The Rise of a Corpse

by Erin Doane, Senior Curator

Autumn is my favorite season with the cooler weather, beautifully changing leaves, warm comforting foods, and, of course, Halloween. While most horror movies are too much for me, I do enjoy reading scary stories. More than ten years ago, I came across an article in the Elmira Telegram published on November 13, 1892. It told the tale of a local undertaker who had a terrifying experience. In the spirit of the season, I will now share that story with you.

Elmira Telegram, November 13, 1892

The article began with the Telegram reporter in conversation with a well-known Elmira undertaker who would only tell his story upon the express condition that he was not named in the article. “The majority of people are inclined to deny or disbelieve supernaturalism, and attribute tales of dead people returning to life as either a fraud or delusion of the nerves,” he said. “I don’t enjoy being called a fool.” With the reporter’s assurance of anonymity, the undertaker launched into his tale.

A few months earlier, the undertaker was called to the Erie Railroad station to collect a body that had been shipped to Elmira. It had been a long, busy day so it was already quite late when he picked up the corpse in his ambulance and brought it to his undertaking rooms. There were two funerals scheduled the next morning and his assistant was tired, so the undertaker sent him home. That was around midnight. Once the assistant had left, the undertaker locked the street doors to his office and went about preparing the newly-arrive body for burial. At this point in the article, he made sure to let the reporter know that he was not superstitious and had “not the least particle of dread of a corpse.” He went so far as to tell about the finely polished skeleton he kept in his own bedroom. He said he would often pat its bony skull or shake its fleshless hand, thus proving that he was not at all afraid of the dead. 

Continuing the tale, the undertaker said he removed the body from the casket and laid it upon the preparation table. The corpse was in rough shape and he thought he “detected the effluvia of decay” as he unwrapped its shroud. He washed the body then took his trocar needle and began injecting embalming fluid into the cadaver. He explained that there is a vessel that “if rightly touched will raise the sunken eyes or cheeks to their normal fullness” so that the individual would look as they did before sickness and death. 

Just as the undertake inserted the needle into the corpse’s face near its eye, it suddenly sat up! “It seemed to me as the flash of an electric current, the body raised up in a sitting posture, throwing me back by the contact and driving the needle far into the eye socket.” At the same time, the deceased’s lips twitched and it let out a breathy, unintelligible sound. “To say that for once in my life I was frightened out of my wits does not fittingly describe the situation.” He ran out of the operating room and into the office, expecting to be chased by the suddenly-reanimated corpse. 

The undertaker dropped into a chair, feeling terribly weak with great beads of perspiration rolling down his forehead. He was “so wrought up” that when he finally mustered the courage to look back toward the embalming room, he thought he saw the cadaver peeking through the black muslin curtain that covered the door. He rushed to the front door, unlocked it, and ran out to the street in search of a policeman. 

The officer he found thought at first that the undertaker was drunk, but agreed to accompany him back to the undertaking rooms. The two man found the corpse face down on the floor with both hands outstretched. Though the policeman seemed skeptical of the undertaker’s tale, he helped return the body to the operating table. The pair reexamined the body for signs of life and even summoned a nearby doctor who applied his galvanic battery to the corpse to make sure it was indeed deceased. The doctor pronounced the subject “stone dead” and advised the undertaker to take something for his nerves. 

When the undertaker finally returned to his home early that morning, his wife asked if he had been ill. He told her he wasn’t feeling well but didn’t tell her about his terrifying experience as she was “a very nervous woman.” He supposed that no one would believe his story and that he would be “sneered at by all of the jesters in the town,” but he assured the reporter that it actually happened. 

“It will probably remain a fact or phenomenon that cannot be explained,” the undertaker said. “Psychometery, visions, voices, table movements, automatic writing, trance speaking all may be accounted for, but when a dead man rises up and fairly speaks, with a trochar (sic) inserted three inches into his brain, the greatest searcher after psychical knowledge is puzzled.”

The article concludes: “The Telegram reporter shrugged his shoulders and looked around the undertaker’s office to see that no uncanny corpse was about to grab him, and bade the undertaker good-night.”

There were a half dozen undertakers working in Elmira in the early 1890s. Any one of them could have been the source of this chilling tale. We’ll never know. I’m just glad that one of them trusted the Telegram reporter enough to share it.