"The dread of kicking the bucket can be painful to many. For a few, being covered alive is a significantly greater dread.
Prior to the turn of the century, when it was difficult to recognize unconsciousness and death, some hapless individuals went into the ground just to die after awaking.
Martin Sheets, a Terre Haute inhabitant, needed to ensure that accident never happened to him.
Sheets lived on Ohio Street, close to the current area of the Goodie Shop. A significant number of his neighbors thought him somewhat odd, in any case, he was know to do thing as he saw fit.
This included arranging his burial service. Martin Sheets needed to ensure be would not be buried alive so he raised a huge mausoleum in Highland Lawn Cemetery. Inside it was a casket with extraordinary latches so the final resting place could be opened from within. As a last precautionary measure, Sheets had a phone introduced in the burial chamber so that should he wind up in the circumstance he feared, he could call somebody to come and get him out. He also had an armchair and jug of bourbon left in the tomb.
It was said that at the old Indiana Bell Telephone Co., administrators were in constant fear that sometime the line would start blazing from Sheets' resting place.
A long time passed and Mrs. Sheets died because of a cardiovascular failure. She apparently was discovered lying in bed with her phone held so firmly that the Emts struggled breaking her grasp. At the point when her body was interned in the tomb, it was discovered that the installed phone was off the hook and on the floor."