In the summer of 1915, a 30-year-old woman named Essie Dunbar from South Carolina had an epileptic seizure and fell to the ground. Her family panicked and called a doctor named Dr. D.K. Briggs from Blackville to check on her. When the doctor arrived, he could not find any signs that she was still alive. She was not breathing and had no pulse, so he told the family that Essie had died.
The family decided to hold the funeral the next morning at 11 a.m. because Essie’s sister lived in another town and needed time to get there. When the funeral day came, they put Essie’s body in a wooden coffin and three preachers took turns leading the service. The ceremony went on for quite a while, but Essie’s sister still had not shown up. Eventually, the family felt they could not wait anymore, so they went ahead with the burial. They lowered the coffin into a grave that was six feet deep and covered it with dirt.
Just a few minutes later, Essie’s sister finally got there. She was really upset that she missed the funeral and asked if she could see her sister one more time. The preachers were not sure about it at first, but they finally agreed to dig the coffin back up, as per History Defined. When they opened the lid, everyone got the shock of their lives. Essie was sitting up in the coffin, very much alive, and she was even smiling at her sister and everyone else standing around.
She wasn’t a ghost or anything supernatural though
After that, people started freaking out immediately. The three preachers were so scared that they fell backwards into the grave, and one of them got stepped on by the others and ended up with three broken ribs. A lot of people at the funeral ran away because they thought Essie was a ghost coming back from the dead.
Essie was just a regular woman who got buried by mistake and was fortunate that someone dug her up in time. But the people in her town did not understand it that way. For many years after what happened, the folks in Blackville treated Essie differently.
Essie Dunbar, buried alive—yet lived to tell the tale. https://t.co/8V9eyLmAXa pic.twitter.com/rf566I2gKb
— History Defined (@historydefined) November 3, 2025
Some people called her a zombie and others thought she had some kind of curse on her because she somehow beat death. Even though there were all these weird rumors going around about her, Essie just went back to living her regular life and became someone everyone in town knew about.
In 1955, a newspaper called the Augusta Chronicle wrote about Essie when she was 70 years old. The article said she was still alive and working, picking cotton to make some money. A local doctor named Dr. O.D. Hammond, who had taken care of one of the preachers that got hurt at the funeral, talked to the newspaper.
In 1915, a woman arrived late at her sister's funeral. When she arrived, she demanded that her sister's coffin be raised so that she could see her one last time. Upon opening the coffin, her sister, Essie Dunbar, sat up and smiled. She went on to live another 47 years. pic.twitter.com/TutNjY7g0x
— FatwesTV (@FatwesTv) November 7, 2025
He said that Essie “has many friends today” and that she “gets a nice-sized welfare check monthly and earns some money picking cotton.” The newspaper also pointed out something pretty wild. Essie had lived longer than Dr. Briggs, the same doctor who said she was dead all those years ago. This reminds me of another story where a shaman buried his followers alive in shallow graves.
Essie Dunbar ended up living for 47 more years after her first “death.” She finally died for real on May 22, 1962, at a hospital in South Carolina when she was 77 years old. The local newspapers wrote about her death with a headline that said “Final Funeral Held For South Carolina Woman.” This time around, nothing crazy happened at her burial.
In 1915, a woman arrived late at her sister's funeral. When she arrived, she demanded that her sister's coffin be raised so that she could see her one last time. Upon opening the coffin, her sister, Essie Dunbar, sat up and smiled. She went on to live another 47 years. pic.twitter.com/gpoJnzw381
— Oluwatimileyin(@Timmysofine) November 8, 2025
But these days, people who study history are not completely sure if the whole story really happened the way it was told. A fact-checking website called Snopes says there are no records from 1915 that back up the story. Most of what we know comes from that 1955 newspaper article and a book called Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear that came out in 2001.
Nobody can say for sure if everything about Essie’s story is true, but it is still one of the wildest survival stories in American history. She is not the only person this kind of thing supposedly happened to either. There have been other scary situations involving people being buried alive, like when 26 children had to escape after being buried alive by their kidnappers.
