Second Death refers to several different versions of repeated death after initial death in traditional religious belief and North American folklore. In the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, the original understanding of Second Death refers to a person whose soul (and in some versions, soul and body) is resurrected at the final judgment only to be condemned by God to eternal damnation and therefore, a second death. Many evangelical Christians point to the passage in Revelation 21:8 that depicts this final judgment and Second Death in a lake of fire as evidence of an eternal judgment of the soul after death: “The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.” The term is also found in Jewish texts from the Second Temple period (516 BCE–70 CE) to describe one of the Jewish beliefs surrounding the resurrection of the dead at that time.
These ideas have transferred to other more popular versions of the Second Death in which monsters (Frankenstein), vampires (Dracula), and zombies (The Living Dead) need to be killed a second time to be vanquished. In these tales the dead are symbolized by the grotesque and/or monstrous, and the Second Death can be viewed as a way to overcome the ugly and unpleasant aspects associated with death itself. For some, monsters, vampires, and zombies represent the quest for immortality, but each version of escaping death exacts a price. For Frankenstein it is to live piecemeal, literally made up of parts that can never be completely whole due to his ugliness. For vampires it is to live in the shadows and to live off the lives of others—in other words, to live, but without humanity. And for zombies it is to live without brains or the sensory understanding of the world around us. Thus, each version reflects in some way the eternal damnation of living forever but not as human life. In other, more material accounts, the Second Death can also refer to the decomposition of the body in the grave and the complete disintegration of material matter to the point of no recognition.
Finally, another version of Second Death comes from the popular urban legend in which a person who has been pronounced dead wakes up only to die again out of fright or shock. The occurrence of Second Death actually was more common before the emergence of modern medicine and the introduction of techniques to verify death. Historical understandings of death were largely based on cardiopulmonary understandings of death, generally verified through the sound of a person’s pulse or by placing a mirror or piece of glass under a person’s nose or mouth to see if she or he were still breathing. This method of death verification was not always foolproof, and some who were believed to be dead would wake up later during their funeral, or even worse, in their casket buried alive. With the emergence of modern medicine, these occurrences of Second Death still happen but with less frequency and often in less developed areas with reduced access to modern technology. Modern countries tend to adopt definitions of death that include not only cardiopulmonary death but also brain (or partial brain) death, requiring sophisticated machinery to verify death. This being said, Second Death still occurs, and it is unknown whether this is due to miraculous circumstances or poor medicine.
There is frequently a second element to the urban legends about Second Death occurrences, and that is that when such persons wake up, they are so frightened by the fear, shock, and joy of those around them, that they usually die again from fear or shock themselves. Variations of this story are many. More recent stories include the tale of a young Brazilian boy who woke up at his own funeral, announced to his family that he was thirsty for water, drank the water, and then died again minutes later. A Russian woman who was declared dead but woke up at her own funeral was so frightened by those wailing and mourning her death that she died again from a heart attack out of shock. Several other stories discuss people waking up in the morgue after being declared dead and even waking up during the autopsy because of the pain; in these cases there is no Second Death (yet).
Second Death occurs frequently enough to have spurred some commonly used phrases in the English language today, such as the expressions “saved by the bell,” “graveyard shift,” and “Lazarus effect.” Though the historical veracity of these terms is still debated today, legend has it that in England, it was once common to bury people with a hole drilled into the coffin, through which went a string that was attached to a bell. It was commonly believed that if a person who was previously believed to be dead woke up, they could tug on the string, which would ring the bell at the other end—thus they were literally saved by the bell. On the other end of the string was a person who elected to work into the early hours of dawn when nobody else was awake, and because he usually worked at night by himself in the graveyard, this quickly became known as the graveyard shift. Both terms emerged because it was difficult to verify whether or not a person was, in fact, actually dead. Finally, the term Lazarus effect has been coined in the last thirty years to describe those declared clinically dead following cardiopulmonary resuscitation, who then spontaneously revive (usually due to a relaxation of blood vessels and increased blood flow following CPR). Though all these versions of Second Death may at first glance seem disparate, they all deal with the fear of having died, having had to consciously face one’s death, and the ensuing consequences of death—whether those consequences include eternal damnation in a hell, living as a monster, or the realization that one has been buried alive.
Candi K. Cann
See also Buried Alive; Out of Body Experiences; Vampires; Zombie Legends
Further Reading
Boon, Kevin Alexander. 2007. “Ontological Anxiety Made Flesh: The Zombie in Literature, Film and Culture.” Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, edited by Niall Scott. 33–43. New York: Rodopi.
Lauro, Sarah Juliet, and Karen Embry. 2008. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” boundary 2 35 (1): 85–108.
Murano, Grace. 2014. “10 People Who Woke Up after Being Pronounced Dead.” ODEE. January 8. http://www.oddee.com/item_98718.aspx. Accessed June 13, 2015.
“7 Bizarre Tales of People Coming Back from the Dead.” 2012. The Week. June 8. http://theweek.com/articles/474803/7-bizarre-tales-people-coming-back-from-dead/. Accessed June 13, 2015.
Waller, Gregory Albert. 1986. The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.