You Can’t Keep A Good Man Down July 5, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Beach is proud to present this family story from West Virginia from Alan Moses. It took place in 1933.
Old Man Bill Mason was my grandfather’s childhood mentor and post-adolescent friend and bootlegger. Bill spent a lifetime doing heavy farm work, his spine arthritic and bent in his old age as a result. When Bill died, he was working as night watchman at the local freight yard about a mile above my Grandparents house. When Bill was found dead, he was in an old stuffed chair he would often nap in a little watchman’s shack. Rigor mortis had set in by the time he was found, but the doctor, not knowing of Bill’s back problems said not to worry, when it subsided, the body would relax and they could lay him out in a proper coffin for viewing. Off to the undertaker went Bill to be fitted up.
When Bill’s body arrived back at the house of his nephew for display, the nephew noticed Bill’s body had been tied to a plank inside the coffin and asked why. The undertaker explained that Bill’s spine was so misshapen that it had to be done to get him straight enough to lay in the coffin and have it closed. Bill’s nephew had been too poor to have him embalmed and as the weather was warm, he decided a one day viewing would be enough, followed by a quick funeral the following morning, the undertaker agreed.
In those days, viewings of the body took place in the parlor of the house, the coffin usually placed on a couple sawhorses covered with a sheet to disguise them. The nephew and friends got things set up, the friends bid him goodbye and the nephew went to bed. The next morning the nephew woke up, went into the parlor, and saw the coffin lid partially ajar with the top of Bill’s head poking out. It scared the living Hell out of the guy, he ran down the lane to the preachers house convinced that Uncle Bill had tried to get out. The preacher calmed the nephew, and a few of the locals, my Grandfather included, went to the house to see what was up, the nephew refusing to go back in. The answer was, as Bill’s rigor mortis had relaxed further, the ropes had loosened and Bill’s naturally curved spine had taken over.
In my Grandfather’s words, ‘Bill was already getting ripe’, they decided to hold a brief viewing, then store Bill and his coffin in the root cellar where it was cool enough to slow decomposition until the funeral in the morning. Throughout the viewing and the short in-house funeral, the undertaker had to occasionally tighten the ropes to keep Bill from rising up. As most of Bill’s close friends were rowdies and his former customers, they thought the whole business was hilarious, with quips along the lines of, ‘You can’t keep a good man down,’ and to the undertaker, ‘Time to tighten those ropes, Fred, it looks like he wants to sit up and have a drink.’
Bill was buried in an old cemetery on a high hill up a steep road. Even thought the coffin was nailed shut, when the procession was on the way to the road up the hill, there was a loud ‘thunk’ from inside the coffin. Apparently, the ropes had loosened again and Bill’s head had hit the lid. It was too much for the nephew, he got out of the procession and said he would wait at the bottom of the hill. Nothing eventful happened until a couple of days later when the nephew refused to stay in the house any longer, scared silly by the events. His explanation was he couldn’t sleep as he was afraid when he woke up he would find Bill in the parlor asking why he’d been buried alive. The nephew moved fifty miles downriver and never returned.
Thanks to Alan! Death stories are always welcome (at least if they are this good!): drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Death fans should go to…
Chris from Haunted Ohio Books, 10 Jul 2017, What a wonderful story! It’s the details, like the thunk of the dead man’s head on the lid of the coffin, having to put Bill in the cellar, and the poor nephew’s consternation that make it. Apparently the vagaries of rigor were well-known and always good for a laugh.
“I never like to shave a corpse,” remarked an amiable funeral-director from an adjoining county, “and, if it is practicable, I always like to get a barber. About a month ago I had an old man to bury who had died with four or five days’ growth of beard. His limbs had contracted terribly after death, and to straighten them out we had laid a couple of pieces of plank across him. He was lying on the bed in this way when the barber came, a big colored fellow, with considerable superstition about him. He shaved the outside of the face all right, and then had to climb on the bed, over the deceased, to shave the other side. In some way his knee hit the plank which lay across the dead man’s chest and held his arms down, releasing both arms. They sprang together like the jaws of a steel-trap and happened to catch the barber on both sides of the head. He gave one long yell that lasted till he reached the street, and that was the last seen of him. I had to finish the job since. The darkey was so badly scared that it was three days before he went to work again.”
The Argus [Holbrook, AZ] 15 January 1898: p. 3
See the story, “The Corpse Sat Up” in this post
and when rigor went wrong, it went very very wrong…
CORPSE
Sat Up On Cooling Board
And One of the Watchers Fell Over Dead From the Terrible Fright.
Joplin, Mo., February 25. Word was received in this city to-day of the death of Miss Mary Garling from fright, at Garton, as the result of sitting up with the corpse of a friend. An undertaker, in order to get the body of Thomas Sharon, a cripple, of that place, straightened out sufficiently to get it into a casket, laid it out on a cooling board with ropes tied to nails driven into the floor. Sharon had died of rheumatism and was so stooped in life that when he walked his hands touched the ground.
Neighbors were sitting up with the corpse during the night, among them being Miss Garling, when one of the watchers stumbled over the rope that passed across the body of the corpse. The rope broke and the corpse sat up, facing Mary Garling.
The watchers fled from the room except the Garling woman, who uttered a shriek and fell to the floor in a dead swoon. When the watchers returned they found the corpse in a sitting position, its glassy eyes wide open, while Miss Garling lay upon the floor unconscious. She died in a short time.
Indianapolis [IN] Sun 28 February 1902: p. 8
