The Mystery of the Moving Coffins

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re going to take a look in some burial vaults to see what the heck those dead people get up to in there.

The story goes like this: A family builds a burial vault, which is a kind of underground tomb, a chamber that’s typically large enough to hold several coffins and is reached by a set of stairs that lead down to the door. So the family inters their dead, the tomb is sealed by a heavy stone door, and presumably everyone inside rests in peace until the next time the tomb is opened, when somebody else in the family dies.

But to their shock, at the next funeral, the family finds the huge, heavy lead coffins have been tossed around the vault, as if a giant hand had flung them. Some coffins have tipped over, some lie on top of each other, and some lean against walls, upside down so the head is at the bottom, which is extra creepy. 

Naturally, no one has a great explanation for this. At last, the family decides a team of very strong vandals have broken in and caused mischief. They search the tomb, but find no sign of an entrance anywhere but that main door. So they seal it carefully this time, making sure it’s quite secure, and then leave, until the next family member dies.

Well, sure enough, when they reopen the tomb, the coffins are once again thrown about. Furious, the family sets everything to rights, then spreads ash or sand on the floor to record any vandal footprints, and seals the door with concrete, marked with the family crest from somebody’s signet ring.

Is any of it true? Well, maybe. 

The most famous of the moving coffin cases is the Chase vault in Barbados, where the story dates to the early 1800s. But there aren’t any contemporary sources for the story, which makes it suspect. (In fact, there are no records of anybody having been interred in that tomb—ever. It’s empty today.)

Instead, the moving coffins legend seems always to have been a ghost story, possibly arising from tensions between colonialists and the people they enslaved [pdf], as a metaphor for scary indigenous “magic” threatening the white slaveowners’ social order. It could also be some strange allegorical tale about freemasonry.

The only reason the moving coffins story is maybe true is there is a plausible natural explanation as well. Earthquakes is a common guess, but those leave other evidence. Instead, the secret, silent coffin thrower is: water.

Burial vaults are underground. There is also water underground. Theoretically, water could flood a vault through small cracks, rearrange the heavy coffins, and then seep away before the vault is opened again. (In my opinion, this is why the stories usually mention putting sand or ash on the floor: water would disturb that, so they’re trying to rule out the water theory.) 

But in any case, because there is a natural explanation, there is a possibility that somewhere, sometime, somebody has opened a family vault to find out that Great-Grandma still knows how to party.

And now for some entombed writing prompts!

• The new neighbors. So what do the dead get up to down there? How do the coffins get thrown around? Do the dead actually crawl out of their caskets and fling them with supernatural strength, or do they use telekinesis or magic? You could write a dark comedy in that tomb, full of hissy fits and ridiculous complaints about the neighbors, a horror story about a new burial trapped underground with a supernatural menace, or an epic battle of good and evil fought in a tiny dark room.

• What lies beneath. So maybe it’s not the departed that are the trouble. Maybe they’re all trying to rest in peace, thank you. But what if there was something else in that tomb? Maybe before the vault was built, people were buried in that spot, and they’ve either been displaced or they’re still down there, undiscovered and angry. Or maybe the land itself is cursed, making for a whole graveyard of restless dead, and the hurled coffins in the vault is the only obvious sign of it. Or maybe some foolish teenagers sat on the roof of the vault with a Ouija board and accidentally bound a demon to the tomb. How would the living determine the truth and fix the problem?

• Locked tomb mystery. You could have a story about a skeptic who tries to solve the mystery of the moving coffins. Set it in any place or time period you like. Throw in complicated family history, maybe some romance or doomed romance, suspicious deaths or murder, and a character trying to prove there is a rational explanation for the disarray in the vault. Whether they’re right or wrong is up to you. Maybe your skeptic eventually realizes the supernatural is real. Or maybe they prove the water theory and lay all the fears to rest, so to speak. In either case, what consequences would the explanation have on the troubled family?

• Artistic expression. So let’s say the tomb is reopened and the coffins found thrown, but there are footprints in the sand. Maybe animal footprints, or strange symbols, or a bible verse or drawing of a devil. This would clearly point to a supernatural explanation. But it could also be a prankster who figured out the water explanation, waited until there’d been a good rain, then broke in and put new sand down as their artist’s medium. How would the family and the rest of the community react to that? Would they figure out it was a prank?

• Underground party. So what happens to the tomb after the family abandons it? Well, then you’ve got a haunted underground room in a cemetery. No way the local teenagers are leaving that alone. Maybe they throw a party or have a seance or use it as a lover’s lane. And maybe the trouble is gone, now that the coffins have been removed. Or maybe not. There could be something evil still down there. Or maybe a serial killer starts using the vault as a place to hide bodies. Even scarier, how about an accident that shuts that tomb door again, with living people trapped inside, and no one on the surface the wiser?

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! I think it’s time to let the dead get some rest. Hopefully they think so too.

Sources & further reading:

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. “Moving Coffins.” The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. Facts on File, 1992. On Goodreads 

The Chase Vault on Wikipedia

Finneran, N., & Welch, C. (2020). Barbadian Gothic: The Moving Coffins of the Chase Vault in Socio-Cultural Context. Folklore, 131(1), 55–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2019.1637561 Read free [pdf]

The Mysterious Moving Coffins of Chase Vault in Barbados: Key Caribe

The Moving Coffins of Barbados: Skeptoid