40 Fun Facts About The Premature Burial

Which disorder, named for want of a better term, plagues the narrator of The Premature Burial?

Catalepsy was a real diagnosis in Poe's day, and the narrator says even rigorous medical tests could not tell its deepest trances from death.

In The Premature Burial, where is the narrator really lying when he thinks he has woken in a grave?

He lay in a ship's berth barely eighteen inches wide, having sheltered from a storm aboard a small sloop.

In The Premature Burial, what hangs from the narrator's vault roof, its rope meant for his hand?

A large bell was one precaution among many: the vault doors opened from inside, and the padded coffin's lid sprang up at the slightest movement.

Which US president shared The Premature Burial's dread, ordering a three-day wait before entombment?

George Washington gave the order on his deathbed in 1799, telling his secretary Tobias Lear to wait three days before burying him.

In The Premature Burial, whom do Edward Stapleton's doctors hire once his friends refuse a post-mortem?

Body-snatchers unearthed him on the third night after his funeral, and the dissection stopped when the supposed corpse rose from the table and spoke.

Which thrifty filmmaker directed the 1962 film The Premature Burial, one of his eight Poe pictures?

Roger Corman made it the third in his Poe series, at first financing it through a film lab instead of his usual studio.

Which word names the fear of live burial that rules the narrator of The Premature Burial?

Taphophobia comes from the Greek for grave or tomb, and before modern medicine the fear was not entirely irrational.

The Premature Burial opens with real horrors, including an earthquake in which European capital?

Lisbon was wrecked on All Saints' Day 1755 by an earthquake, a tsunami and fires, and Poe lists it among horrors that grip readers because they are true.

In The Premature Burial, what does Julien Bossuet mean to take from Victorine Lafourcade's grave?

Her hair was all he wanted, but when he opened the coffin at midnight and reached for it, her eyes opened.

In The Premature Burial, what puts a giant artillery officer in the stupor that gets him buried?

A riding accident fractured his skull when an unmanageable horse threw him, and three days after the funeral a visitor sitting on his grave felt the earth move.

In The Premature Burial, what becomes of the narrator's trances after his night of terror?

They vanish for good once he gets out of the house, takes exercise and gives up his morbid reading, a cure as sudden as the fright that brought it on.

Near which Virginia city, Poe's boyhood home, is the climax of The Premature Burial set?

Richmond is where Poe himself grew up, taken in at nearly three by the merchant John Allan, whose name he carried.

In The Premature Burial, what drops into a husband's arms when he reopens the family vault?

His wife's skeleton had hung upright by the door for three years: she had revived, broken out of her coffin and died while trying to raise the alarm.

In The Premature Burial, which device kills a rescued officer yet revives the lawyer Mr. Stapleton?

A galvanic battery gives electric shocks: in the tale one sends the recovering officer into a fatal fit, while another jolts Stapleton off the dissecting table.

In The Premature Burial, what does the narrator stock beside his coffin, apart from air and light?

Food and water sat in receptacles beside a coffin that was warmly and softly padded, all so that waking in the vault would not be fatal.

In The Premature Burial, what must the narrator's friends swear to wait for before burying him?

Visible decay was the only proof of death he would accept, since he had begun to suspect his friends might be glad to be rid of him.

The Premature Burial recalls prisoners suffocating in an infamous 'Black Hole' in which Indian city?

Calcutta was where the Nawab of Bengal's troops packed British prisoners into a tiny Fort William cell overnight in 1756; Poe puts the dead at 123.

In The Premature Burial, where do Victorine Lafourcade and her rescuer hide for twenty years?

America sheltered the couple, and when they went home her husband claimed her, but a court ruled that the long lapse of years had ended his rights.

The Premature Burial's first publisher had earlier awarded Poe $100 for which code-breaking tale?

The Gold-Bug won a story contest run by Philadelphia's Dollar Newspaper in 1843, and the prize was probably the most Poe was ever paid for a single work.

Which usual star of the 1960s Poe films did an exclusive contract keep out of The Premature Burial?

Vincent Price was tied to the studio the director had left to finance the film elsewhere, and that studio bought its way back in on the first day of shooting.

Which Oscar winner for The Lost Weekend plays Guy Carrell in the 1962 film The Premature Burial?

Ray Milland had won Best Actor as the alcoholic writer of that 1945 drama, and took this role because the series' usual star was under contract elsewhere.

Like The Premature Burial, which Poe tale turns on live burial, as Montresor walls up Fortunato?

The Cask of Amontillado has Montresor lure his drunken victim into the family catacombs at Carnival time to judge a rare wine.

As in The Premature Burial, who is entombed alive by Roderick in The Fall of the House of Usher?

Madeline, his twin sister, breaks out of the vault bloodied and attacks her brother, who dies of fright as she does.

In The Premature Burial, what round the narrator's head does he mistake for a corpse's jaw-binding?

A silk handkerchief had stood in for his usual nightcap, and its pressure on his jaws felt like the band tied round the faces of the dead.

In The Premature Burial, what is the real source of the grave-like smell of damp earth?

A load of garden soil, which Poe calls garden mould, lay close by, with labourers already engaged to unload it.

In The Premature Burial, who felt the earth heave while sitting on a buried officer's grave?

A peasant kept to his story so doggedly that the Sunday crowd fetched spades, and the shallow grave was opened within minutes.

In The Premature Burial, which faculty is slowest to return whenever the narrator wakes from sleep?

Memory failed him for many minutes after any slumber, which is why, at the climax, he cannot recall where he lay down the night before.

At the end of The Premature Burial, what does the narrator suspect really caused his trances?

His own obsession with the grave was, he says, perhaps less the consequence of the illness than its cause, a reversal of all he had believed.

In the nightmare in The Premature Burial, which word does a voice whisper as an icy hand wakes him?

Arise is the command, and the fiend who gives it then throws open every grave on Earth to show how few of the dead lie at rest.

In the 1962 film The Premature Burial, who has secretly schemed to drive Guy Carrell to his death?

His bride, Emily, hired men to torment him and had his father's tomb disturbed, a scheme his sister exposes only after shooting him dead.

Which later Oscar-winning director, in his early twenties, assisted on The Premature Burial (1962)?

Francis Ford Coppola got his start under the film's director, who went on to produce his horror feature Dementia 13 the following year.

The Premature Burial names 'the Conqueror Worm', title of a poem Poe later inserted into which tale?

Ligeia gained the poem in 1845, two years after it first appeared in Graham's Magazine; in the tale the dying heroine is its author.

The Premature Burial's image of a silver cord loosed at death comes from which book of the Bible?

Ecclesiastes pairs the cord with a broken bowl as images of death in its last chapter, and Poe reused the bowl to open his poem Lenore.

The Premature Burial ends by naming Carathis, a caliph's mother in which William Beckford novel?

Vathek ends with the caliph and his mother both condemned in the halls of Eblis, the kind of hell Poe says no mortal imagination can explore unharmed.

The narrator of The Premature Burial swears off Night Thoughts, a graveyard poem by which writer?

Edward Young published the poem in nine parts called nights in the 1740s, and William Blake later made a notable set of engravings for it.

The Premature Burial was reprinted in which New York paper, the only periodical Poe ever owned?

The Broadway Journal reprinted the tale in June 1845 and became wholly Poe's that October for $50, paid with a note, but it folded within months.

In the 1962 film The Premature Burial, which tune whistled by a gravedigger makes Guy Carrell faint?

Molly Malone, the Dublin ballad of a fishwife who dies of a fever, first undoes him when it is played on the piano after his wedding.

The Premature Burial credits one live-burial case to a surgical periodical from which German city?

Leipzig, which Poe spells Leipsic, lends the artillery officer's case authority, but scholars searching German medical periodicals have never found the original report.

The Premature Burial ends with King Afrasiab sailing down which river beside sleeping demons?

The Oxus, now the Amu Darya, carries Poe's closing warning: like those demons, the terrors of the grave must be left to sleep or they will devour us.

In The Premature Burial, a congressman's spouse is entombed alive in which 'neighboring' city?

Baltimore lay close to Philadelphia, where the tale was first printed, and it is also the city where Poe himself died and lies buried.