Being buried alive was way more common than you might have thought in the 18th century.

At the time the mortality rate was so high that doctors weren’t always present to make sure the patient was actually dead, so witnesses would often take the apparent lack of breathing or a pulse as enough of a confirmation.

The problem got so bad that people started taking additional measures to make sure the corpse was dead before burying them, including shouting in their ear, sticking needles under their toenails, and whipping them with nettles.

In Germany they went a step further, and set up ‘hospitals for the dead’ to observe the rotting process before the bodies were buried. Some of these were around till the 1950s!

Source - https://www.buzzfeed.com/valezabakolli/disturbing-historical-facts