Buried Alive! by Charles Joyner
“Why did you let them bury me alive?” Young Alexander Hostler sat up in bed with a start. The voice was that of his best friend, Sam Jocelyn, whose burial he had attended just days earlier in the graveyard of St. James Episcopal Church in Wilmington, N.C. Samuel R. Jocelyn Jr., son of a distinguished Wilmington lawyer, had been thrown from his horse while riding alone. Two men passing by in a cart had found him unconscious on a sandy road. They carried him to his home, where he was pronounced dead. His funeral was held two days later, in March 1810. “How could you let me be buried when I was not dead?” This was the third night in succession his apparition had appeared to Alex Hostler, always asking the same question. “Open my coffin and you will know I am tellling you the truth!” Just a short time previously the two friends had discussed their belief in life after death and had agreed that the first of them to die would attempt to communicate with the other, never dreaming that death to one of them would come so soon. Only after being confronted by Samuel’s ghost for a third time did Alex decide that he must take some action. He told his story to a friend, Lewis Toomer, and the two went together to relate the bizarre experiences to Jocelyn’s parents. Subsequently, with the parents’ tearful permission, Hostler and Toomer went at night and exhumed the wooden coffin. By the pale light of a hooded lantern they removed the coffin lid. There, face down, was their friend’s body. One side of the coffin was loosened, apparently by frantic kicks.
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24 OCTOBER 2006 Carolina Country
This, in essence, is the horrifying tale passed down through the years. Col. James G. Burr related these details in a lecture he delivered on Feb. 3, 1890, in the Wilmington Opera House. Burr had heard the story from his mother, a near relative of Alexander Hostler. And Lewis Toomer had told of the disinterment in the presence of a Mrs. C. G. Kennedy, who put her statement in writing for Col. Burr. These events are included in “A History of New Hanover County and the Lower Cape Fear Region,” compiled by Alfred Moore Waddell in 1909, and later transcribed by Barbara Shore.