Skegness Magazine

Buried Alive – 101 Days in a Coffin in Skegness

A woman was buried alive in a coffin for 101 days in a Skegness amusement park…

EMMA IS ‘BACK FROM DEAD’
Coffin ordeal proves what a woman can stand, she declares

MINER’S wife Emma Smith surface last Tuesday after 101 days in a coffin under a heap of soil in a Skegness amusement park and said “I’ve proved a woman can do anything a man can do.

Unable to walk, and wearing sun glasses to protect her and a fur coat to proven catching cold, she spoke for the first time of the months she spent in the air-conditioned oxygen-supplied coffin.
She wanted to show what a woman can stand because she’d heard about the Irishman, Mike [?] staying in a coffin for days, she said.
There were times, I admit, when it was difficult to go on. I thought about my children and my husband and I was very lonely.

I often used to think no one cared down there in the ground on my own, it used to be on my mind that no was worried about me.

SAW ROOF ‘BULGE’

But at times when I wanted to come up, I made myself think about the children. I got real claustrophobic sometimes, but I willed myself to relax. I got to the stage where things were so bad I watched roof of the coffin and saw it lifting, as if everything was going to cave in.
It was only my imagination course, and it probably sounds silly. But it was real at the time. But only once, all the time ‘as down there. did I press the alarm which was supposed to be for an emergency. And when people got there, I told them I had done it by mistake.
I was determined to stick it out, whatever happened. I don’t think there was any danger involved in it, only times I used to think as dangerous was when I thought of it catching fire. If that had happened, they have
never got me out. It has been a horrible in some ways.

There were times when I thought I couldn’t stand it any more. But for most of the time I was all right. I never really enjoyed it, but physically I was always comfortable and I was kept well fed and well looked after.
SATISFACTION
“Now, I am very happy to have done it. I feel real satisfaction at showing what a woman can do.
“After all, she can’t get into a boxing ring and fight it out with a man, but when it comes to determination and stamina she can do anything a man can do”.
Asked if she would do it all again, Emma, 43, said: “I would if somebody challenged me, but not right now, I must admit”.
She was talking after being given a shouting, cheering reception by a crowd of about 800 people, packed into a small square between the coffin site, an amusement arcade and a dodgem track.
Police had to force passage through the crowd so that Emma could be carried from the coffin to a nearby caravan where she was thoroughly examined by a doctor who had attended her regularly during the 101 days — using, when necessary, a stethoscope with an 8ft extension that could be lowered to Emma through a feeding and speaking tube.
HOT BATH
He pronounced her fit enough to be taken home to Ravenshead, Nottinghamshire. But first she was driven to the Seacroft Hotel, where the first thing she asked for was a hot bath.
“It Is the thing I have looked forward to most,” she said.
Afterwards she was carried Into the hotel ballroom, which the stunt organisers had hired for the evening, so Emma could give television interviews.
She did so calmly, with the lights on her and the cameras whirring. And then she said: “I feel quite famous now, after all the cheers and now being on television”.
After the television crews had finished, Emma explained for the first time the coffin stunt’s budget. And she said, “I have made nothing at all out of it”.
GIFTS TO CHARITY
She said that the doctor’s fees, the wages of four permanent staff on the coffin site, the rent of the site, the electricity and telephone bills, the cost of radio equipment and of erecting and dismantling the site, and other small bills had taken up most of the estimated £3,000 taken through the turnstiles.
A part of what was left had been sent to charity.
“It will leave very little, if anything, for me,” Emma added.
But I am hoping to profit from a diary I have kept day by day in the coffin. I recorded ail my feelings about being there as each incident happened, and I am hoping somebody wild publish the diary, either in a newspaper or as a book
“It is probably the only way I will benefit financially from making a world record in the coffin.
NOT THE MONEY
“But it wasn’t the money that was uppermost in my mind. It was the thought of achieving a record of doing better than any man has done.
“Also it was the enjoyment I got from talking to some of the 60,000 people who came to see me.
Some People might think that being buried alive is a funny way of making a name for yourself, but all I can say is that everybody is entitled to their opinions, just as I am.”

Picture above shows Emma Smith wearing sun shades being carried from the coffin by her husband, Stan (left) and Eric Pearce.

Emma Smith was 43 when she was buried alive in Skegness forty years ago in September 1968. If she’s still alive she would be 83 now. Did YOU know Emma? Do you remember this bizarre news story?