Gloom, dread, sadness and depression worked it's evil way into me today as I shot some footage at the old Roseland Cemetery where coffins from the 1800s sit above ground and others appear to have had the occupants trying desperately to break out of their tombs.

The thought of being buried alive torments me!

I have had relatives from the past who were discovered to have been buried alive when their bodies were exhumed. One woman on my mother's side clawed at the inside of her coffin and when that didn't work she tore at her face and pulled her own eyes out from the trauma.

That story has been published in a book about my ancestors, but I first heard it from relatives sitting on a porch reminiscing on a warm fall night after a family reunion when I was a child. The story has stuck with me ever since. Sometimes at night as I pull the covers up to my face, I can see her screaming and clawing, but the sounds are muffled by soil and murmured by nightmares.