Taphophobia

Taphophobia, from the Greek taphos, grave or tomb, and phobos, fear, is an abnormal, psychopathological fear of being buried alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. Before the era of modern medicine the fear was not entirely irrational: the English reformer William Tebb, collecting accounts of premature burial in 1905, found 219 cases of near live burial and 149 actual live burials, and several notable historical figures, including Frederic Chopin, George Washington, Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Nobel, are thought to have feared live burial themselves and took specific precautions against it. Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Premature Burial is about a person suffering from the condition.