Martin Sheets awoke in his bed, as he had done so many times before. But out of the corner of his eyes he could see his wife standing there, by their bed, crying. Who was that with her? "Dr. Roberts? Why are you here?" Martin tries to ask, but then realizes he did not say anything, but just thought the question. Trying to raise his arm to get their attention, he finds that he cannot. As a matter of fact, he can't move at all!
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Sheets, I did all that I could," said the doctor as he pulled the bed sheet up over Martin's head.
"Wait! Hey! What are you doing? I'm alive!!" The words were screaming in Martin's mind, but there was only silence.
The next days seemed to pass before Martin's seemingly lifeless body in but a few minutes. The funeral service, the mourners. How despritely he wanted to reach out and grab someone. How he wanted to suddenly sit upright and scream out, "I'M ALIVE!!" Then the lid of the casket was closed for the last time. He could hear the locking mechanism on the casket clinking in the darkness. Oh how dark it was. Next, he could feel the reverberations as shovelfuls of dirt hit the top of the casket. Then finally, the silence....
Martin Sheets bolted straight up in bed, his skin covered with cold persperation. "Argh! That dream! Why does it have to haunt me so?" he thought to himself. Night after night this senerio was repeated. After kissing his wife goodnight and drifting off to sleep, that reoccuring nightmare would return, so real, so frighteningly real that perhaps he would never be able to have a restful sleep again.
So real was the dream, and so convinced was Martin that he was destined to be buried alive, that he decided to go to any length he could to prevent its occurance. First, he had a custom-designed coffin constructed for him, one that could be unlocked from the inside. That wouldn't do him any good if he was six feet down in the ground, so he had a mausoleum constructed in the Highland Lawn Cemetery in his town of Terre Haute, Indiana, as his final resting place. But Martin didn't stop there, what if he couldn't get out of the mausoleum? What if he was too weak to move much? So he had a telephone, which was a relatively new invention at the time, installed in the tomb. There was a direct line installed from the telephone to the cemetery office, so that help could be summoned simply by lifting the receiver, which would turn on an indicator light in the office.
Martin seemed to rest much better after these provisions had been put into place, and he eventually died of natural causes a number of years later. His instructions were followed to a 'T' and he was laid to rest in his special casket, in his mausoleum with the telephone line to the living. For several years after this, workers in the cemetery office would occationally glance at the Sheets' light, wondering just what they might do if the it would suddenly flash on, especially during the long lonely nights, as someone was employed to be at the office to answer the phone in case of emergencies.
Eventually the whole towns phone system was changed and upgraded, and the direct line from the Sheets' mausoleum to the office was removed. However, Martin's widow made sure that her husband's wishes in his will were carried out, and the telephone in the mausoleum was left connected to the phone system and was active.
One day, many years later, Mrs. Sheets was found dead, lying in her bed. Clutched in her hand, so tightly that it had to be plied from her fingers, was the telephone handset. Her death appeared to have been from heart failure, and it was assumed that her last effort in life was to try to call someone for help. The funeral service for her was a quiet one, and workers prepared to lay her to rest in the mausoleum, next to her husband. As the workers were inside the dark, cool tomb, one of them noticed something and turned to his partners. "Would you look at that, the phone in here is off the hook!"
