for trying to break their Star-Crossed Lovers destinies. One half of each body was destroyed, so he stitched them together to create Ashura. In Shin Mazinger Zero, the readers learn who these lovers were: Tristan and Isolde. Yes, that Tristan and Isolde.
• Naruto:
  • A filler episode has a villain who isn't satisfied just doing this — he holds a funeral where all the attendants have to just stand there while the guy in the casket is screaming his lungs out and pleading for his life. Raiga would recall the "good memories" they shared and "forgive" them for betraying his trust... before proceeding with the burial.
  • Gaara tried to do this to Kimimaro. It didn't take.
  • Later on, in the second season, Shikamaru uses explosives to dismember Hidan and then buries him in the middle of a forest. Because Hidan's special power is immortality, his head is cursing Shikamaru as it's buried. Kishimoto swings back and forth over whether he's truly immortal or if he'll eventually die, but either way, he's out of the picture.
• Ranma ½:
  • Happōsai one time chained Ranma up, sealed him in concrete, and then buried him in the backyard. But it takes more than that to stop Ranma.
  • Ryōga tried to do this to an ensorcelled Ranma-chan after drugging her with sleeping powder. She woke up just as he was digging the grave, though.

Audio Plays

• The Grand Finale of We're Alive features Burt doing this to Scratch. He even made sure to reinforce the concrete around the coffin so it wouldn't crush her and installed a small ventilation fan to supply oxygen. Burt wanted Scratch to starve the way she starved him during his months of captivity.

Comic Books

• Magneto does this to Red Skull in the aftermath of Acts of Vengeance, during which Loki had manipulated the two into working together. Given that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor and Red Skull was Hitler's right-hand man, this had been a rather ill-conceived partnership. Red Skull survives because his Dragon, Crossbones, rescues him from the tomb Magneto had created.
• Batman:
  • This happens in Batman R.I.P.. Interestingly, they plan not to kill Batman, but merely wait for him to be permanently brain-damaged, believing that killing Batman's mind is more important than killing his body. Batman escapes. And he is PISSED.
  • Happens again in a Batman and Robin (2009) story arc, done by The Joker to Dr. Hurt. The guy slips on a banana peel the Joker planted, breaks his neck and is paralyzed. He is injected with Joker Venom and buried alive while still under its effects. Oh, and Dr. Hurt is immortal, so he's stuck, paralyzed and laughing at himself forever inside of a coffin six feet in the ground. Though it's not like the Joker didn't WARN the guy first (see Batman: R.I.P.), and to be fair Hurt did kind of deserve it.
  • Also happens in Batman: Noël, when, after Batman gets knocked out unconscious by a blast from an explosive rigged in the Batmobile, the Joker (representing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) drags him to the graveyard and buries him alive. It takes a vision of a Bad Future to make the Dark Knight realize what a jerk he has been in losing the holiday spirit, and he digs himself out to save the day.
  • Happened to Nightwing in the later run of his book. Instead of the usual version of going up, Nightwing went to the side, as the grave was near the edge of a cliff.
  • In Death of the Family, a group of thugs tried this on Poison Ivy. It didn't work, because she's a plant lady, and one can't kill a plant just by burying it!^note Although, when the plant is completely buried, it's deprived of sunlight, so it'll just wither away and die. If it's just the root, though, it's fine. Being Ivy, it's perfectly possible she used nearby plants to help break her out, which makes this example also Shooting Superman — except not quite.
  • In Robin (1993), Tim Drake gets buried alive alongside Cluemaster by Cluemaster's accomplices purely by accident when their fight leaves them both in the back of an armored truck that is buried in concrete for a few weeks as part of Cluemaster's plan to get away with stealing its contents. Robin hits Cluemaster with a sedative to prevent him from wasting precious air screaming in panic. The issue periodically makes note of the time to let the reader know how long they've been in there; over five hours in Tim has a Moment of Weakness as he considers that there isn’t enough air to last much longer — for both of them, anyway. Luckily Spoiler was expecting to meet with Robin and manages to rescue them after shadowing Cluemaster's accomplices for a day.
  • In The Attack of the Annihilator, Supergirl walls the titular Big Bad up to contain him while she and Batgirl decide what to do with him.
• In Cavewoman: Rain, Meriem is buried by the citizens of Marshville after she is knocked into a death-like coma in a fight with Killer Gorilla Klyde. Of course, it turns out that she was Only Mostly Dead.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: In the short-lived 1990s comic, this happens to the team when they're buried in a box under the sand. Fortunately, the Pi-Rats happen to sail ashore not long after and are able to dig them up.
• Code Name: Gravedigger: In Men of War #16, German agent Von King lures Gravedigger's tank into a Pit Trap and attempts to kill Gravedigger ironically by by burying him alive by filling sand in on top of the tank. However, he reckons without Gravedigger's legendary status as The Determinator.
• Comic Cavalcade:
  • When Green Lantern is faced with an unexpected return by Solomon Grundy, whom Alan had trapped on the moon in All-Star Comics #33, Alan encases him in a ring construct and buries him deep within the earth.
  • In the Issue 18 Wonder Woman feature King Manlius, who overthrew the weak new democracy in Aurania after it was freed from Queen Clea, tries to burry Wonder Woman, the old queen and the president in the base of his throne. Di smashes her way out.
• In an issue of Dazzler, Alison is hired to appear in a music video that was a thinly-veiled copy of Thriller. The preparation for one scene calls for the zombie dancers (including Alison) to be buried alive, so they can crawl out of their graves during the video. However, the director, having arranged a series of accidents to draw publicity to a "jinxed" production, removed the air hose from Alison's plot, hoping to suffocate her. She was not amused, and got a confession from him in front of the news crew he'd invited for the "accident".
• EC Comics stories:
  • "Jury Duty!" (Crime SuspenStories #6) is a tale of a man who was hanged and declared dead. The twist was that his neck was broken but his spinal cord was not severed — so he was still very much alive. He went on to be a complete bastard to the town that had punished him, because it was impossible to prosecute a legally dead man for any crime. However, some of his enemies decided to use that loophole to their advantage as well, because there is nothing in the world wrong with burying a dead man, either....
  • "Chatter-Boxed!" (The Haunt of Fear #15), a story set in December 1941, features an elderly man who suffers from catalepsy, making him appear dead when he isn't. He leaves instructions to be buried with a telephone, allowing him to call for help lest he regain consciousness. Sure enough, he is buried after having an episode behind the wheel and does exactly that, only to find every phone line tied. After futilely trying to get a call through and finally running out of oxygen, the operator angrily snaps at the man's blue-faced corpse for being ignorant of what's just taken place: the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
  • "The Thing From The Grave" (Tales From the Crypt #22) has this occur when a Love Triangle forms between a woman and two men, ostensibly all friends. One of the men becomes jealous when the woman starts to favor his rival more than him and elects to Murder the Hypotenuse, then bury him in a shallow grave (the murdered man is, however, very certainly dead and thus does not count for this trope). When the woman still refuses to marry the remaining man, the murderer goes into a jealous rage and decides that he'll just leave her to burn to death in a cabin if she won't be with him. Her screaming actually wake the dead man, who comes to the woman's rescue after she faints, then proceeds to pursue his murderer until they both fall into the open grave from which the dead man rose. The zombie proceeds to bury himself and his killer alive (or technically, undead and alive respectively).
• A The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers story centers around Fat Freddy dying. Turns out he was really under some very powerful drugs, and he bursts out of his grave, not at all happy.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel):
  • Serpentor, looking to usurp Cobra Commander, let him and Destro lead the invasion of the Joes' headquarters, the Pit, hoping they'd get themselves killed. Hawk sets the base to self-destruct, collapsing it upon itself, barely getting out in time, while the Commander and Destro were Left for Dead. The two managed to be in an area that didn't fully collapse, though, and managed to make it to a Drill Tank that the Joes kept on hand for use as an Escape Pod.
  • Later, Cobra Commander is seemingly killed by one of his Crimson Guardsmen who takes his place and buries him in the woods. Raptor and Dr. Mindbender go to dig him up a few years later and find the grave empty. It turns out another Crimson Guardsman was watching the first and rescued the Commander. This leads to...
  • The real Cobra Commander locking the Crimson Guardsman who replaced him and several others (including Raptor and Dr. Mindbender) in the landlocked freighter, sending it into the volcano on Cobra Island, and sealing the cave. A few years later, some Vipers on patrol find a tunnel dug in the side of the volcano. They investigate and discover most of the people trapped inside died from botulism. The dead: The Crimson Guardsman, Raptor, Dr. Mindbender, Croc Master, Captain Mihn, Tyrone, Voltar and some Vipers. The survivors: Zartan, Billy, and Firefly.
• Michael Myers kills Lisa the protagonist this way in the comic Halloween: Nightdance, putting her in a coffin and burying her in a graveyard.
• Amazo does this to the Detroit-era Justice League at one point, leaving them Bound and Gagged in covered pit. Luckily, Vixen manages to break her bonds before she and her teammates suffocate.
• The French comic Les Maitres de l'Orge has a disturbing variant: Adrien Steenfort entombs his son's murderer Garcin on the spot of the murder, chaining him to a wall before bricking it up. Every evening, he returns to the wall and removes a brick, giving Garcin just enough food and water to live. This goes on for twelve years, with Steenfort using Garcin as his confident, before Steenfort has a heart attack due to financial problems and ends up unconscious for several days. By the time he's out of the hospital, Garcin is dead, and Steenfort burns his body before shooting himself, expressly likening talking with him as a drug.
• Done in a Sam & Max: Freelance Police comic.
  "Buried alive?! I'm alarmed!"
  "We're going to shoot you first."
  "Oh, thank god."
• Sensation Comics: When Rudolph Hessenpfeffer aka the Gentleman Killer has Steve Trevor at his mercy he decides to bury him alive by collapsing the cave ceiling on him instead of just shooting him. Wonder Woman rescues Steve almost immediately.
• In Sherwood, Texas #1, Rob Hood is shot, tossed into an old copper mine and Left for Dead. Gisburn tosses in a stick of dynamite; collapsing the mine and burying Rob's body. He comes back.
• Spider-Man:
  • Kraven's Last Hunt: Having been driven completely Ax-Crazy, Kraven confronts Spidey, shoots him wtih a tranquilizer dart, buries him alive and then impersonates him. Spidey eventually digs his way out, but it takes a week, due to Spidey having to recover from the paralysis that leaves him still conscious and unable to move. Indeed, this experience clearly gave him nightmares for years to come, as every time Kraven was mentioned from that point on focuses on that event.
  • In the first Marvel Knights Spider-Man arc, Norman Osborn has Aunt May kidnapped and buried alive as part of a plan to put Spidey in such a blind panic that he wouldn't be paying attention to Osborn's efforts to assemble a new incarnation of the Sinister Six.
  • The final part of the Revenge of the Green Goblin story opens with Peter hallucinating being buried alive at his own funeral.
• Superman:
  • In a Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic, Jimmy and Superman go to a county fair where Superman demonstrating his powers will be part of the entertainment. The final trick involves Superman being sealed in a coffin, left underground for hours, and then dug up alive and well. However, when the coffin is lowered, we see Superman suffocating and crying that his powers are gone. When they dig him up, Jimmy and the townspeople are shocked and horrified to find Superman dead. And then another Superman arrives to investigate; as it turns out, the first Superman was actually a villain who had created an experimental serum to give himself Superman's powers. Making the serum, he experimented on gophers and inadvertently gave them power-nullifying radiation similar to Gold Kryptonite. When he was lowered into the ground, the gophers ended up burrowing nearby, cutting off his powers and causing him to suffocate.
  • Another, less complicated, version appears in issue 4; a crook lures Superman to a mine by pretending to be a miner whose partner got trapped by a cave-in. Once he's there, they incapacitate him with Kryptonite and entomb him. Fortunately, Jimmy, tracking what he was doing before his disappearance, finds and frees him.
  • In Supergirl (1982) #20, super-villain Parasite absorbs Supergirl's powers and throws her in a flying metal coffin which floats about a mile straight up from solid ground, using heat vision to seal her in.
  • In Supergirl (2005) storyline Way of the World, Supergirl has a nightmare where she is buried alive.
  • The K-Metal from Krypton: Art critic Daryl Bronson and gangster "Rocks" Gordon had made a deal to steal a painting hidding a map to a gold mine and split the profits. However, as soon as he has grabbed the paiting, Gordon tries to get Bronson murdered. Mad with rage, Bronson forces Gordon and his men at gunpoint to walk into the mine. He then blows up the entrance and decides to wait outside as they run out or air.
• Superman/Batman: In Public Enemies (2004), Metallo shoots Superman with a kryptonite bullet, and buries Superman and Batman alive. They escape, and Alfred removes the bullet.
• Terra: Atlee rescues a group of miners trapped in a tiny pocket of air in a collapsed mine.
• Roderick "Digger" Krupp was a gravedigger gone bad who, as the Horror Host of Tower of Shadows often told his macabre stories to victims while he was burying them alive. He softened a little after becoming a member of the Night Shift, switching to a version of the Sand Necktie to ensure they survived (given that the comics he now appeared in were under Code rules) at least in all witnessed cases.
• Wonder Woman: In Wonder Woman (1942) #5, Dr. Psycho tries to get rid of Wonder Woman by burying her in the grave that was meant to be his in the prison yard. She digs herself out almost instantly.
• Yellowjacket: The baddies of the first story in Yellowjacket Comics #4 lock our hero in a steel coffin and drop him in a river, making this an unusual case of being buried alive at sea.

Fairy Tales

• In "Maid Maleen", a princess and her servant are sealed away in a tower with no door or windows as a punishment when the former refuses to go through an arranged marriage. The king intended to get them out after seven years -expecting his daughter to be more "pliable" after her long captivity-, but he became unable to do so when his kingdom was destroyed by some enemy. If Maleen and her chambermaid had not decided to find a way to break through the wall when they were running out of food, they would have starved to death inside their giant tomb.
• "Reygoch": As exploring a maze of underground caves, Curlylocks removes a staff which happened to be keeping a pillar upright, accidentally causing a landslide and trapping her between walls of rock. Fortunately, her friend the giant Reygoch remembers about her and removes the boulders trapping her.
• In The Brothers Grimm tale "The Three Snake Leaves", the main character is buried alive with his wife when she dies, as per their pre-nuptial agreement.
  And as she lay there dead, the young King remembered what he had been obliged to promise, and was horrified at having to lie down alive in the grave, but there was no escape. The King had placed sentries at all the gates, and it was not possible to avoid his fate. When the day came when the corpse was to be buried, he was taken down into the royal vault with it and then the door was shut and bolted.

Fan Works

• In the Kim Possible fanfiction Buried Trilogy, a two-bit hood kidnaps Kim and buries her alive in order to get a job working for Drakken. Drakken is so disgusted by this action that he has Kim's abductor killed. This story starts dark and stays there as it deals with Kim dealing with the trauma of being buried alive in increasingly self-destructive ways. The sequel story The Chrysanthemum and the Sword deals with her recovery.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic "Coffin for Two", Darla decides to take care of Buffy and punish Angel into the bargain by burying them both in the same coffin after breaking Buffy's right arm, believing that this will force Angel to either watch Buffy suffocate or try to dig her out himself only to be destroyed once he reaches the surface and gets hit by the sun. Fortunately, they realise the coffin is buried close to an underground utility line, allowing Angel (with a minor strength boost from Buffy's blood) to dig them a path out that way.
• The Hogan's Heroes fanfic ''Darkness'' has Peter Newkirk not only encounter ghost lights and Weeping Angels but save a woman who was buried alive by her husband after he got tired of her domineering ways. Even Hochstetter, the die-hard Nazi Gestapo major, is horrified at the thought of what would have happened if Newkirk hadn't been there.
• In Flashpoint 2: Advent Solaris, Jessica Cruz, who's anxiety and shock by witnessing what happened to Oa in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War turned her into a Yellow Lantern, attempts to bury Lois Lane alive in the Metropolis cemetery as an act of revenge for all of those who died during the film either due to Lois Lane's perceived negligence/incompetence or in the aforementioned attack on Oa. Superman manages to prevent the burial from happening, but Lois is still absolutely shocked at how close she came to such a fate.
• In Glass (Bellamy Taft)'s sequel/AU, Shattered, once Pegasus has finally had enough of Seto he has him buried alive. Since Seto is already weak from months of inactivity and everyone else on the island is under Pegasus's thumb, there's no escape.
• Naruto does this to the demon Doraku in A Growing Affection. Since humans cannot kill demons, Naruto instead pins him to a cave wall and collapses the tunnel on Doraku instead.
• Jack Scanlon endures this during The Green Hornet fanfic The Hornet's Girl when she's held hostage by a group of gangsters who want to eliminate the Green Hornet. Thankfully, the Hornet, Kato and her brother manage to rescue her in the nick of time.
• Discussed in Imaginary Seas. After realizing that they were at an impasse due to their mutual Nigh-Invulnerability, Percy considers just burying Caenis alive under rocks and trees until she starves to death. He dismisses the thought when he remembers that Servants can simply disperse into Spirit Form.
• In Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail, this is a recurring theme about how people would want to bury their past instead of making peace with it or to torture someone.
  • After Goh called out Chloe's lack of drive to chase a dream, the narration notes that Chloe looked ready to bury Goh into a six-foot grave.
  • Lexi (a sentient book) was buried within the confines of his own car for eight years. Titus, his own father, is shocked to learned this because he permitted Lexi to leave with two passengers on their journey. Said passengers? Grace and Simon.
  • When Lexi wants to get revenge on Grace and Simon, Chloe recites a line from "The Mariner's Revenge Song" which involves throwing them into a hole and having the victims crawling at the ceiling of their graves.
  • When Chloe recites "A Gorey Demise" both times it ends on the lyric "E is for Erik who was buried alive". The beginning narration to "Buried Alive" is also played out in a later chapter and she has the Creature Feature cover for "Bury A Friend" as an alarm clock that represents her desire to end her friendship with Goh.
• In The Lion King Adventures, the immortal villain Shocker is buried alive by the Interceptor. This leaves him in a state of permanent death and resurrection.
• In Nor Iron Bars a Cage, Sailor John escapes from jail by hiding in the coffin of a deceased fellow inmate and being buried alongside him until another inmate digs him out. Since John is claustrophobic, this is not a good experience for him.
• Variant in Quicken: Emma was already dead when she was buried, but her power brought her back to life when she was lying in her coffin, and she had to dig her way out of her own grave.
• In Something Always Remains, this is Freddy Wickes' fate.

Films — Animation

• Jafar in Aladdin combines this with a Drowning Pit by sticking Jasmine into the bottom chamber of an enormous hourglass and letting the sand pour down.
• In Justice League: Doom, Bane does this to Batman after ambushing him and rendering him unconscious. As an added bonus, Bruce is buried in his father's coffin. And his father's skeletal corpse is still inside.
• This almost happens in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the Queen figured that once Snow White was apparently dead, her protectors, the Dwarfs, would accidentally ensure her real death by burying her alive. Fortunately, they don't have the heart to do so, instead putting her in an above-ground glass coffin.
• The title character of Tim Burton's Vincent, in the throes of one of his Vincent Price/Roger Corman/Poe fantasies, believes he's buried his wife alive, and digs up his mother's flower bed trying to "retrieve" her.

Films — Live-Action

• The Val Lewton film Bedlam. After Sims the evil master of Bedlam House is killed by one of his patients, the other patients resolve to wall up the body and make out as if Sims ran away. However, the final shot of Sims behind the wall shows his eyes flying open, revealing that he is still alive, right before the last brick is put in the wall.
• In Blood Simple, Ray does this to Marty, more out of panic — he's discovered that Marty's still alive after assuming Abby shot him to death — than sadism.
• The entire point of the film Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds plays a civilian contractor in Iraq who has been kidnapped by insurgents and, well, buried. The film follows his various attempts to secure a rescue via a cell phone with a dwindling battery.
• There were two Buried Alive movies, each one beginning with one spouse near-death by poisoning. A subsequent rushed funeral apparently skips autopsy and embalming (the killers veto the autopsies to make sure that no one discovers how they died). Later, the intended victim wakes up, digs their way out, and plots elaborate revenge.
  • At the end of the first film, the male protagonist buries his cheating wife alive in his grave, alongside the body of her boyfriend and the money that they were trying to steal. He avoided getting embalmed because his wife wanted him in the ground as soon as possible.
  • In the second film, the female protagonist is saved from her grave by the first film's protagonist (who later dies for real due to health problems caused by the poisoning). Miraculously, she avoided getting embalmed because of a machine malfunction despite her husband's orders. She gets her revenge on her conniving husband and his girlfriend by entombing them in a boat and sinking it. The film ends with the two, still trapped in the boat and still alive, uselessly screaming for help.
• In The Burrowers, the title monsters paralyze their victims and bury them up to their noses in dirt.
• In Cabin by the Lake, the serial killer in the movie who drowned numerous women escapes the authorities unpunished for his crimes and implies that he wants to start another murder spree where he buries women alive. In the sequel Return to Cabin by the Lake, he buries the director Mike Helton in a coffin six feet under while he relaxes in a chair seated on the ground on top of his victim while lighting some fireworks.
• At the end of The Candy Snatchers, a woman is buried alive... and a child with Down's Syndrome accidentally shoots her captors before they can either dig her up or inform anyone of where she is. Then the child walks away, quickly forgetting what just happened, condemning her to death. A rare effective Diabolus ex Machina.
• In Casino, Frank Marino and company do this to Dominic and Nicky after beating them senseless with baseball bats.
• The fate of Mike (Daniel Wu) in Cop on a Mission. The film actually begins with him being buried while bound and gagged, before a Whole Episode Flashback details how he got into this mess in the first place.
• In Crackers, Joey does this to himself after accidentally getting Bomber killed. He gets out shortly after.
• A Deadly Secret has this happening to Lady Ling huang-hua, buried alive by her father Master Ling when she tried to expose his conspiracy. The truth behind her demise is exposed when the hero Ding digs out her coffin... and realize her arms are propped upright against the lid.
• Diamonds Are Forever: Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint dump an unconscious James Bond in an oil pipeline under construction out in the desert. Bond gets out by short-circuiting a welding robot sent down the pipeline, so a repair crew will turn up and rescue him.
• In the movie Dirty Harry, Scorpio demands ransom from the city of San Francisco after he kidnaps a teenage girl. He claims that his prisoner only has enough air to last until 3:00 a.m. the following morning. When he gets the ransom, he says "I changed my mind. I'm going to let her die." When Harry Callahan catches up to Scorpio on a football field, he uses the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique to make him give up the girl's location, but when the police dig her up, it turns out that the poor girl's already dead.
• In Don't Say a Word, Patrick is buried alive in the New York cemetery when several tons of dirt collapse on him.
• Ashley Judd's duplicitous husband does this to her in Double Jeopardy. As she tries to follow her "son" through a cemetery, her husband comes up behind her, knocks her out, and drags her into a mausoleum. When she comes to, she is horrified to realize that she's been placed in a coffin.
• The Emperor and the Assassin: This is the fate of the children of the Zhao capital. All of Them. Their toys are scattered all over the surface of the city, and on closer inspection their fates are revealed.
• Faust: Love of the Damned: After John Jaspers refuses to aid the villain's plans, he has Jaspers captured and buried alive in an open grave.
• The movie Ghost Story begins with characters telling a scary story about a man buried alive and scratching at the inside of his coffin, yelling out "Still aliiiive...". And as it turns out, the titular ghost was killed when she was pushed and hit her head on the side of a fireplace. Her body was put inside a car, and the car dumped in a river... and then she woke up and started screaming for help just before the car was fully submerged. Even worse, out of the group of men responsible for her death, the one guy who tried to rescue her was held back by the other murderers.
• Ghost Town (1988): After torturing the sheriff, Devlin and his gang buried him alive just outside of town.
• The Ghoul: If you believe the doctor, Morlant was never actually dead, but merely in a cataleptic trance, and thus was entombed alive.
• The Gravedancers: During the Grave Robbing scene, Kira is imprisoned inside a coffin that is then slowly sucked into the earth. Later, when Harris attempt to deposit Emma's skull in the grave, he is pulled in as well and covered with dirt. Allison and Victor manage to dig him out.
• In Grim Prairie Tales, Colby gets sealed alive inside a burial mound by the tribe whose graveyard he desecrated.
• Guarding Tess: When the FBI and Secret Service raid the kidnappers' home and arrest them, they find Tess buried, but alive, beneath the floor of the farmhouse.
• The Big Bad in the movie Gunmen (played by Patrick Stewart) is shown having a woman buried alive at the beginning of the film, and he meets the same fate halfway through.
• Hellraiser: Hellworld A vengeful father has dosed the party-goers with a powerful hypnotic, and buried them in a row of coffins. He leaves them ventilation tubes so he can influence and listen in on their nightmarish hallucinations.
• In Highlander III: The Sorcerer, the villain Kane and his two immortal companions are buried inside Nakano's cave when it collapses after his death, with only Connor escaping. Since they're immortal they don't die however, and are incredibly pissed off when they are released centuries later.
• House of Usher had Roderick bury his sister alive, to keep her from marrying and perpetuating their cursed, criminal family line.
• By the end of The Houses October Built, four of the five protagonists are trapped in coffins buried in the middle of nowhere, with no chance of rescue. For additional sadism points, one of them is established early on as being extremely claustrophobic, meaning her last moments onscreen are spent in the grip of one hell of a panic attack.
• Budd does this to the Bride in Kill Bill: Volume 2. She escapes, though not without difficulty. What makes it really creepy, however, is that the entire Buried Alive scene is shown from the Bride's POV. Which means that several minutes of the movie consist of heavy breathing, the sound of sand falling onto the coffin, and total darkness. Interestingly, Budd gives her a flashlight when he does so as a sign of respect.
• In Kiss of the Tarantula, after Walter ends up paralyzed after a fall down the stairs, Susan (who pushed him down said stairs in self-defense) drags him into the basement and stuffs him into a sealed casket (she lives in a funeral home), which also turns out to be soundproof.
• In The Last Witch Hunter, this is what almost happens to 36th Dolan. Thankfully, Kaulder manages to realize that the man is cursed, not dead, before the funeral.
• Clyde Shelton from Law Abiding Citizen does this to the defense attorney who had secured an extremely lenient plea deal for his wife and daughter's murderer. The lawyer was kept unconscious with a sedative IV and was hooked up to enough oxygen that police could have saved him had they followed Clyde's demands to the letter. They're delayed by an Obstructive Bureaucrat warden so the lawyer suffocates.
• In A Lonely Place to Die five mountain climbers hear a voice yelling from inside the forest, and eventually find a breathing tube coming through the ground and dig up a young Serbian girl and get caught up in a kidnapping plot.
• Rawley, the main villain of Lone Wolf McQuade, orders his mooks to bury the badly beaten main character alive, using his own truck as his coffin. But McQuade manages to escape his earthly prison by showering himself with beer and engaging the Nitro Boost in his car.
• Possibly one of the most disturbing invocations of this trope is seen in Megan is Missing. At the end of the film, Amy, who has been kidnapped and put through hell by a truly sick internet predator, is promised by her captor to be released and reunited with her family, only to be stuffed into a barrel with the decomposing corpse of her best friend Megan, taken out into the woods, thrown into a hole and buried alive, all while she screams and pleads for her life. She's 14.
• Imhotep was wrapped up and buried alive in The Mummy (1932) for attempting to raise the dead Anck-Su-Namun. The Hammer Horror version has him get his tongue cut out first. The 1999 remake takes it further by burying him alive with flesh-eating scarabs.
• The Mummy: Ahmanet's elaborate and fancy "tomb" is, in fact, a Tailor-Made Prison, where she is interred as punishment for murder. Given her dark powers, quite a lot of effort is made into building it in order to hold her. (And naturally, the actions of the movie's protagonists result in her escaping.)
• In Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), Marot faked his suicide and used a deep breathing trick taught to him by Orsini to survive being buried.
• Played entirely for laughs in the South Korean romantic comedy My Sassy Girl. When Gyeon-Woo mentions that Koreans like melodramas and brings up the classic short story "Sonagi" ("Rain Shower"), the girl comments that "the ending sucked" and suggests her own. In the original story, the female lover requests to be buried in the dress reminiscent of her love. In the girl's version, she requests to be buried "with her loving friend," and we are then treated to a scene in which the male lover is carried, kicking and screaming, to the grave before he's thrown on top of the coffin. His attempts to crawl out are met with a shovel to the face. Can be seen here.
• In The Nun, it's pointed out that the old-fashioned graves at the convent included a bell on a wire that the occupant could ring to call for help if they had the misfortune to wake up underground. Sure enough, this becomes a plot point when Father Burke gets buried alive and tries to signal with the bell. Unluckily, the bells on all the other graves start ringing too, forcing Irene to use her psychic abilities to locate him.
• In the movie Oxygen 1999 a kidnapper (played by Adrien Brody) buries a rich woman alive and demands ransom from her husband within 24 hours.
• The Pit and the Pendulum takes this into Karmic Death territory when the wife who fooled her husband into thinking he'd entombed her prematurely ends up entombed prematurely for real, with all surviving cast believing she'd been dead all along.
• In The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), Torquemada has the papal envoy walled up alive in the cellar (in a scene from a completely different Poe story). Later, Torquemada believes Maria is dead and seals her up inside a tomb.
• The Premature Burial ends with the main character seeing his worst fears realized.
• In The Prestige Robert Angier does this to Alfred Borden's assistant, both for revenge, and to keep him busy digging him out instead of going after him.
• In Romeo is Bleeding, this is the fate of the mob boss. He's also forced to dig his own grave.
• In Relative Fear, this is the fate of poor Chubby the Evil-Detecting Dog, who is buried in the front yard with his mouth tied shut.
• In Scare Campaign, the Masked Freaks seal Abby in an airtight coffin and bury her: telling Emma and Marcus that her air will last for maybe five minutes.
• The '70s Made-for-TV Movie The Screaming Woman concerned a wealthy woman who hears screams emanating from beneath the grounds of her estate and realizes someone has been buried alive there, but cannot get anyone to believe her.
• In the film The Serpent and the Rainbow, an anthropologist goes to Haiti to explore the phenomenon of real-life "zombies": people who have been drugged into catatonic states, buried, and then resurrected to work as slaves. He gets an uncomfortably up-close and personal lesson on what the experience is like.
• Society of the Snow. An avalanche in the middle of a blizzard hits the crashed airplane the survivors are using for shelter, forcing them to scramble to uncover the faces of those buried in the snow before they suffocate. Right after they've done this, they get hit by another avalanche that buries the shelter completely. They're able to evacuate an air hole, but are stuck under the snow for four days until the blizzard stops. Several people suffocate before they can be freed, and the trapped survivors are forced to eat their bodies (which they'd already been forced to do, but previously they'd kept the cutting up of the corpses out of sight of the others to spare their feelings, something they can no longer do).
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: "I've done far worse than kill you. I've hurt you. And I wish to go on hurting you. I shall leave you, as you left me... as you left her. Marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet— buried alive!" Little does Khan know that Kirk is playing him, and that leaving him there is the best way to guarantee that Kirk survives.
• Tales of Terror: In "The Black Cat", Montressor shackles Fortunato and Isabel to the wall of the cellar and then bricks them up alive.
• Talon Falls: Late in the movie, the pig-masked employee is chasing Lyndsey through a mine tunnel. He swings his axe at her, but only chops into a couple support beams. Doing so causes him to be buried under a pile of rocks. He manages to dig out of them, though.
• In Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, the villain meets his end when he's trapped in a room that is rapidly filling with gold dust. What makes it especially blood-curdling is that the chief of the village, who trapped him in there, is standing outside the door listening for him to stop screaming.
• The Three Musketeers (2023): In Part I, D'Artagnan is left for dead after the fight where he attempted to save the noblewoman from Milady and her goons, and the tavern owner with a peg leg is tasked to bury the bodies. Fortunately for D'Artagnan, he's not in a coffin nor buried too deep and has no body over him, and thus gets out of the ground pretty easily.
• This accidentally happens to the doctor's wife in Tremors when one of the Graboids drags the car she is hiding in underground.
• True Legend (2010): In the second act, The Hero had his wife kidnapped by the Big Bad, who had her sealed in a wooden box and buried, and our hero had to defeat his enemy and find his wife before she suffocates completely. Spoiler alert, she didn't make it.
• Twice-Told Tales: In "The House of Seven Gables", Gerald traps Alice in the basement grave of Mathew Maulle, then goes to the study to find the vault.
• The fate of Matias in one of the endings of Unfriended: Dark Web. To make it worse, his girlfriend Amaya is standing on top of where he's buried but because she's deaf she can't hear his screams for help and to twist the knife further, the antagonists interfere with Matias' other communication attempts: blurring his mouth so Amaya can't read his lips during a video call and changing his texts to say "I wish I could sign better" to further taunt him.
• One of the victims in Uncle Sam is knocked unconscious with spray paint, has his leg broken, and is knocked into an empty grave, which is then filled in.
• Pretty much the whole point of the movie The Vanishing, and its Dutch original film and book, which are Spoorloos and Het Gouden Ei, respectively. It's only revealed at the very end, too.
• In Walled In, this is combined with the Drowning Pit method as a form of Human Sacrifice in which people are imprisoned inside hollow building columns that are then filled with cement until the victim suffocates. The opening scene depicts a little girl ending up as one such victim.
• This is averted in What Did You Do In The War Daddy. Captain Cash is mistaken for a German Colonel who is believed to be dead, and while he is unconscious, he is put in a coffin for burial. But when the Germans bury the coffin, it falls through into the catacombs beneath the city, the coffin breaks, and Captain Cash wakes up and climbs out unharmed.
• Young Sherlock Holmes: After being shot with the hallucinogenic dart, Elizabeth has a hallucination where she is lying in a open grave and her uncle starts filling it in; shoveling the dirt on top of her.

Folklore

• Happens to Sindbad the Sailor in the Arabian Nights account of his fourth voyage. He'd won over and wed the princess of a faraway kingdom, but when his bride died unexpectedly, Sindbad was sealed up in the catacombs so he could join her in death. (Not buying into this local tradition, he looted the burial vaults and escaped.)
• Some versions of the Bloody Mary legend had Mary as a girl who was buried alive after being mistakenly pronounced dead by a doctor when she took sick and fell into a deep coma, the truth only being revealed when the family dug up her grave and found Mary dead, but with numerous scratches on the inside of the coffin lid and her fingernails bloody from trying to claw her way out of her coffin.
• In the English Fairy Tale "The Buried Moon", as you can predict, the Moon is trapped on earth by evil spirits and buried in a nasty bog.
• Stories abound in Europe of "The Lady With the Ring", about a woman who was prematurely buried after falling into a coma. She was hastily buried wearing a valuable ring, and her burial place was raided by a grave robber who tried to cut off a finger in order to get the ring... only to die of fright when he woke the not-quite-dead woman! In some versions of the story, the robber merely flees in terror, and it's the woman's husband who dies of fright upon answering the door to see his recently-buried wife.

Gamebooks

• In Book 15 of the Lone Wolf series, The Darke Crusade, High Warlord Magnaarn traps Lone Wolf inside an underground temple, which he then brings down on the hero. Lone Wolf isn't killed by the collapse but is buried alive and has to tunnel a way out during sixteen days with only the food and water he was carrying. He still survives thanks to his Magnakai powers and determination, but is severely weakened by the ordeal.

Jokes

• The Glorious Mother Russia version, based on the "Sarah O'Bannon" Creepypasta found in Web Original:
  In Russia, coffin has pipe for air, and bell with string. If man is true Soviet, he does not die. When buried, yells for undertaker and rings bell. Bell rings. Is no wind.
  Undertaker asks, "Are you Lady Gorbochev?"
  Voice says "Da!"
  "Born winter of 1927?"
  "Da!"
  "Gravestone says 'Died 20 February, 1957'"
  "Nyet, am still living!"
  "Am sorry, but is August. In June, ground will thaw. You must wait for June."
  And woman is true Soviet, waits for June.
• A gravedigger is giving a tour of his cemetery.
  "And over here we have Timothy Carter, who in 1850 decided to set the record for longest time spent buried alive."
  "How long did he last?"
  "Well he hasn't come up yet, so they can't declare him the winner."

Literature

Authors

• Edgar Allan Poe was fond of this, as it was one of his own personal Author Phobias:
  • "The Premature Burial", for one, published back in 1850. In fact, it was so common in the bad horror literature of the time that this story is actually a parody. It ends with the reveal that the narrator freaks out over waking up in a confined shipboard bunk, then stops reading "bugaboo tales -- such as this" and gets a life. His catalepsy turns out to be all in his head. However, the story scared readers so much, caskets were built with a button that could be pressed to cause a flag to pop up in case someone was indeed buried alive!
  • The Fall of the House of Usher, which had the insane Roderick Usher accidentally entombing his sister alive in the family vaults.
  • The Cask of Amontillado, in which the narrator exacts a Disproportionate Retribution upon Fortunato by getting him drunk and immuring him within his own family vaults.
  • "Berenice", in which burial alive is not the worst thing which happens to the title character... considering she is dug out and found to be alive, not consecutively.
  • In The Black Cat, the protagonist ends up murdering his wife in a fit of fury directed at the title cat, and "buries" her in his basement wall. When the police inspect his house, they're led to the tomb by the cat's screams, the protagonist having buried it alive with her without noticing it.

Individual works

• 1066 and All That implies this happened somehow to Edward I, who "died of suffocation at a place called Burrow-in-the-Sands."
• Exploited in Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code. Mulch Diggums, a dwarf whose entire race can dig through the dirt using only their jaws and hands and breathe while doing so, convinces two dumb henchmen to do this to him. Needless to say, he has a good laugh about it afterwards. Hell, he has a good laugh during the burial, which he passes off as "shaking in fear". Right, Mulch.
• David Eddings had his sorcerer Belgarath do this, near the end of the The Belgariad: Zedar the apostate was Buried Alive for eternity in the center of the earth for a millennia-long life of crimes, the last one being the brutal murder of Belgarath's daughter's beloved mate Durnik. Belgarath later said "Whenever I wonder if I went too far with him, I remember what that bastard did to Queen Ilessa of Nyissa".^{what he did}Knowing that Nyissian queens have a high fear of death and aging (because they're executed once they no longer look young), he bribed her with a false promise of immortality to have the King of Riva assassinated, knowing full well it would cause a retaliatory war that would devastate her country and get her killed. He also mentions in his own spin-off books that details his origin that if he could ever confirm his suspicions that Zedar was involved in the suicides of two of their fellow Aldur followers, he would put him somewhere even less pleasant than where he is now.
• In The Black Spider, the eponymous immortal monster kills people and beasts indiscriminately until a woman manages to lure it into a hole in a wooden beam; then she hammers a peg into the hole to seal it away forever.
• In Tanya Huff's Blood Books series, vampire Henry Fitzroy started his unlife buried alive for three days before his sire could dig him up. Several hundred years later, this is still a Very Unpleasant Memory.
• An interesting take on this trope came from The Count of Monte Cristo when Edmond makes his escape from the prison. He plans to switch places with the body of his friend and mentor and once he is buried in the shallow grave, dig himself out. He has to change his plans rather quickly when, instead of burying him, the guards proceed to chuck him over a cliff into the ocean.
• The Criminal Minds book Killer Profile mentions a serial killer whose MO was burying his victims in homemade coffins, which had pipes leading to the surface, so they could breathe. The guy also enjoyed giving his victims false hope by leaving them with a bit of water and hammer they could try and escape with.
• Discworld:
  • A variation of the trope occurred in The Light Fantastic. One particularly old wizard was not at all interested in a close encounter with Death, so he'd holed himself up in a box that nobody and nothing could get into once it was shut. Including light and, more importantly, air.
    Death: DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT?
  • Windle Poons from Reaper Man got a taste of this trope, but only a small one, as he was a zombie when his University colleagues buried him. Lack of oxygen wasn't a bother, but he got so bored and fed up with the situation that he soon dug his way out again.
  • Nearly happens to Ptraci in Pyramids, when she's condemned to be entombed alive in the crypt of Pteppic's father. She was intended to be entombed with him dead, the better to serve him in the afterlife, but refused to drink the poison offered by the funerary priests.
  • It's off-handedly mentioned in The Discworld Companion that the Big Bad of Witches Abroad "has buried three husbands, at least two of whom were already dead."
• The protagonist of the Stephen King story "Dolan's Cadillac" (found in Nightmares & Dreamscapes) does this to the title character as revenge for the murder of the protagonist's wife. Directly inspired by Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado", to the point that the antagonist breaks down screaming "For the love of God!", which the protagonist then quietly repeats. Dolan, however, is far more deserving of his fate than Fortunato.
• Part of the backstory of the Dr. Gideon Fell novel The Hollow Man/The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr was a jailbreak by Buried Alive. There was a plague epidemic going on in that prison, and the escaper counted on the burial detail being in too big a hurry for little details like nailing the coffin lid tightly or shoveling very much dirt on top.
• Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels mention the Spell of Forlorn Encystment, which keeps its victims alive indefinitely inside solid rock some sixty kilometers underground. A few victims are accidentally released and found to be in near-catatonic states.
• Egil's Saga: When King Herlaug of Namdal hears that Harald Finehair is preparing to conquer Namdal, he, together with eleven of his men, enters a newly-built gravemound, and "[t]he mound was closed after them." The End.
• The book Elephant Run by Roland Smith has the very rare voluntary version, where Nick's father is buried alive with a hollow cross to breathe through to keep him hidden from the invading soldiers. He puts on a brave face for his children, but staying so long like that has clearly rattled him.
• The villain in the young adult novel The Executioner attempted this on the protagonist in revenge for his brother's death, but was stopped by his father before he could finish.
• The short story "The Extension" deals with a man who's so afraid of being Buried Alive that his funeral arrangements include a phone line to his crypt in case the coroner misdiagnosed him. His worst fear comes true, and the whole story has him desperately calling everyone, trying in vain to convince them that he's Not Quite Dead. Ultimately, Fridge Logic hits and he asks the operator how long they'll keep the line connected, and is assured the service will remain indefinitely. He realises this is probably his personal Hell, but also that he's got to keep calling and trying to get out...
• This was the Queen's goal in Fairest of All: A Tale of the Wicked Queen. She'd put Snow White into a death-like sleep then have her buried alive. Alas, the Queen's plans went wrong.
• In Fengshen Yanyi:
  • In order to save his future disciple Wu Ji from being executed for an accidental murder, Jiang Ziya performs a ritual to alter his fate so that the wise Duke Ji Chang's divination will consider him dead. To do so he has to dig a squared hole in the ground, lit candles around it and put Wu Ji inside, covering him with leaves and dirt while he marches around the hole, pronouncing spells. The trick works and Wu Ji is allowed to live unmolested.
  • Because Destiny Says So, King Wu of Xiqi has to enter the deadly Red Sand Formation, where he's buried in the deadly sand for a hundred days alongside Nezha and Leizhenzi. He actually suffers a Disney Death, but thanks to Ran Deng's spells his body is preserved and he's brought back to life by the other taoists.
• It happens a few times in Galaxy of Fear. People are repeatedly killed in Eaten Alive by the ground swallowing them. In City of the Dead there's an interesting version of this trope — Dr. Evazam, experimenting with zombiemaking, injected a still very alive Zak with the revival serum and a poison designed to put him into a coma so deep it looked like death.
• The Garden of Evening Mists: This is the fate of Yun Hong and the other prisoners — and most of the guards — associated with Golden Lily. They dug mines to hide the stolen treasures, and when Japan surrenders, the camp leaders herd them into the mines then blow up the entrances.
• Dutch novel The Golden Egg has a girl undergo this treatment when travelling Europe. Her boyfriend spends the rest of the novel trying to find out where she is until at the end he meets his girlfriend's killer, and says he'd do anything to find out what happens to her. The killer proceeds to drug him and bury him as well.
• In The Golden Hamster Saga book Freddy to the Rescue, Freddy is in a field hamster burrow when a bulldozer drives right overhead, causing the tunnel to cave in around him. He tries to dig himself out but soon becomes exhausted. He's eventually rescued by Enrico and Caruso.
• In The Great Train Robbery, the characters exploit the fear of being buried alive for their benefit. Because it was a serious concern at the time, coffins were rigged with bells and escape latches and such which would pop open if the person moved around inside the coffin. They fake a dead body and have the coffin open on the platform, grossing out the police inspector who otherwise would have searched it and found the hidden man.
• Idlewild sees Maestro do this to Halloween. In Maestro's defense, he claimed that it was intended to break Halloween's problem with authority and that Maestro would release him later.
• The Jonah: Having fallen into a grain silo, Detective Constable Jim Kelso and hired thug Bannen struggle to avoid this; the latter tries to inflict it on the former.
• Journey to the West: after being defeated by Buddha, Sun Wukong has a whole mountain composed of the five elements dropped on him, leaving him buried in the earth with only his face and hands poking out of the side. Five hundred years later, he's released by Tripitaka to aid him in his journey.
• A Master of Djinn: Fatma is trapped under rubble along with Abigail and Siti near the end, though not for long since people hear them underneath, digging everyone out.
• Miles Taylor and the Golden Cape: This happens to General Breckenridge in "Rise Of The Robot Army" when his base comes down on top of him.
• Millennium Series: In The Girl Who Played with Fire, this happens to Lisbeth Salander after she survives being shot in the head. She digs her way out with a cigarette case and then shoves an axe through the face of the man who put her there.
• In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean arranges for himself to be buried alive in order to get out of the convent in which he's hiding. Due to unforeseen circumstances, it doesn't go as smoothly as planned; he passes out from lack of air and freaks out the gardener who's agreed to dig him up.
• Ambrosio keeps Antonia in a tomb for a while in The Monk to secret her away before he rapes her.
• Used in the Mary Higgins Clark book Moonlight Becomes You, which starts out with the protagonist buried alive and desperately pulling one of the aforementioned bells to signal for help. The story then flashes between the present and to several weeks earlier, showing how she came to this fate and leaving the reader to decipher who her would-be killer is, all the while inserting her frantic efforts to remain conscious until help arrives, which it does at the last minute.
• The Nature of Predators: When an alien fleet bombs Earth and specifically target bunkers, some of the bunkers survived, others were destroyed, and still others particularly the bunker where Marcel's wife and Nulia are, suffered the upper areas collapsing and sealing the occupants inside.
• In Ken Seibert's Night Burial, the protagonist Terry, with the aid of his friend, decides to spend the night in a makeshift coffin buried in a cemetery, initially excited at the thought. Unfortunately, things go not quite as planned: it's quite hot in the coffin and he put on too many layers with no way to get rid of them in the uncomfortably tight space he has to spend the night in with no way to get out unassisted. The story ends with a stranger mistakenly thinking that his tube to the surface — which provides him with air — is a makeshift flower vase and stuffs it with flowers out of respect for what she believes to be a newly passed-on soul.
• In Ollie's Odyssey, Zozo is buried when the Tunnel Of Love collapses on him. When it kills him, he's ultimately reunited with the spirit of the ballerina that he loved.
• The short story "One Summer Night" by Ambrose Bierce involves a man who's been buried alive (albeit pretty chill about it), a couple of students from a nearby medical college, and the cemetery keeper they've hired to dig up corpses for them to experiment on...
• Recommended by the Dead Man as a potentially-effective execution method by which the contagious Serial Killer curse might be stopped in Red Iron Nights. Averted when Garrett finds another solution that prevents the curse from jumping into a nearby potential host when its bearer is killed.
• In Reprisal, Danny Gordon. In Crisscross, set in the same Verse, the villainous upper echelons of the Dormentalist Church have been burying cult members alive worldwide at the Otherness's behest.
• In Rogue Male it looks as if this will be the fate of the hunter-turned-hunted protagonist when he is tracked down and trapped in the secret den he dug as a last refuge, scarcely bigger than a coffin.
• In the second novel of The Shadow, one of The Shadow's helpers is buried alive by the villains despite the fact that the villains have killed and buried all previous visitors to their house. Harry is rescued by The Shadow, who tunnels sideways into the grave from a nearby tomb.
• Shadows of the Empire: Xizor recalls how one of his mistresses wouldn't break it off when he wanted to, with her ending up "accidentally" buried in concrete by a construction droid.
• In The Sharing Knife: Horizon, Fawn Bluefield is buried alive when the talisman that protects her from malices burns through so much of her life energy that she appears dead to anyone without groundsense. (Less traumatic than most instances, since she's unconscious the whole time.) However, one person with groundsense may have realized she was alive and allowed her to be buried out of jealousy. The others were just trying to give her a proper burial.
• In one Stephanie Plum book, Stephanie is trapped in a coffin by the bad guy. The coffin isn't actually buried but Stephanie doesn't know that and reacts as such.
• In David Gemmell's The Swords of Night and Day, Queen Jianna buries an advisor alive inside a large stone chamber after he speaks his mind too freely. She later decides to reverse the decision, but by the time he's dug up he'd found a way to hang himself.
• In Trigger Mortis, a villain with a knack for making people choose their fates with a deck of cards has James Bond being put into a box and buried alive. Luckily, he managed to sneak a knife with him, which allows him to dig his way out of the slow suffocating death.
• In Völsunga saga, evil King Siggeir has Sigmund and Sinfjotli entombed alive in a gravemound.
• Warrior Cats has quite a few:
  • Oakheart in Into the Wild.
  • Hollyleaf in Sunrise, though she is later revealed to have survived in The Forgotten Warrior
  • Tallstar's Revenge mentions, though never shows, the death of Leafshine in a collapsing tunnel, and later Sandgorse is killed in a collapsing tunnel while trying to save Sparrow.
• This happens to the main character of What Happened to Cassie McBride, though if it is meant to kill her or torture her is up to reader interpretation.

Live-Action TV

• 1000 Ways to Die: In "Dung For", this accidentally happens to a farm hand after he is caught having sex with the Farmer's Daughter.
• Early in the seventh season of 24, Jack and Tony are working undercover with a mercenary organization to discover who hired them, but are found out by FBI Agent Walker. To keep their cover up, Jack fakes killing her, but they're still under watch and on orders to get rid of the body, so he and Tony have to do this to her to keep suspicions down.
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents:
  • The classic episode, "Breakdown", has Joseph Cotton paralyzed in a car accident and taken for dead. He is saved at the last minute when an alert coroner notices a tear glimmering in his eye.
  • The '80s version of the show had an episode where a woman tried to escape from prison by hiding in the coffin the next time someone at the prison dies. Unfortunately, the next to die is the man who was supposed to dig her up. Worse yet, she doesn't find out until after they're buried. This one is a remake of an episode from the original series, with Roddy McDowall as the prisoner.
• Alias:
  • In the final episode, Sloane, who has become somewhat immortal due to a Rambaldi thingy, has this happen to him. He's trapped in a cave with his legs pinned after Jack (a good guy) blows himself up.
  • Sydney herself had this happen to her as well in a previous episode, leaving Marshall to find out her location before she suffocates.
• A rare example of a hero doing this to a villain on All My Children, which had the evil Dr.Madden buried alive while the voice of his unseen abductor tormented him, refusing to release him until he revealed the location of a missing child. This went on for several days before the man finally drowned when a rainstorm flooded the vent that had been providing him with oxygen.
• In 1993, on Days of Our Lives, crazy Vivian hated Carly so much that she injected Carly with some Chinese herbs, forcing her into a seemingly dead state, had an open casket funeral with all Carly's loved ones, buried her with a radio to taunt her, some water and enough oxygen to prolong the slow torture and the rolled over her grave, laughing. Carly was saved just in time, though she seems quite traumatized by it all to this day. Not that we can blame her.
• Angel:
  • This was done to a previous occupant of Cordelia's apartment. In the apartment walls!
  • Connor welds Angel into a metal box and drops him to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean at the end of season 3. This doesn't kill Angel, since he's immortal and doesn't need to breathe, but instead makes him weak and insane from hunger. Of course, this was kind of the point.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?: "Tale of the Dream Machine" features this happening to one of the characters.
• In Being Human (US), being buried alive is used as a form of punishment for vampires. Their nature means they won't suffocate or be crushed by the soil, but they will grow very weak and slowly go insane from hunger. Suren was buried alive for over 80 years, and Season 2 ends with Aidan buried alive.
  • The original series really takes this up to eleven. Ghost Alex is trapped in her own coffin by [The Devil and buried alive as the cliff-hanger to the final episode. However, as it's her own coffin, she is trapped in their with her own body, which is in the state you'd expect given she died a year ago. Yikes.
• Big Wolf on Campus. When Merton discovers that Corey Haim is a real vampire, Corey knocks him out and buries him. Merton phones Tommy, whose werewolf senses are sharp enough to pick up where he is.
• In one episode of Blindspot, Jane is kidnapped and spends most of the episode buried in a wooden coffin with only a cell phone and flashlight and must use the clues of her environment (dirt, wildlife, any local sound) to help the team locate her.
• Bones:
  • Temperance Brennan and Jack Hodgins are buried alive in a car by a kidnapper/serial killer called the Gravedigger.
  • They'd previously helped identify the remains of twin boys who'd died after the Gravedigger left them buried alive inside a metal tank. As the name implies, this villain's M.O. was to subject victims to this trope, then demand a ransom in return for information on where they were buried.
• One episode of Boomtown (2002) featured the body of a dead fraternity pledge wrapped in plastic and hidden within the walls of a house. Investigation of former friends eventually reveals that he was knocked out dead during a hazing ritual and his freaked-out friends wrapped the body in plastic and hid him inside the walls. Only near the end of the episode is the awful truth revealed: The man was alive when they hid him inside the walls and the last shot of the episode shows a flashback from his POV, waking up inside the walls, wrapped in plastic and unable to have his screams heard because of the loud rap music
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the Season 1 episode "Nightmares", the residents of Sunnydale have their nightmares literally come true, so Buffy is buried alive. Rumor has it that this trope is one of Sarah Michelle Gellar's greatest fears. Apparently, Joss Whedon does not settle for merely tormenting his characters. In season 6, Buffy is brought back to life after already being buried, but since her friends think the spell didn't work, they don't bother to dig her coffin up. She has to dig her way out, something she clearly finds traumatizing.
  • Also, since vampires die when they are sired before they rise again, they are often buried and forced to dig themselves out when they wake up.
• CSI.
  • Nick in "Grave Danger." He's trapped in a clear plastic box, so the dirt around him is clearly visible, with a few glow sticks and a gun to kill himself with. There's a webcam the CSI crew can watch him on, which turns on powerful lights; unbeknownst to his friends, they draw from the same power supply as the fan giving him fresh air, so their attempts to not leave him in the dark end up nearly suffocating him. He eventually uses the gun to shoot the lights — which ends up not only leaving slowly spreading cracks in the walls of the box, threatening to break apart and let dirt bury him, but also lets a colony of fire ants find him. He is rescued, though not until he's suffered quite a lot.
  • An early Victim of the Week gets buried alive by her lover, though it was originally a Faked Kidnapping... until the guy turned on her. She gets arrested along with him.
  • A case in season 6's "Up in Smoke" leads to another body that was found sealed into a recently expanded brick chimney wall. Catherine and Sara make reference to Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado when they realize the victim wasn't dead yet when she was being sealed up.
• An episode of CSI: Miami has the Victim of the Week wake up buried in wooden coffin...which turns out to be on construction site grounds...and a drill slowly descends down breaking through the coffin...
• CSI: NY: One Victim of the Week in "Boo" conspires with his wife to collect his life insurance and she has him buried alive after a fake funeral. However, it turns out she had an affair with the doctor who helped them fake his death. The wife and the doctor planned to let him die for real in his coffin, but the victim manages to dig himself out and inject both of them with tetrodotoxin before succumbing to a head wound the doctor gave him in the struggle.
• One episode of Carnivàle has this happen to Ben after he is robbed by some backwoods hicks who turn out to be his cousins. They hastily dig him up after realizing their error.
• Cold Case:
  • There was an episode where a teenage boy had been buried alive. The killer in question walks into the station 20-something years later to confess to the murder—and reveal that he has just buried another victim. The episode is spent trying to determine his motives for both attacks and find the second victim before he suffocates (fortunately, they find him).
  • Also the MO of serial killer "John Smith", who kills his victims (after weeks of psychological torture) by entombing them in the cells where they've been held.
• Control Z: Ernesto and Dario are buried in a coffin together by the avenger in Season 2. They manage to get located and rescued in time before their air runs out.
• Criminal Minds:
  • In the episode "Scared to Death", there was a killer who, under guise of "getting you over your phobia," trapped you in your worst fear and then waited until you scared yourself to death. The final victim was a bit more direct cause of near-death — and this was the trope to do it, too. Instead of the usual way of doing it (in a grave), he drops the victim down a shaft and then pours bags of potting soil down it. The soil eventually went over her head, leading to this.
  • In the episode "Revelations", the killer forced Reid to start digging his own grave so he could bury him alive. The BAU saves the day, though.
• One episode of Crossing Jordan involved a serial killer who buries his victims alive — with a walkie-talkie so he can hear their dying pleas. Shudder. Of course Jordan ends up buried before the episode is over.
• Dark Shadows:
  • Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Barnabas Collins bricks the witch-hunter Reverend Trask up in a wall a la "The Cask of Amontillado". This comes back to haunt him (literally) a century later when his ghost breaks free.
  • Barnabas himself was trapped in his chained-shut coffin back in colonial times by his father, who couldn't bring himself to drive a stake through his vampiric son's heart. Presumably Barnabas wasn't conscious during the intervening centuries, as he isn't a raving basket case when a would-be tomb robber unchains him.
• Dinosaurs features this in "The Last Temptation of Ethyl," when Earl's mother-in-law seemingly dies at home. He's all too eager to get her in the ground and buries her in the backyard. It turns out Ethyl's not actually dead, but is having a near death experience and shown a glimpse of the afterlife. As Earl's trying to explain to Fran that her mother was definitely dead, Ethyl emerges covered in dirt and weeds. It seems premature burial's a common enough occurrence they make greeting cards for it, which is why Earl tries to use one as a halfassed apology.
  Earl: Now come on, Frannie! They wouldn't make this kind of card if it didn't happen all the time.
  Fran (in a tone of long suffering exasperation and exhausted rage): You buried my mother alive, Earl.
  Earl: I did a bad thing yesterday! I said I was sorry now let's move on!
  Fran: She had to claw her way out from under FIFTEEN FEET OF TIGHTLY PACKED DIRT.
• Done in EastEnders. There were widespread complaints due to this going out pre-Watershed, which were upheld by Ofcom.
• Endeavour:
  • In "Fugue", the opera Theme Serial Killer buries one of his victims alive to match the heroine's death in Aida (Verdi).
  • In "Degüello", Max discovers concrete in a victim' sinsuses, mouth and lungs, meaning he was still alive the killers dropped into the wet concrete of a building's foundation.
• The Following: In the penultimate season 1 episode, Debra Parker is tied up and thrown in a coffin by a couple of cultists, who proceed to bury it while she screams for help.
• The "king" of Qarth in Game of Thrones gets this ending. He's locked in a rather spacious treasure vault with his girlfriend, and no food or water. This is a rare heroic version of it, as they both truly deserved it. He sold out his honored guests to someone who not only killed the town leaders, but tried to steal their dragons (and either kill them or keep them there forever); she betrayed the mistress she'd sworn to serve for life by helping him do it. They did all of this under the guise of trying to help the heroes, when they really wanted was riches with which to fill said vault)...making this very much a Karmic Death.
• General Hospital: Ryan Chamberlain faked his death to escape from the asylum.
• In an episode of Good Vs Evil, Chandler is buried alive by Morlocks, and spends most of the episode talking to Henry on his cell, going over the details of the previous night, hoping to figure out where he is. He's being used as a hostage, so that the Corps will release a Morlock prisoner: Emmanuel Lewis.
• Harrow: In "Sub Silentio" ("In Silence"), Harrow attempts to dig up Francis Chester's grave in order to prove Chester is still alive. Chester overpowers Harrow and injects him with a fast acting anesthetic. When Harrow wakes up, he is inside the coffin, and since his request for an exhumation was denied and he's been suspended so isn't expected at work, no one even knows he's missing and he knows no rescue is coming. Chester leaves him a cell phone, but it's locked so Harrow can't make outgoing calls, and Chester proceeds to not only call Harrow to taunt him, but make video calls showing Harrow's daughter Fern. Since Chester's MO is to paralyze his male victims, then kill the female victim while they watch helplessly, Harrow knows where this is headed for hours before the final attack. Fern escapes, and Chester's MO is so ingrained he has to dig Harrow up so he can try again later.
• The "Pahele" episode of Hawaii Five-0 has a group of kidnappers doing this to an entire school bus full of children.
• Heroes:
  • In a rare example of a hero doing this, Hiro assures the other heroes that the immortal Adam Monroe will never hurt another person. Cut to Adam screaming in a coffin, buried in the same cemetery where Hiro's father who Adam killed, was interred.
  • Also, as retribution for all the crimes he had committed against not just the world, but Parkman's wife only minutes before, Parkman locks Sylar in his own mind, alone and powerless. Not only that, to prevent anyone from finding him and trying to help, he seals Sylar up behind a wall in his basement. Not only THAT, while Sylar was trapped in his own mind doomed to wander New York City alone forever, his super fast brain had an increased perception of time, making every second he spent in reality feel like days. Even though he got better and was really only buried alive for about half an hour, over three years had passed in his mind.
  • In the final seasons, Samuel buries Claire and Noah together in an RV underground, so that Claire can watch Noah suffocate and die.
• A couple of implied instances in Highlander:
  • Nefertiri took poison and was mummified after the death of Cleopatra. As far as the audience knows, she stayed unconscious for all 2000 years until set free by Duncan MacLeod.
  • Quentin Barnes was executed for murder 30 years ago and was accidentally freed by a construction project. It turns out Barnes was the split personality of Duncan's friend Michael Moore. Moore experienced those years as a nightmare.
  • Another Immortal, a Nazi, was "killed" with a pitchfork, wrapped in chains and tossed into a river during World War II. It took him 50 some years to free himself and come back for revenge.
  • Due to the nature of the show, there are several more where someone "died" and was buried, only to recover once they're in the ground.
• Homicide: Life on the Street had a variant, where the victim had been entombed behind a basement wall. Munch and Howard are able to determine he had survived for at least a week before succumbing to starvation from the scratches on the wall. The episode ends with his guilt-ridden killer trapping himself behind the same wall.
• Hotel Beau Séjour: Kato is buried alive near the climax, although it is unclear whether the villain did this deliberately, or whether he tried to kill her first and she just got better.
• In The Incredible Hulk (1977), David Banner faced one of his most horrific situations when he is confused for a lookalike gangster and rival gangsters capture him, ignore his protests that they have the wrong man and take him to a construction site. There, they force him into a shallow grave, put a sheet of clear plastic on him and pour concrete on him to bury him alive. When you see that kind of murder method, you're on the edge of your seat until the very last image of Banner just before his head is covered is his eyes going green to start his change into the Hulk.
• JAG: Mentioned in the 3rd season episode "Vanished". The villain orders one of his underlings to kill the hostage and bury them in the woods. The underling seems to interpret this literally by asking if they are to be buried alive. The villain replies by saying he’s not heartless and he can shoot them first.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • A copycat serial killer kidnaps the only surviving victim of the original killer. He locks her in an old fridge with an air tank and holds her for his bargaining chip when the detectives finally catch him.
  • In another episode, a pedophile buries the little girl he has kidnapped just before the SVU investigators catch up with him. They dig her up just in time.
  • In "Harm" a cop turned defense attorney tells Casey Novak that the case that ended his police career involved a young girl being buried alive: he had tortured the suspect for the girl's location, and as a result, all the evidence was thrown out in court. However, as the girl was found alive, he makes it very clear he still believes he did the right thing.
• In The League of Gentlemen, Herr Lipp buried Justin to stop him telling anyone about his peculiar habits. Don't worry, he left him a straw.
• Parodied in the second season of Le cœur a ses raisons when Brett survived more than an entire week in an underground coffin. He managed to single-handedly escaped thanks to his "manly tote bag".
• Leverage:
  • Parker did this to herself once as a child to cure herself of a fear. She thought it was a normal thing to do. The team told her it was not.
  • Then in the season 4 episode, "The Grave Danger Job," as the Leverage crew investigates an embezzling funeral director, Hardison is buried alive in a cemetery by a Mexican drug cartel to whom the funeral director has been selling ID information stolen from the deceased who go through her funeral parlor.
• Life: In "Dig a Hole", Crews and Reese receive a case where the body of a Zen instructor is found in a construction site. What makes the case more interesting is the fact the body was buried alive.
• The Longest Day in Chang'an: Happens to Tan Qi. Yuan Zhi locks her in a coffin even though he knows she's still alive, then has his allies throw the coffin in a grave and start to fill the grave in. The whole time Tan Qi is awake and screaming to be let out. She's rescued just before she loses consciousness.
• On Lost, Nikki and Paolo are buried alive, but it's because the Losties think they're dead after being paralyzed by a poison.
• In the Brit Com Mandy, the episode "Broadsword to Donna Ball" starts with Mandy calling a radio phone-in from inside a buried coffin, then reveals How We Got Here. She Faces Death With Dignity until the last few seconds of the episode when she suddenly remembers a Chekhov's Gun from earlier which enables her to escape.
• The Mentalist: The victim in the episode "Red Rover, Red Rover" was killed by being locked in a locker at an abandoned factory. Jane later buries the suspect alive to force a confession (actually part of his plot to fake a mental breakdown to set a trap for Red John).
• Midsomer Murders:
  • The first Victim of the Week in "Saints and Sinners" is buried alive in an archaeology trench.
  • In "Drawing Dead", the murderer stabs their last victim and then rolls their still living body into an open grave (intended for one of their previous victims) and fills it in. Barnaby and Winter arrive in time to save her.
  • The first victim in "A Grain of Truth" is trapped while cleaning out the grain silo and the door barricaded. The grain is dumped in from the top and they are buried alive.
• In the British sci-fi drama Misfits, we have a rare case of this trope being played (mostly) for laughs. And it happens to the main character, no less. Nathan, after suffering a brutal death some days before, turns out to have the power of Resurrection. He's thrilled to find himself alive and starts gloating ridiculously about his newfound power, actually uttering the phrase: "Who's laughing now?!" When it sinks in that he's been buried alive (yes, he's a bit of a dumbass), he gets furious and starts hurling hilariously futile abuse at no one in particular. Then he just lies back and begins casually listening to his iPod. And this happened in the season 1 finale. In the second season opener, a telepath visiting his grave overhears him masturbating and arranges for him to be exhumed.
• Done twice in the Mission: Impossible episode "The Cardinal". Barney and Willie use an underground tunnel to enter a monastery, but a cave-in traps them in front of a vault door that must be opened from the inside. Meanwhile, Rollin, impersonating the Cardinal, has allowed himself to be captured by the Big Bad, who plans to suffocate him in a sarcophagus sealed with a 600-pound lid. Which is exactly what he expected, carrying equipment very specific for escaping the sarcophagus in his cross pendant. In "The Council" the team digs up a freshly buried mobster (sentenced for embezzling from the bosses) so that they can interrogate him on one of his boss' mannerisms (so that Rollin could better impersonate him).
• This happens to Monk on more than one occasion, with attendant freak-outs.
• MythBusters:
  • They checked out if surviving this was possible and deemed it Busted. First, they found that human beings couldn't punch their way out of a cheap pine casket, much less a top of the line one; indeed, any coffin flimsy enough for a person to realistically bust apart would also be crushed by the weight of earth above it. Plus, they found that even if a human could break out, there was no way a human being could dig their way up through six feet of dirt, especially within the half hour or so they'd have before they ran out of air. Basically, anyone buried alive would be crushed by the weight of the dirt or suffocate.
  • A much earlier episode highlights how unlikely this is to occur accidentally — at least nowadays. Modern undertaking practices include draining all of the blood from the deceased, ensuring that if you weren't dead when you came in, you most certainly were by the time you were buried.
• The victim in the NCIS episode "Left for Dead" was buried alive.
• NCIS: Los Angeles has Sam being buried alive in a prior mission, along with a partner of his, by Croatian soldiers. He was the only one who survived the event. Because of this, when a girl is buried alive by two boys whose uncle is an ex-con, Sam takes up the mission without hesitation, focused on it with resolution like no other, and is fully ready to beat them up when demanding where she is, due to this being a very personal traumatic experience and a very huge Berserk Button for him. Luckily, she manages to be dug up before she runs out of air.
• The Not Going Out episode "Coffin" revolves around Lee trying to get himself out of this situation following a stag party. The other stags repeatedly make things worse for him by convincing him not to phone the police and try digging his way out, as well as going to the wrong graveyard to try to rescue him (resulting in them all getting arrested for interfering with a corpse). Luckily, Lucy finds out about it just in time to call the priest and get him to rescue Lee moments before he drowns in soil.
• Obi-Wan Kenobi: In "Part VI", Darth Vader knocks Obi-Wan into a hole, then uses the Force to fill it with rocks and dirt before leaving him for dead. Obi-Wan uses the Force to create an air pocket, then after a Heroic Second Wind, is able to lift all the rubble out of the hole.
• There was an especially vindictive instance of this in Oz, where the preacher for the Christians was beaten, tied up, sealed behind a brick wall in the cafeteria and then there was an industrial sized freezer placed in front of it, and the whole deal was orchestrated by his former second in command. After being freed after an explosion (though as a charred, barely alive husk) he was shown to have stood up, as if rising from his grave, still covered in 3rd degree burns, after seemingly appearing to other inmates and making them try to kill the one responsible, and then he disappeared. Guess where they found him a few episodes later? Sealed behind another wall, only this time dead for real.
  • This also happened to Mark Mack and another Aryan Brotherhood member when they tried escaping out of Rebadow and Busmalis' hole.
• In an episode of Pacific Blue, one of the heroes is buried in an RV with a phone that can only take incoming calls, and a time bomb/escape-rigged gas canister.
• Passions: Sheridan Crane's death was faked (to escape criminals who were pursuing her) and she was buried to continue the ruse. Unfortunately, plans to rescue her immediately were hindered when the criminals in question kidnapped her would-be saviors, leaving her in considerable peril (Sheridan's claustrophobia didn't help matters much). Although she was ultimately rescued at the end of the "day", the scenes played out for over a month.
• The Pretender used this twice.
  • The victim in "Back From the Dead Again" was buried alive.
  • In "Red Rock Jarod", the villain of the episode buries a hostage alive in a remote location — with an air pump, but if he doesn't get what he wants before the pump runs out of fuel...
• Pretty Little Liars: Alison's autopsy makes it clear she was buried alive after being knocked out by a blow to the head in the incident that kickstarts the series. Eventually, it's revealed that Alison is actually alive, but she was buried alive after a blow to the head and escaped with help from a friend. Later that night, Bethany Young was knocked out and buried alive in the same grave Ali had been buried in; upon discovery, her body was misidentified as Alison's.
• Done on Ray Bradbury Theater, when a young girl overhears the screams of a woman whose husband buried her alive. The woman is rescued eventually, but only after an awful lot of people dismiss the girl's claims.
• Red Dwarf: Rimmer is buried alive by the hidden psychopath in "Cured".
• Riverdale: In "Silent Night, Deadly Night", the Black Hood holds Archie and Betty at gunpoint. He orders Archie to lie down in a pre-dug grave, then orders Betty to fill it in. Fortunately, when the Black Hood gets distracted, Betty is able to smack him with her shovel, then quickly dig Archie out and escape.
• In Roswell, this happens to Laurie Dupree. Luckily for her, the attacker specifically wanted to keep her alive, so set it up that she could breathe.
• This is darkly explored in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes: The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, in which Holmes and Watson foil a con artist's attempts to bury a drugged woman alive. Unfortunately, the woman is so mentally scarred by the experience that she becomes a veritable vegetable.
• Smallville:
  • In "X-Ray", Psycho Lesbian Tina Greer does this to Lana. Clark frees her after she passes out.
  • In "Obscura", Chloe is also buried alive, but Clark manages to rescue her. She is later shown to be traumatized by the event. The man who did it was a cop who wanted the credit of finding her. Whether he would have done so before or after she died is unclear.
  • In "Fade", after Graham incapacitates Clark with Kryptonite, he buries him with it leaving him to die, but Chloe and Lois rescue him.
  • In "Harvest", an angry mob of crazed villagers do this to Clark, who has lost his powers from blue kryptonite exposure. Fortunately, the soil shields him enough from the kryptonite to give him back some of his strength, allowing him to break free.
• During a Dream Sequence in the "Doppelganger" episode of Stargate Atlantis, Sheppard begins to bury Ronon alive. Ronon wakes up at that point.
• Supernatural:
  • Happens to Dean, although to be fair, he was dead when they buried him. It being Supernatural, though, he didn't stay that way.
  • Dean and Sam also earlier do this to an immortal murderer. He's also chained into his coffin.
• Tales from the Crypt: "Dig That Cat... He's Real Gone" has a magician do this as his final trick. A doctor had transplanted into him the organ that gives cats nine lives, so he could die and just come back. After using this to make a small fortune at a sideshow, his final stunt was to be buried alive in front of hundreds of witnesses. Only once he's in the ground does he start reminiscing about what an interesting life he's had, before he realizes he didn't count the death of the cat among his lives. He's on his ninth, not his eight...
• Toast of London: Toast gets put in a coffin and buried underground as part of a movie he's shooting, but the director goes insane and the crew scatters before he can be exhumed, leading to him spending all day trapped in the coffin slowly running out of air as he tries to call someone to rescue him on his new cell phone, to no avail.
• Torchwood:
  • In the finale episode of series two, Jack's brother Gray has Jack buried alive sans coffin; bear in mind Jack can't die. Or rather, he does die, but returns to life a few minutes later. So Jack spends 2000 years choking to death on soil over and over again.
  • It sorta happens again in the Children of Earth story. Under orders to neutralize Jack, and after proving he can survive being blown to smithereens, an arm of the government encases him in extremely quick-drying cement, where he presumably suffocates over and over again. Luckily, his team manages to rescue him before the day is out.
• The Traitors: Used as part of the challenge in Episode 6, in which six of the contestants are buried alive, with their teammates being tasked with finding clues to locate where they're buried and then free them within a time limit.
• True Blood:
  • Russell Edgington is sealed in concrete at the season 3 finale and is dug up in the season 5 premiere.
  • Five years of live burial is also a punishment dished out by the magister to vampires who kill their own species although he can sometimes be more creative.
• One of the news anchor jokes on The Two Ronnies told of England's most notorious practical joker, who was buried today. "He's not dead, it's just the neighbors getting their own back."
• In The Vampire Diaries, similarly to the Angel example above, Silas locks Stefan in a safe and dumps him down a river. His lungs explode but, being a vampire, they regenerate... so that they can explode again. He remains dying and regenerating for three months before he's rescued by Qetsiyah.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: Several episodes have featured one of the main characters or an underage person, usually children buried by the villains, and Walker and the Rangers racing against time to stop the bad guys and locate the victim. Three such episodes aired within months of each other in 1996 alone:
  • "Deadline": With the state facing a budget crisis, state senator vows to disband the Texas Rangers as a cost-cutting move... then won't allow Walker to help find his daughter when she is kidnapped and buried alive by a gang of bank robbers. Only when Walker does find her does the senator realize the value of the Rangers.
  • "Miracle at Middle Creek": Walker and a young boy are trapped in an underground crevice forced there by a band of bank robbers. Why? To ensure cooperation by the boy's father when the heist does take place. This time, Trivette saves the day.
  • "Cyclone": A sadistic extortionist and his band of thugs hijack a school bus full of children -- the bus just happened to be driven by C.D., and Alex was the chaperone — after a trip to the museum. The bus is driven to a landfill, parked in a ditch, and then buried with everyone inside in tons of dirt and fill. Walker and Trivette race against time and a threatening storm system to rescue the kids, Alex and C.D. before the bus crumples under the weight of the fill and/or the air runs out or they get swallowed by the storm.
• Wentworth: The fate given to Joan. A rare example dished out by a heroic character, though given this series' use of Grey-and-Gray Morality, precisely how heroic they are generally depends on the episode.
• The X-Files:
  • This happens in the end of "Fresh Bones" to an evil Marine sergeant in charge of a Haitian refugee camp, who turns out to be using the Haitian's native Voodoo to incapacitate/kill whistleblowers who were going to expose his ordered abuse of the refugees.
  • In "Apocrypha", a body-surfing alien uses Alex Krychek to get back to its spacecraft, which has been left in an abandoned missile silo. The episode ends with Krychek locked inside the silo, eighty stories down, hammering on the door and screaming to be let out.
  • Technically, even Mulder himself is buried alive in "Deadalive".

Manhua

• Old Master Q suffers this fate when going on a solo archeological dig, where he dug down for hundreds of meters without taking the proper precautions (ladder, shelter, etc). He comes back in the next issue however because of the manhua's Negative Continuity.

Music

• Avenged Sevenfold has a song called "Buried Alive". Guess what it's about?
• Referenced in the Scissor Sisters song "I Can't Decide" (where what can't be decided is "whether you should live or die"): "Or I could bury you alive / But you might crawl out with a knife / And kill me when I'm sleeping".
• The Creature Feature song "Buried Alive", as a tribute to Edgar Allen Poe, is unsurprisingly about this concept. It isn't the only song that mentions this. They also have it on "Such Horrible Things" (My Brother Was Quite Dull/So With Laughter In My Skull/Pushed Him In A Hole/Then Buried Him Alive) and in "A Gorey Demise", a parody of Edward Gorey's poem "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" (E is for Erik who was buried alive).
• The Creepshow have a song called "Buried Alive", which is about just that.
• Referenced in "The Mariner's Revenge Song" by The Decemberists:
  Find him, bind him
  tie him to a pole and break his fingers to splinters
  drag him into a hole until he wakes up naked
  clawing at the ceiling of his grave...
• A subversion bearing the trope name: the traditional song "Buried Alive" as performed by musicians like the Dropkick Murphys is not about someone doing this to someone else deliberately, but the occupational hazard inherent in being a coalminer.
• Lupe Fiasco's "The Cool" has this happen to the main character in the first verse, and he digs himself out during the second.
• "Dynamite Mine" by Murder By Death (the band), also about the occupational hazards of being a coal miner who pissed someone off in the past.
• Several My Chemical Romance songs off of Revenge and Bullets reference crawling out oh holes in the ground. Presumably buried alive, unless you're gonna run with the story line involving a guy killing 1000 evil men for the devil in order to get his life back.
• Nox Arcana's "Shadow of The Raven" album ends with the sound of dirt being shoveled onto a coffin, and the muffled voice of the poor guy inside knocking and shouting that he's still alive.
• The final disc of Thrice's The Alchemy Index has "Child of Dust", a funeral-like dirge which ends with the last two lines muffled and the sound gradually receding into unsettling silence. The group actually buried their microphones while recording the song, presumably to give the listener the sensation of being buried.
• Rammstein's "Spielhur" involves a child ("Ein kleiner mensch," lit. "A small person") who, wanting to be alone one day, fakes being dead. The child is buried with a music box, and awakens when it snows that night. The child plays the music box until their air runs out. The song has an Ominous Music Box playing as Book Ends and creepy robot children singing part of the chorus.

Music Videos

• The Blue October music video for their song "Dirt Room" involves a woman coming home, realizing her house is being robbed, knocking the burglar unconscious and restraining him before pushing him into a freshly dug hole, and finally calling the police and presumably having him arrested.
• In a skit during "Legend of the Fall-offs", Busta Rhymes plays a metaphorical hip-hop Grim Reaper burying a has-been rapper alive.
• In the Music Video for the song "Buried Myself Alive" by The Used, Bert is on his way to being buried alive.

Pinball

• Though it isn't buried, the Attic in Gottlieb's Haunted House has a Coffin with a person (or a ghost?) sleeping inside, stretching awake.
• Done of a sort in Metallica — the game has a giant Hammer that hits captured pinballs into a coffin beneath the playfield.

Pro Wrestling

• WWE wrestler The Undertaker has fought in several Buried Alive matches, where a grave site is created near the stage area of the arena, and the objective is to bury one's opponent alive. Usually these end with Undertaker buried, and disappearing for several months, only to come Back from the Dead (hey, he's practically The Grim Reaper; he can do that) with a new look, thirsting for revenge.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The imprisonment spell, which was inspired by Jack Vance's "Spell of Forlorn Encystment" (see above). It buries a victim in suspended animation deep below the surface.
  • This is how a Living Wall comes into being in the Ravenloft campaign; when an evil person walls up a victim and leaves him to die in such a manner, and the victim curses the one responsible in such a way that the Dark Powers hear him and respond, then when the victim dies, his spirit merges with the wall itself, turning it into an abomination that assimilates the bodies and souls of anyone who comes near.
  • A non-official sourcebook introduced the entombment spell, which buries alive a creature on the spot. If a saving throw is passed, the subject is only buried to the waist... but if the spellcaster prepared the spell twice and casts it a second time, then the victim no longer has a saving throw.
  • This trope is also a danger to anyone who falls victim to a Lich's Paralyzing Touch, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The truly unlucky survive the lich, but not their funerals.
• GURPS: In GURPS Ultra-Tech, the result of being teleported into a mountain is this. A 2-cubic-meter column of stone appears in the teleport chamber as a form of Equivalent Exchange.
• Pathfinder: Zomoks have a breath weapon that allows them to vomit forth a tide of soil and gravel, which on a lucky roll can entirely bury a prone target.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters:
    • There's mention of a geist, the Gravedigger, who in life did this to his murder victims (hit them with a shovel, bury them alive, listen to them scream). He met his end when he didn't hit one hard enough — the man woke up, retrieved the shovel, knocked the Gravedigger out and buried him alive (upside down, to boot). Fortunately for everyone, although the Gravedigger came back as a geist and hooked up with a miner who'd eaten his coworkers to survive a cave-in, the first krewe they met instantly pegged them as bad news and destroyed them.
    • This is also what's necessary to activate the Oracle Manifestation using the Grave-Dirt Key. It allows the user to astrally project, but they need to effectively be suffocating from their burial. Once they get back into their body, however, they erupt spectacularly from the ground with all the damage from suffocation healed up. At the highest understanding of the Oracle, a Sin-Eater can effectively wander freely as long as they want; the corebook makes reference to an urban legend amongst the Bound about a Mafioso who was buried in wet cement while knocked unconscious and has been using the Oracle for decades to keep his body in suspended animation.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade: The Sabbat use this as part of their embracing ritual when there's a need for a large surge of shock troopers. They beat the would-be vampire senseless, turn them, bury them alive en masse with other candidates, and see which ones come up. The ones that don't? No need to waste time digging them back up, they weren't even worth the blood to embrace. A popular Sabbat pastime is to go out, find a grave with a failed inductee, dig them up and try to kill them. Since the released vampire is both insane and probably in frenzy, this is not a safe form of entertainment.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The Odyssey set has a card literally named Buried Alive.
  • Claustrophobia from the Innistrad block depicts an unfortunate victim trapped in a buried coffin.
    Flavor Text: Six feet of earth muffled his cries.

Theatre

• In Aida (Verdi), this is the fate of the eponymous character and her lover Radames. Radames is condemned to die in this way as a punishment for treason and Aida, who had purportedly escaped, comes back and sneaks into the tomb to join him. In the musical, both Radames and Aida are captured and given this sentence, with Amneris exercising what power she has to arrange the small mercy that they be buried together in a single tomb so they can at least have each other by their sides in their final moments.
• Older Than Feudalism: According to Sophocles' Antigone, the eponymous heroine was walled up in a crypt to die after being sentenced to death. Her crime? Burying her dead brother so his soul could have an afterlife instead of suffering eternal unrest. Creon's a Jerkass like that. In a cruel twist of fate, Creon (upon the advice of a prophet) chooses to reverse Antigone's sentence less than an hour after issuing it, but Antigone, not wanting to endure the slow death by starvation that Creon had planned, has already killed herself.
• In The Mikado, this is the punishment for women whose husbands are beheaded. (It's such a stuffy death!)

Theme Parks

• A portion of the Phantom Manor ride at Disneyland Paris has the Doombuggies going underground, where the dead are rising from their graves.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate II:
  • A side-quest in Athkatla's cemetery leads the Protagonist to track down a gang of kidnappers who bury their victims alive. When you catch up to them it turns out they intended to kill the victims before burial, but the body disposal guy was Afraid of Blood and would simply bury them while unconscious instead.
  • Not to mention the Protagonist is threatened with a magical version of his by a loony Harper — Imprisonment is a spell which basically traps a person underneath the earth and rendered immortal during this time.
  • And the various demiliches, mages and superpowered imps who show up in the expansion or as Optional Bosses and who have "Imprisonment" as an at-will ability. Whack 'em quick, or you've got a 1 in 6 chance of an instant game over per round.
• Banjo-Kazooie ends with Gruntilda crushed under a boulder too heavy for her to lift. By the time her sisters succeed in lifting the boulder in the sequel, she's a skeleton.
• In the Haunted House level of CarnEvil, the player character is knocked into an open grave after falling off of a roof. Two zombies pop up with the clear intention of burying them alive, but they manage to shoot their way out before resuming the level.
• Clive Barker's Undying: An ancient warrior is buried alive at the Standing Stones to seal the Undying King. Also, Lizbeth.
• The Allied ending of Command & Conquer: Red Alert had Stavros bury Josef Stalin in the rubble of his ruined Kremlin, after gagging him.
• Happens to Yoshiki in one of Corpse Party's Wrong Ends.
• As the title suggests, this is a primary factor in the plot of Dark Tales: The Premature Burial, based on the Poe story of the same name. It's eventually revealed that the Big Bad of the game specifically marries women with catalepsy, agitates them into a coma, has them declared dead, and buries them in his personal mausoleum. He's on wife #3 at the time of the game.
• It's revealed at the end of the Vestal's backstory in Darkest Dungeon II that her asshole of an abbot had her Sisters immured alive in their quarters for being associated with her. And poor Junia finds this out just after she escapes from the oubliette where she was tortured.
• Happens to the Player Character in Def Jam: Icon after he's ambushed and shot in the face by the Big Bad. Fortunately, he's rescued by his best friend, the Gooch.
• A mild example happens in Dragon Quest V when Bianca Whitaker is kidnapped by skeleton ghosts and is stuffed inside the queen's grave during your exploration at the Uptaten Tower. She's quickly freed and doesn't seem to be bothered at all.
• Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress have an amusing tendency to do this to themselves. Due to a quirk in how they build walls, they will always prefer to build them from the west side. This occasionally results in them walling themselves into an enclosed area and dying of dehydration. Of course, you can always do this on purpose; doing it to vampires is especially popular, as they're truly needless and immortal, so you can just immure them in a lever room/office and have them act as your perpetual book-keeper, manager, or "automated" trap system.
• Eternal Darkness:
  • The game has the quicksand variant as a hallucination effect — every so often, your character will sink into the ground, whether it's sand, dirt, or solid concrete!
  • On a more serious note, Roberto Bianchi is commissioned to aid in the construction of a monument. At the end of the chapter, he and several other architects are chucked down into an oubliette-styled hole. And then the concrete pours in. The end of the chapter's final shot is Roberto's face and body as he tried, in futility, to escape his end.
• If you pursue the Light Fingers ambition in Fallen London, a villain will eventually threaten to do this to you if you continue, if you get caught continuing you will in fact end up buried alive in 'a small velvet lined box' from which the only escape is usually to kill yourself (but Death Is Cheap so it's just a temporary inconvenience).
  You've moved to a new area: A small, velvet lined box. You can't see anything. You have just enough space to twist onto your belly or your back. Oh dear God. Oh dear God.
• You survive this, and two bullets in the head, at the start of Fallout: New Vegas thanks to a certain robot.
• The Fruit of Grisaia:At the end of her route Michiru gets buried alive by Yuuji, in order to make her realise the value of being alive. Though Yuuji ensures air to flow through the coffin and doesn't bury that deep to make sure she can escape easily, if she really wants to, she still spends three days down there.
• In the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas mission "Deconstruction," you have to stop a nearby construction company from screwing with your newfound gains. Smashing up their portables would have been plenty, but C.J. goes the extra mile by also trapping the foreman in a porta-potty, pushing it into a hole, and filling it up with concrete, all while listening to him scream "OH GOD, NO!" Stone. Cold. And the reason C.J. did this? The guys who were working for the man were harassing C.J.'s sister Kendl and calling her a hooker, and C.J. wanted to teach them some respect.
• Heiankyo Alien revolves around digging holes to trap aliens in. Once an alien is trapped, the hole has to be filled back in.
• Hi-Fi RUSH: Roquefort, instead of blowing up like most other bosses, ends up buried under a pile of money in the company's own vault.
• Hitman 3: In the Dartmoor level, one of your targets is faking her death with a mock funeral to avoid being assassinated. She demands to be shown her gravesite prior to her "death", including the hole that has been dug. Naturally, one of the ways she can be eliminated is with Agent 47 disguising himself as the gravekeeper, leading her over to the hole, shoving her in, and burying her for real. While game mechanics say she dies the moment she hits the bottom of the hole, the implication is clear.
• That's one of the ways to die in Lode Runner. To be buried alive inside bricks.
• The Matrix: Path of Neo has Neo do this to the Smiths during the alternate courtyard fight, instead of The Matrix Reloaded's Dog Pile of Doom and Neo flies off ending.
• "Premature entombment of a non-dead individual" happens to Stan in Monkey Island 2, where Guybrush has to get Stan to jump into one of his own coffins and nail the lid shut so he can steal a key from his office. Stan subsequently stays shut in the coffin until the sequel, where Guybrush can finally open Stan's casket after the two are shut in the same crypt together.
• The culprit of Nancy Drew: Last Train to Blue Moon Canyon collapses the entrance to an abandoned mine in an attempt to inflict this trope on Nancy.
• During the scalled/forest arc of Outlast II, at one point Blake is buried alive by Laird and Nick in one of their attempts to have him be reborn. Luckily for him, the hole wasn't deep, allowing him to be able to escape.
• Pirate101 has a rare case of a hero doing this to a villain, although by accident. El Toro buries Captain Blood he thinks that he had killed him in a duel. The problem was the "dead" man had literally cheated death and become immortal. This resulted in a an accidental creation of a Sealed Evil in a Can that gets opened many years later when the clockwork armada tries digging up the grave looking for a key that might be on the body. The broken bodies surrounding the now open grave indicate they did not expect to be greeted by a angry, powerful, and very much alive pirate.
• Though this never happens in-game, the Nameless One in Planescape: Torment is warned by one of his past incarnations of the extreme danger that being buried (alive or dead) held for him. Given his immortal nature, he would be doomed to an eternity of terror, suffocation and amnesiac reawakening.
• In Pokemon X, Lysandre activates his Doomsday Device, which will grant everyone in the immediate area immortality but kill everyone outside of his Elaborate Underground Base. However, due to the PC and Xerneas, the base collapses instead. The PC and friends make it out; Team Flare doesn't. Professor Sycamore speculates, and it's implied, that everyone in the base is still alive, immortal, and trapped under thousands of tons of rock for all time.
• Saints Row 2: After making the MASSIVE mistake of picking a fight with Gat during Aisha's funeral, Ronin leader Shogo is given an utter ass beating by Gat. Gat then drags him to a coffin, dumps out the corpse already in it, and tosses Shogo inside, burying him alive, as he screams for mercy. Even The Boss is unnerved by this, though not too much that he/she doesn't grab shovels.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time: Petey Piranha does this to himself in his battle with him, although he only does it up to his oversized head.
  • Mario Sports Superstars: Metal Mario's Double Bogey animation in the Golf mode is similar to Mario's, except his depicts him getting completely smothered in Koopa shells instead of getting hit by one and turning into Small Mario.
• Tomb Raider:
  • In the original Tomb Raider I and its remake Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Natla is locked up and buried underground by the other two Atlantean rulers, Tihocan and Qualopec, as punishment for her betrayal. The events of the game are kicked off when a nuclear test unearths the pod, releasing her.
  • In Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, this occurs when Werner Von Croy attempts to steal the Isis and its death trap mechanism activates. An unspecified amount of time later he manages to escape with his prize and a leg injury. At the end of the game, Lara herself gets buried under the collapsing Tomb of Horus, leading to her memorial service in the sequel and her hardened personality in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.
• In the 2012 reboot of Twisted Metal, this is Sweet Tooth's fate after his wish to find his daughter Sophie because she escaped him when he tried to kill her is granted by Calypso. Sophie had committed suicide ten years before the game began. Sweet Tooth ends up in trapped in his daughter's coffin face to face with her desiccated corpse. To add insult to injury, some time after Sweet Tooth suffocated to death, Calypso revives Sophie and gives her a Monster Clown makeover of her own.

Web Animation

• ETU - Animated Stories:
  • Peter was buried alive by his girlfriend Hana by putting sleeping pills in his food. He was luckily rescued by Milton.
• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Old-Timey style cartoon "That A Ghost", Homestar Runner and his friends encounter what seems to be the ghost they're hunting, but turns out to be Sickly Sam. Apparently he buries himself alive every Tuesday.
  • In the Strong Bad Email "different town", one of the things Strong Bad would do to make his town different would be to bury the King of Town alive in a crate of peas.
    Strong Bad: The King of Town
    Would be underground
    In a box filled up with peas!
    King of Town: I hate peas!
    Strong Bad: I know!
• The titular character of Meet Arnold has been subjected to this trope twice.
• Panic Collection: Michael buried his pregnant wife Paige because he thought she was having an affair with Francis and the fact that her father had a criminal record. Fortuantely she was able to get out and expose him.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Sarge once allows himself to be buried for his funeral when his obsessive dedication to orders causes him to think he died and was replaced. He survives due to the ground giving out beneath him and landing him in an underground cavern before he runs out of air.
  • This happens earlier to him in an April Fool's Day episode when Grif mistakes him for dead in a Warthog explosion. He survives because, as he put it, "I ate my way out! The soft earth was like a delicious butterscotch brownie to me."

Web Comics

• Bug Martini tells us that if this happens to you, you may be getting older.
• A terrible incident in Daniel that leads to even more (vampire-related) terrible things.
• This happens early on in The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon, to the title character. He gets out of it.
  Jack: Oh, what, that underground thing? I just punched my way out.
  Craig: What? What?! That doesn't make sense!!! You were over there when I buried you!
  Jack: Right, yeah, I punched in your direction.
  Craig: In my direction?!
  Jack: It's not my fault if I can hear your incredibly nasal voice underground.
• Happens to Ziggy in Goober Grove. It's apparently not the first time this has happened, and on top of that, ze doesn't especially seem to mind.
  Ziggy: Yep. Buried alive again... And we all knows what that means... I can FINALLY get some time off of work!
• Kiwi Blitz: Gynoid 35's fate at the hands of 42 after her ill-fated assassination attempt is buried beneath the ground after falling into a trap.
• This was to have been Rietta's fate in Like Wind On A Dry Branch. She's saved when Archduke Axias takes her as his companion in return for forgiving the debt her previous master owed him.
• One Penny Arcade strip featured Gabe doing this to Tycho as his latest April Fool's joke. The previous two were telling him his birth father wanted to meet him, and creating a billboard identifying him as a pedophile.

Web Original

• The Creepypasta "Sarah O'Bannon":
  Coffins used to be built with holes in them, attached to six feet of copper tubing and a bell. The tubing would allow air for victims buried under the mistaken impression they were dead. In a certain small town, Harold, the local gravedigger, upon hearing a bell one night, went to go see if it was children pretending to be spirits. Sometimes it was also the wind. This time, it wasn't either. A voice from below begged and pleaded to be unburied.
  "Are you Sarah O'Bannon?" Harold asked.
  "Yes!" The muffled voice asserted.
  "You were born on September 17, 1827?"
  "Yes!"
  "The gravestone here says you died on February 20, 1857."
  "No, I'm alive, it was a mistake! Dig me up, set me free!"
  "Sorry about this, ma'am," Harold said, stepping on the bell to silence it and plugging up the copper tube with dirt. "But this is August. Whatever you are down there, you sure as hell ain't alive no more, and you ain't comin' up."
• Other Creepypastas:
  • Boxborne Wraith involves a gangster being buried alive for upsetting the Don. He's accidentally set free by a famine-struck tribe of ghouls, who were hoping for a corpse they could eat (live, or at least fresh meat is poisonous to them, and they're pacifists.) He strikes a deal with them: If they help him get revenge, he'll bring them the bodies.
  • The Other Side of the Grave is about a botched suicide who is buried alive, and falls into the bowels of a Nightmarish Factory run by higher-dimensional beings trying to save humanity from being trapped in their own dead, rotting bodies after they die.
• Deus Ex Machina. Plague deliberately built a pipe to the surface so that he could still breath. He managed to stay down there for four days before he escaped. Lots of bad people died when he escaped.
• "Why there is no moloch13"
• From a Black Humor collection: Parodied version.◊
• SCP Foundation: SCP-6502 ("Harwick Cemetery") is a cemetery where anyone buried alive is unable to die; their consciousness remains intact as long as they stay buried, even as their body rots away completely. The Foundation discovered it in 1994 (at which point there were six such non-dead people buried in the cemetery courtesy of a local unlicensed coroner, the earliest dating back to 1951), and now uses it to preserve certain important personnel (and occasionally prisoners from rival Groups of Interest) for consultation/interrogation — although relying on information from people buried in Harwick might not be the best idea, since being trapped in a dead body six feet underground for months to years and counting doesn't do great things to the subject's mental state or sanity.^note ...and that's even assuming that the prisoners from the rival GoIs don't start actively feeding the Foundation misinformation as revenge for having left them in this deathless hell. To mitigate this, researchers are encouraged to pretend that the Foundation is trying its level best to recover personnel from Harwick and that the subjects' interment is merely a temporary measure, but this doesn't work so well if the subject in question is a high-level Foundation specialist who already knows what Harwick really is and does:
  Dr. Ava Bradley / SCP-6502-46:^note specialist interred in SCP-6502 Robert, where am I? What have you done? Why can't I move my body at all?
  Dr. Robert Campbell:^note SCP-6502 lead researcher Ava, please listen to me. It's better if you don't worry about this for the time being. We have a staff of researchers working round the clock to fix—
  Dr. Bradley: Robert Campbell, I am your superior and you WILL tell me where I am.
  Dr. Campbell: You're in a safe place. That's all I can say for now.
  Dr. Bradley: This is Harwick, isn't it.
  [Beat]
  Dr. Bradley: Oh God.
  Dr. Campbell: It's only a temporary measure.
  Dr. Bradley: Get me out of here, Robert. Get me out of this box. Please, you have to get me out.
  [...]
  Dr. Campbell: I'm sorry, Ava.
  Dr. Bradley: (shouting) Get me out!
  Dr. Bradley: Please!
  Dr. Bradley: Please, please... I can't move, I can't...
  [five days later]
  Dr. Bradley: [REDACTED]. I know you want answers, Robert. You’ve always been curious, I've seen your search logs.
  Dr. Bradley: I can tell you everything. Just get me out.
  [...]
  Dr. Bradley: Anything you want! Fucking anything, you hear me? I'll promote you, I'll recommend you to the O5s, I'll give you full access to [REDACTED].
  Dr. Bradley: Please!
  [Beat]
  Dr. Bradley: Help me.
  [The remaining transcripts in the article indicate further increases in mental distress coupled with some degree of Sanity Slippage.]
  

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Mollymauk's very first memory is waking up with a face full of dirt and clawing his way out of a shallow grave. It's later revealed that this live burial was an accident — Lucien, Molly's old self, performed a ritual to allow him to speak with the Somnovem, but due to sabotage by Vess DeRogna, the ritual went wrong and his soul was splintered across the Astral Sea. The Tomb Takers presumed him dead and buried him, not knowing that a piece of his soul stayed behind in his body, eventually gaining enough strength to wake up, dig himself out, and slowly develop his own identity.
• My Dad's Tapes: The ultimate fate of Chris's girlfriend, at the hands of Uncle Don and donotcontinue, when Chris rejected their proposal.
• 7-Second Riddles: One riddle involves a woman getting buried alive by some angry Mafiosi; the riddle is how she can get herself freed, before she suffocates to death.
• In March of 2021, MrBeast posted a video where he spent 50 hours buried alive, and the forfeit was that if he got out early, he would have gotten tased. He succeeded it.

Western Animation

• American Dad!:
  • The first time Hayley broke up with Jeff in the episode "Bullocks to Stan", Stan tried to help him toughen up to win her back. Part of this involves burying him in the backyard.
  Jeff: I can't breathe!
  Stan: Plenty of air out here, Jeff. I'm filling my lungs with it now.
  Jeff: Mr. Smith, please!
  Stan: Real men stay calm under pressure, Jeff. By the way, you only have five more minutes to learn that lesson. Two if you panic.
  • In "With Friends Like Steve's", Barry buries a sleeping Francine under the Smiths' yard when he turns Faux Affably Evil from not taking his medication.
  • In "Merlot Down Dirty Shame", Roger and Francine have an Accidental Kiss while drunk; Roger is so afraid of destroying his newfound friendship with Stan that he buries Francine alive to stop her from just confessing. When Stan finds out (about the burying, not the kiss), he goes ballistic and Roger buries him. The episode ends with a fake preview for the next episode showing Stan, covered with dirt from digging himself out, beating the everloving shit out of Roger.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In "Big Bro", Carl asks Frylock to help fake his death to get out of a relationship with a hooker. However, Frylock decides to hook up with the lady, and leaves Carl buried alive in the ground.
• General Fong of Avatar: The Last Airbender decides the best way to induce the Avatar State in Aang, to be used as a weapon against the Fire Nation, is to bury his friends and make him fight to save them. Instead, this induces the Avatar State as a weapon against the dumbass who thought this was a good idea.
• Happens twice in Batman: The Animated Series.
  • First in the episode "Deep Freeze" to a villainous Walt Disney-expy who's obsessed with immortality and has Mr. Freeze help him undergo the same cryogenic process Freeze had. By the end of the episode, he's been frozen inside an iceberg at the bottom of the ocean, trapped forever.
  • Also happens at the end of "Avatar" to an immortal, undead sorceress. She was technically already buried alive, but by the end, her tomb caves in on top of her. Assuming her immortality kept her alive through that, she is now trapped in a Fate Worse than Death.
• In the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode "Dawn of the Dead Man!", Gentleman Ghost buries Batman alive in a booby-trapped coffin and he uses Astral Projection to get help from Deadman, Speedy, and Green Arrow.
• In Beware the Batman, Magpie does this Katana in the episode "Attraction".
• Lampshaded in Centaurworld. In the final episode, when Rider insists that the Centaurworld inhabitants should help her kill the frozen soldiers of the Nowhere King's army, they're uncomfortable with this and argue (through song) that they should do this trope instead. An incredulous Rider tries to point out that this is still murder.
  Rider: So I can't lop off this guy's head? You'll just bury him alive instead?
  Everyone Else: (singing) Yes! We dig, dig, dig to bury the bad guys! Then our conscience will be less sad, guys!
• Villain Jambalaya Jake does this to Darkwing Duck at one point, using a box and lots of see-ment.
• This happens to Woldoor in the season 2 opener of Drawn Together, after he hangs himself. However, he wasn't committing suicide but "taking his afternoon noose nap", and wakes up in a coffin. In a parody of Kill Bill, he proceeds to punch his way out, then cuts to him digging his way to the surface a la Dig Dug.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • While filming in "An Ed Is Born", Jonny steals the Eds' camera and runs off with it. Eddy is seen pouncing at him and just as he lands on top of him the screen turns to static. When it goes back to normal, Eddy has buried Jonny and Plank in the ground with his head sticking out.
  • In the Halloween special "Boo Haw Haw", this is how Lothar (Ed) defeats the "Vampiress" (Sarah), after he confuses the hell outta her with a "stake" (steak) "driven" to her heart, taking the opportunity to grab her and throw her into a grave. When the hallucination ends, she really is buried alive as Edd rushes over with a watering can to literally grow her out of the ground, causing Sarah to sprout like a plant with fresh tomatoes growing from her ears.
• A Freaky Stories plot involved a man who was deathly afraid of being buried alive, a fact his wife learned when he had a panic attack from the rice being thrown at their wedding. She promises him that if he died, she'd install a hot line phone that linked directly to the house, where she would wait for a year so he can call her to get him out if he's still alive. The rest of the plot involves her actually going through with this promise after her husband dies suddenly. Her friends finally convince her to go out for the evening on the 365th day. Just after she leaves, the phone rings.
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had Heloise about to do this to someone, only for her to be distracted by seeing Jimmy with Jez.
  • It's also what "being grounded" means in Miseryville.
• In the Justice League episode "Only a Dream", telepathic psychopath Dr. Destiny (John Dee) does this via a nightmare to Hawkgirl (she's claustrophobic) while her friends get visions related to Power Incontinence. While the others get over their fears, Hawkgirl doesn't and is rescued only when Batman kicks Dee's ass. Then again, you can't really blame her for being scared given the circumstances.
• Looney Tunes:
  • "The Old Grey Hare" takes us into the far distant future year of 2000 where a decrepit old Bugs and Elmer are still playing hunter and prey. As usual, Bugs puts on a fake death scene and, having dug his own grave, stands in it as he exchanges tearful goodbyes with Elmer, manages to switch places with him, and quickly shovels the dirt over him, laughing manically. Then, just to rub it in a bit more, he pops into the ground and gives Elmer a big kiss on the face and a burning stick of dynamite!
  • In "Devil May Hare", in order to get rid of Taz, Bugs tricks the devil into digging for groundhogs, and filling in Taz's hole while he was in it. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
    Taz: What for you bury me in the cold, cold ground?
• In "The Boardwalk Booby Trap" episode of The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, the Ant Hill Mob buried Penelope in the sand at the beach. Unknown to any of them, the Hooded Claw had mixed cement into the sand, hoping that the Bully Brothers would flatten Penelope with a steamroller.
• One Robot Chicken sketch features the Shirt Tales fighting in World War II, where they're mistaken for Axis allies by the American pilots and shot down. Their shirts are laid on their graves and they all change to "R.I.P.", except for Bogey's, whose reads "I'm Buried Alive!"
• The Simpsons:
  • In episode "Make Room for Lisa", through a freak series of events, the sensory deprivation tank where Homer is floating is found by Flanders, who mistakes it for a coffin and buries it. Fortunately, it is right on top of a water pipe, and Homer's struggle causes it to fall through, being sucked into the sea and washing ashore where a vacationing Chief Wiggum finds it, mistaking it for litter, and sends it back to the New Age store.
  • In "The Boys of Bummer", Bart asks Lisa if they're going to visit his pet bunny Fluffy. Lisa tells him that he died and Homer buried him in the backyard ("though not in that order").
  • Happens to Hans Moleman in one episode where he points out to the gravedigger that he's still alive just as the casket is lowered into the grave. Apparently he didn't want to be a bother.
  • In "C.E.D'oh", Mr. Burns shoots Homer with a tranquilizer dart and tries to wall him up a'la The Cask of Amontillado (he even quotes the story: "Brick by brick, I sealed his fate!"). However, Burns is so feeble that the wall is only ankle-high by the time Homer wakes up and he just steps out over it while Burns carries on placing bricks.
  • Burns recalls in "Last Exit to Springfield" that his grandfather had a young "atom mill" worker walled up in an abandoned coke oven after finding half a dozen atoms in the boy's pockets.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Nasty Patty", SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs bury a health inspector they allegedly killed earlier. The rain washes him out of the ground later, however.
  • In "Funny Pants", after Squidward convinces SpongeBob that he'll lose his ability to laugh if he does it too often, he tries to avoid laughing and ultimately buries himself in the sand on the outskirts of town until the next morning to avoid seeing anything remotely comedic.
• In the Skylanders Academy episode "Skylanders Unite" Kaos does this to a prisoner to get them to talk. When said prisoner is ready to talk, Kaos has already left the room.
• In Steven Universe, Lapis inflicts this on herself using the ocean, and she describes how awful it is.
  Lapis: You do realize that I spent the last few months trapped under the ocean, right? It was an endless, crushing darkness. Wet and bleak and suffocating. Water was the tomb I lived in for those months.
• Occurs in Thomas & Friends, for some value of "alive". After Henry refuses to budge from a tunnel, he gets bricked into it "for always and always and always", a fate that the narrator encourages us to believe that he thoroughly deserves. Fortunately for him, "always and always" lasts only a few weeks.
• Total Drama:
  • Done to Gwen on Total Drama Island, as part of a challenge where the campers have to face their worst fears. Trent forgot to dig her up on schedule due to being chased by a mime, causing a rift in their budding relationship.
  • Chris, being the utter prick that he is, does it again in Total Drama: Revenge of the Island by having Gwen guest star and buried along with Sam as part of a challenge. Needless to say, she's not happy about this.
• Brock Samson from The Venture Brothers, in the episode, "Dia de Los Dangerous!", is buried alive, after being shot with at least 20 apparently lethal tranquilizer darts and hit by a van, all while keeping a brutal death grip on a poor enemy soldier. Nonetheless, he still manages to dig himself out, with the only side effect of all of this being Brock's extreme rage and being really thirsty.
• We Bare Bears: "Charlie's Halloween Thing 2" opens with Charlie climbing out of a grave with a tombstone. Apparently he was taking a nap, and sleeping so soundly the villagers who buried him thought he was dead.

Real Life

• This was a very real fear in the 18th and 19th centuries. Back in those days, most civilizations had unreliable ways to identify death, and so stories of the recently buried screaming for help were not uncommon. We can't know how often people were in fact buried alive, but the sheer horrific quality of being buried prematurely led to the creation of Safety coffins, which were essentially coffins with a bell or flag stuck above ground to give the recently buried a method of communication with the outside. One of these can be seen in the movie The First Great Train Robbery.
  • Mary Roach's Stiff includes a section on live burial, the bizarre methods doctors once used to try to distinguish death from mere unconsciousness (e.g. an automatic tongue-pulling device!), and so on. She notes that the "coffin bells" never once saved a person who'd been prematurely buried, although some were disinterred when the corpse's decomposition caused its weight to shift and sound a false alarm.
    • Similarly, fears of accidental live burial in German-speaking countries led to the creation of "waiting mortuaries", where corpses were kept above ground until they showed clear signs of decomposition. Again, there is no recorded case of a person actually reviving in one.
  • These days, accidental live burial would only be possible if the person's body was neither autopsied nor embalmed. If you were unlucky enough to get to the mortician or the coroner while still alive, the autopsy and/or embalming process will definitely kill you (or wake you up) before you are buried.
  • Alfred Nobel was so afraid of being buried alive that he left instructions that the doctor who pronounced him dead were to cut open his neck arteries as well, just to be safe.
• In 1968, the young heiress Barbara Jane Mackle was kidnapped, drugged, placed in a coffin and buried alive as her captors demanded for a $500,000 ransom from her family. After three days, she was found weakened yet still alive. She wrote a book about it named 83 Hours 'Til Dawn; it was turned into a Made-for-TV Movie.
• In the infamous 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping (likely the inspiration for the "Walker" and "Hawaii Five-0" examples in the "TV" section), A gang of kidnappers in the American Southwest actually did this to an entire school bus full of children. Thankfully, everyone escaped.
• When the USS West Virginia was finally raised six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, three sailors were found dead, trapped in a watertight storeroom. They had crossed off sixteen days after December 7 on a calendar hanging on the wall. Worse, others knew that there were trapped men still alive in the wreckage — honor guards posted nearby and salvage workers could hear rhythmic metal banging from the trapped men, who were desperately trying to signal for help. Even more worse, due to the limits of technology of the time and the USS West Virginia's position on the seabed, the men could not be rescued without killing them in the process. Everyone on the surface had to listen to the sounds get steadily weaker, until they finally silenced completely.
• Harry Houdini:
  • He once tested an escape in which he was buried six feet deep without a coffin and had to dig his way up. Once. He lost consciousness just after his hand broke the surface, and had to be pulled out.
  • He also spent over an hour in a sealed underwater coffin to demonstrate that it could be done, to disprove another performer who claimed to use mystical powers to accomplish the feat. There was another buried alive escape planned, but it's not clear if it was ever performed prior to his death. Rather ghoulishly, the coffin that was to be used in the escape was instead put to use transporting his remains.
• Stage magician Joseph "Amazing Joe" Burrus attempted to escape from a plastic-and-glass coffin buried by cement and dirt on October 31, 1990, inspired by the same stunt that Houdini did. The problems were that Joe never tested if he could actually escape, and he never knew that cement dried from the bottom-up. As he was being buried, the weight of the wet cemet and dirt collapsed, which was broadcasted on live TV. By the time the stage hands and bystanders were able to dig him out, he couldn't be resuscitated, the additional irony being he died on the 46th anniversary of Houdini's passing.
• 33 Chilean miners were buried alive for 69 days in 2010. Their rescue was watched by the world in awe at the things that humans can achieve when properly motivated.
• Beaconsfield miners Todd Russell and Brant Webb did it first, gaining international fame after surviving for a month underground. There was a play planned for the event, A Symphony in a Flat Minor.
• The "Baby Jessica" incident, when 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell down a 22' deep, 8" wide well shaft in 1987. Three days' efforts to rescue her constituted one of the first major around-the-clock news stories covered by then-fledgling network CNN, and was accused of being a media circus. Jessica survived the experience relatively unscathed (one of her toes was amputated due to gangrene and she also got a scar on her forehead), and at age 25 she received full control of the trust fund to which thousands of people sent donations after viewing the story. Other than that, she's led a more or less normal life.
• There's a Snopes article about it, which includes a story from 1994.
• In the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, a number of rescue personnel were trapped for days in the rubble of the fallen towers. The plight of two trapped Port Authority Police officers was portrayed in the Oliver Stone film World Trade Center.
• Subverted with Anthony Spilotro, on whom the character of Nicky Santoro from Casino was based (see the entry in Film above), and his brother Michael. While sand was allegedly found in their lungs, indicating live burial, it was confirmed years later that they had been murdered in a basement before being buried in the cornfield.
• In an interview, J. K. Rowling said that her own boggart would be her being buried alive.
• In Ancient Rome, supposedly the punishment for a Vestal Virgin that had broken her vow of chastity was being walled up in a crypt and left to die. This was because it was forbidden to spill the blood of a Vestal Virgin. Why they didn't just strangle them is their own secret. However, it was also used a kind of trial: they were left with a small amount of bread and water so that the goddess Vesta could save them if they were truly innocent.
  
  In fact, one version of the story of Romulus and Remus claims that their mother was a Vestal Virgin seduced by Mars, and she was sentenced to this fate by her uncle, who also orders the death of the twins by exposure. Both means would avoid his direct blood-guilt, but her sons are luckier; the servant tasked with killing them can't bring himself to do so, and leaves them by the banks of the Thebes, where they are found by Lupa.
• And British statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote in Letters to His Son: "All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive; but how or where, I think must be entirely indifferent to every rational creature." (letter 311)
• In the First World War, the sheer ferocity of the artillery barrages was sufficient to dislodge large enough volumes of earth to cover over some of those it did not blow apart. Fortunately for quite a few soldiers thus buried, trench warfare being what it was meant that there was always an immediate and plentiful supply of willing hands to dig you out and shovels with which they could do so. Some people survived this treatment more than once.
• Then there was the underground war, where (predominantly but not exclusively) British and German diggers tunneled under the battlefield to lay explosive charges and undermine each other's trenches. This sort of warfare was slow, laborious and terrifying, especially when Your Tunnel met Their Tunnel very suddenly.
• During the first Gulf War, US tanks equipped with plows and armored bulldozers were used to fill in trenches manned by Iraqi soldiers, rather than send in soldiers to clear the trenches with hand-to-hand fighting.
  "I came through right after the lead company. What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and things sticking out of them."
• In 2015, it was discovered that Iraqi soldiers buried 175 Iranian frogmen during the Iran–Iraq War in the aftermath of an Iraqi victory; the soldiers were discovered with their hands tied and no signs of bodily injuries, implying that they were captured and then buried alive in the desert sand. The bodies were returned to Iran and given a proper burial, with an emotional response within Iranian social media condemning the war crime.
• This was a common punishment for women in Medieval Sweden, usually for theft. Men were hanged instead. The reason for this was because women might kick and thrash about with their legs when hanged, and then onlookers might get to see something inappropriate. This type of punishment was called "Kvick I Jord" which literally means "(Lying) Conscious In The Earth."
• Prairie dogs, gopher-like colonial rodents of the North American plains, have been known to fight back against burrowing predators such as black-footed ferrets by filling up the carnivores' tunnel entrances when they're sleeping or suckling young underground. The predator can normally dig itself out again, but wastes time and energy doing so while the prairie dogs can forage in safety.
• African elephants have been known to accidentally do this to sleeping humans, believing them to be dead. Thankfully no digging is involved, they simply cover them in dirt, branches, and leaves.
• According to the Roman historian Tacitus, this was supposedly the punishment for men caught having sex with other men among the German tribes. Literally burying your gays...
• A not very common, but not exactly unheard way to execute Christians, whose victims included: Saint Daria (apparently a former Vestal priestess) and her husband Saint Chrisanthus, Saint Paulina and her mother Saint Candida, Saint Irene of Egypt and her brother Saint Athanasius, Blessed Maria Dolorosa van Brabant, Saint Andronik of Perm, Saint Elizabeth of Russia (the latter, in fact, was thrown into an open mineshaft together with several other people and then they were blown up with grenades), etc.
• The brothers and Sikh martyrs Sahibzada Fateh Singh and Sahibzada Zorawar Singh were two kids under 10 condemned to be bricked up alive inside a wall for not converting from Sikhism to Islam, during the persecutions of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. In a subversion, the boys' executioners entombed them up to their shoulders and then beheaded them, presumably out of pity.
• Dublin man buries himself alive, live-streams from the "grave"
• Floyd Collins, who in 1925 became a national media sensation after spending two weeks trapped at the bottom of what is now Mammoth Cave National Park, with two cave-ins shattering what little hope he had of rescue. In order to get around this, rescuers dug an entirely new entrance into the passageway where he was trapped 55 feet underground, but he died of exposure three days before they were finally able to reach him.
• In the 1995 Sampoong Department Store disaster in South Korea, large portions of the building collapsed into the store's multiple basement levels, trapping anyone who had been in those levels and who wasn't killed in the initial collapse under massive amounts of rubble. Despite the degree of devastation, 27 people were found alive in the rubble; a group of 24, who had the good fortune to be in a room that miraculously didn't cave in despite the weight of the building coming down on top of it, was rescued after two days, and three more survivors were found after more than a week, with the final survivor being pulled from the wreckage an astonishing 17 days after the collapse (the other two were trapped for 9 and 12 days). One of the survivors indicated that he had been aware of other people nearby who had survived the collapse, but that all the others had succumbed to the heat/their injuries or drowned from the water being used to suppress post-collapse fires before rescuers could reach them.
• In 1977, Holly Maddux disappeared after returning to her abusive ex-boyfriend's apartment to collect her things. 1.5 years later, her remains were found stuffed in a trunk which was itself stuffed in the back of his closet. The position of her body—arms outstretched—indicated that despite the severe bludgeoning he administered, she was still alive when he placed her in the trunk and died trying to get out.
• In 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi. When their bodies were discovered in an earthen dam several weeks later, one of them had clay in his lungs and clenched in his fists, indicating that he was still alive when placed in his grave.
• In 2013, 29-year old ship's cook Harrison Odjegba Okene survived a maritime version of this trope when the tugboat on which he was serving capsized and sank off the coast of Nigeria. With his ship resting on the floor of the Atlantic ocean, Okene survived for more than 60 hours in a small air pocket that had somehow not been filled with water, with a bottle of Coke as his only source of food or hydration until he was discovered by divers who had been sent to the ship on a salvage operation. Sadly, the 11 other men on board on the ship were not so fortunate.
• Following the Battle of Guandu, Cao Cao took many of Yuan Shao's soldiers prisoner. When he learned a number of them tried to escape to rejoin Yuan, Cao had them buried alive as punishment, as well as a warning to the other prisoners.
• The first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, was infamous for supposedly burying hundreds of Confucian scholars alive.^note Many of them were alchemists who had failed to discover the elixir of immortality, while others were simply political enemies.
• In 207 BC China, there was a gigantic battle at Julu between the Chu state and the Qin Dynasty involving 150,000 soldiers on the Chu side and 400,000 on the Qin side. It was a Chu victory and a Qin defeat. 200,000 Qin soldiers were killed in battle, and five months later another 200,000 surrendered. Despite their surrender, the Chu state had all 200,000 buried alive.
• In the 900s AD, Olga of Kiev, after the gruesome execution of her husband Igor of Kyiv by the Drevlians, was visited by 20 Drevlian ambassadors who demanded she marry their prince, the killer of her husband. She pretended to agree, and the next day they returned in their boat outside her court. They were carried off inside their boat and, thinking this was an honor, passed it off as nothing until it was too late. They, still within the boat, were thrown inside a trench dug the previous day and buried alive. Olga watched as they were buried, and wondered if "they had found the honor to their taste."
• George Washington used his last words to tell his niece not to bury him for at least two days after his death, in order to ensure he was actually dead. Such instructions was fairly common at the time, where the corpse would be laid out until it started to show obvious signs of decomposition.
• Grain entrapment involves getting buried alive in grain, usually in a silo or grain elevator. Victims either suffocate or are crushed to death.
• Mircea II, older brother of Vlad the Impaler, was murdered in late 1447 by boyars from Târgoviște by being blinded with a red-hot poker and then buried alive. During his second reign (1456-1462) Vlad executed the boyars involved.

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