Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Today's soundtrack: The Misfits "Dig Up Her Bones" ::
Brace yourself. I'm about to blow a piece of supernatural folklore out of the water. Yes, you fans of Buffy, Return of the Living Dead, and anything where the dead rise from their graves, get ready for this.
It is utterly impossible for someone buried in the ground to claw their way out of their casket and dig to the surface. Why? Well, because caskets get interred in concrete vaults, that's why. Sorry to burst your bubble there, folks, but it's true. Cemeteries dig the hole, place the concrete vault, insert casket, place the concrete lid, and replace the dirt, and voila. Now, if someone has been turned into a vampire and then buried as dead, I don't care how strong they are, they ain't getting out of a concrete box with hundreds of pounds of dirt on top of it. Also, while I'm throwing a big heap of reality into this, how exactly does being embalmed before being buried not affect you? Like on Buffy someone could be turned, buried, and then rise from the grave, yet embalming doesn't seem to do anything to them. Kinda weird isn't it?
So, if a strong-as-ten-men vampire can't get out, never mind a weak zombie. Not going to happen. And if you think about it, it kind of destroys the entire premise to Return of the Living Dead completely. In Return (in case you don't know), a toxic chemical was release and a dead body was exposed. This body was reanimated and a couple of guys tried to kill it again. Nothing seemed to work, as even dismemberment left each limb still wiggly. The only thing they could think to do was to burn it, and the ashes from this reanimated dead corpse seeded the storm clouds over head, and when the acid rain came down, it soaked into the ground, seeped into the buried coffins, and those dead became reanimated as well. Now, enter the fact that these coffins would have been placed inside a concrete box into that, there would have been no contact with the acid rain water and no zombie infestation. Oh, sure, the really old caskets may have been affected, but those bodies would have been little more than skeletons by now.
However, the practice of burying a casket within a concrete shell is not done world wide. This is standard for the United States and most of Canada, but not really in Europe. So, if there is some sort of global anomaly which reanimates the dead into flesh eating zombies, Europe is pretty much screwed. Yeah, the USA will fall eventually too, but your survival won't be determined by your proximity to a cemetery. It will depend more on your surrounding hospitals and nursing homes. You know, places where people die a lot, come back as a zombie, and then eat all the helpless sick people around, who will in turn become zombies. Seems pretty weird that a cemetery is safe and a hospital isn't during a zombie plague, doesn't it? Hey, I'm just giving you the facts!
I have been bothered by the vampires digging their way out of grave on Buffy for years. I couldn't understand why no one else shared my frustration when I realized that most people probably don't know about burial vaults. I suppose your average person would have no need to know stuff like this. Not everyone is a morbid freak like me, but you'd think television writers who are going to be writing about cemeteries would do a little bit of research on it. Maybe they found out about the vaults and didn't care. The imagery of a bloodthirsty killer coming up from his grave is just too good to pass up on something as trifling as facts. But then, Sunnydale is a fictional place, and perhaps this town doesn't have a law mandating the use of vaults. There are after all over a dozen cemeteries in Sunnydale, so maybe some of them cut costs by not requiring the use of vaults. Meh, there I go, trying for the No Prize again.
I just want you to know stuff. I mean, shows like Buffy and most supernatural films present you with images which belie the real life facts. Because like I said, in the event that the zombie apocalypse happens or that vampires turn out to be real, you don't need to fear the cemeteries like our media would have you believe. Yes, despite my fascination with being the last man on earth post-apocalypse, I would rather have other survivors out there, so that I, you know, don't go utterly insane from loneliness. I'm merely trying to increase your survival odds. Isn't that nice of me? William's Bloody Hell: the place to come to learn zombie apocalypse survival methods. Maybe I should add that to my Google search criteria.
William the Bloody (myth buster)
