Jesse Malachi Real #2

Grandpa (Jesse Malachi Real #2) once told me that when he was a kid, they didn’t have all the fancy doctors and hospitals like we do now, they had an illness called the “sleeping sickness”. They buried people with a breathing pipe and a bell so they would know if the person woke up after they were buried. He said the “sleeping sickness” caused a person’s blood pressure and pulse to drop so low that you could not find it. Their breathing became so shallow it would not even show on a mirror. They thought the person was dead so they buried them.

One time they were having a funeral for a man they thought was dead. They had already put the wooden box (coffin) into the ground and was covering it with when all of a sudden they heard pounding on the box and yelling coming from the hole in the ground. They pried the lid off the box and sure enough the man was still alive. Grandpa said, “the women started dropping like flies”. Four of them fainted at the sight of the “dead man” climbing out of his coffin. So that after that funeral they started burying people with a pipe sticking out of the grave (breathing pipe) and a bell attached to the above ground end of the pipe. A string was tied to the bell and the other end of the string was ran through the pipe into the coffin. This was so that if the person was not really dead when he was buried the pipe furnished air for them to breath and they could pull the string to ring the bell so someone would know they were alive. For three or four days after the next few funerals some one would sit guard of the bell, waiting to see if it rang. Grandpa said there were a few rambunctious boys that when they were bored would hide in the cemetery and ring the bells so they could watch the town folks come running to the cemetery. After the whippings with a razor strap it only happened a couple of times. He would not say if he was one of the boys.

Note: There are several breathing pipe graves in the old Bohemia Cemetery in Trinity County, Texas.