The Premature Burial
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40 free The Premature Burial trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Premature Burial for a public that half believed it could happen to them. Newspapers of the 1840s traded stories of people sealed in tombs too soon, inventors showed off contraptions to prevent it, and Poe built a tale that begins like a factual report and ends with one of his slyest reversals. This quiz follows the story from its opening catalogue of real disasters through the narrator's supposedly true case histories, his elaborate precautions, his nightmare vision and the night that changes him. It also covers how and where Poe published the tale, the books and legends he alludes to, his other stories on the same theme, and the screen adaptations that followed. It suits students who have just read the story, Poe readers checking how closely they paid attention, and horror fans who know the tale mainly from the film. The questions run from the main turns of the plot to details that only a careful reader will catch.
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Q 01Which disorder, named for want of a better term, plagues the narrator of The Premature Burial?
Catalepsy
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.
Q 02In The Premature Burial, where is the narrator really lying when he thinks he has woken in a grave?
A ship's berth
He lay in a ship's berth barely eighteen inches wide, having sheltered from a storm aboard a small sloop.
Q 03In The Premature Burial, what hangs from the narrator's vault roof, its rope meant for his hand?
A large bell
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.
Q 04Which US president shared The Premature Burial's dread, ordering a three-day wait before entombment?
George Washington
George Washington gave the order on his deathbed in 1799, telling his secretary Tobias Lear to wait three days before burying him.
Q 05In The Premature Burial, whom do Edward Stapleton's doctors hire once his friends refuse a post-mortem?
Body-snatchers
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.
Q 06Which thrifty filmmaker directed the 1962 film The Premature Burial, one of his eight Poe pictures?
Roger Corman
Roger Corman made it the third in his Poe series, at first financing it through a film lab instead of his usual studio.
Q 07Which word names the fear of live burial that rules the narrator of The Premature Burial?
Taphophobia
Taphophobia comes from the Greek for grave or tomb, and before modern medicine the fear was not entirely irrational.
Q 08The Premature Burial opens with real horrors, including an earthquake in which European capital?
Lisbon
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.
Q 09In The Premature Burial, what does Julien Bossuet mean to take from Victorine Lafourcade's grave?
Her hair
Her hair was all he wanted, but when he opened the coffin at midnight and reached for it, her eyes opened.
Q 10In The Premature Burial, what puts a giant artillery officer in the stupor that gets him buried?
A riding accident
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.
Q 11In The Premature Burial, what becomes of the narrator's trances after his night of terror?
They vanish for good
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.
Q 12Near which Virginia city, Poe's boyhood home, is the climax of The Premature Burial set?
Richmond
Richmond is where Poe himself grew up, taken in at nearly three by the merchant John Allan, whose name he carried.
Q 13In The Premature Burial, what drops into a husband's arms when he reopens the family vault?
His wife's skeleton
Q 21Which Oscar winner for The Lost Weekend plays Guy Carrell in the 1962 film The Premature Burial?
Ray Milland
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.
Q 22Like The Premature Burial, which Poe tale turns on live burial, as Montresor walls up Fortunato?
The Cask of Amontillado
The Cask of Amontillado has Montresor lure his drunken victim into the family catacombs at Carnival time to judge a rare wine.
Q 23As in The Premature Burial, who is entombed alive by Roderick in The Fall of the House of Usher?
Madeline
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.
Q 14In The Premature Burial, which device kills a rescued officer yet revives the lawyer Mr. Stapleton?
A galvanic battery
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.
Q 15In The Premature Burial, what does the narrator stock beside his coffin, apart from air and light?
Food and water
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.
Q 16In The Premature Burial, what must the narrator's friends swear to wait for before burying him?
Visible decay
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.
Q 17The Premature Burial recalls prisoners suffocating in an infamous 'Black Hole' in which Indian city?
Calcutta
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.
Q 18In The Premature Burial, where do Victorine Lafourcade and her rescuer hide for twenty years?
America
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.
Q 19The Premature Burial's first publisher had earlier awarded Poe $100 for which code-breaking tale?
The Gold-Bug
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.
Q 20Which usual star of the 1960s Poe films did an exclusive contract keep out of The Premature Burial?
Vincent Price
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.
Madeline, his twin sister, breaks out of the vault bloodied and attacks her brother, who dies of fright as she does.
Q 24In The Premature Burial, what round the narrator's head does he mistake for a corpse's jaw-binding?
A silk handkerchief
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.
Q 25In The Premature Burial, what is the real source of the grave-like smell of damp earth?
A load of garden soil
A load of garden soil, which Poe calls garden mould, lay close by, with labourers already engaged to unload it.
Q 26In The Premature Burial, who felt the earth heave while sitting on a buried officer's grave?
A peasant
A peasant kept to his story so doggedly that the Sunday crowd fetched spades, and the shallow grave was opened within minutes.
Q 27In The Premature Burial, which faculty is slowest to return whenever the narrator wakes from sleep?
Memory
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.
Q 28At the end of The Premature Burial, what does the narrator suspect really caused his trances?
His own obsession
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.
Q 29In the nightmare in The Premature Burial, which word does a voice whisper as an icy hand wakes him?
Arise
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.
Q 30In the 1962 film The Premature Burial, who has secretly schemed to drive Guy Carrell to his death?
His bride
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.