Russian Buries Himself Alive

A Russian man who decided to spend a night buried alive for "good luck" didn't make it out of the ground alive. The 35-year-old villager dug a hole in a garden and climbed into an improvised coffin with holes for air pipes, bringing a phone and a bottle of water with him. A friend then covered the coffin with earth and planks, returning the next morning to find his friend dead. Investigators believe a rainstorm may have blocked the air supply to the coffin, the Telegraph reports.

"According to his friend, the man wanted to test his endurance and insistently asked his friend to help him spend the night buried," an investigator says. "The victim was a computer programmer and has a small child." Numerous Russian bloggers have written about undergoing supervised self-burial, and investigators believe the superstitious victim was influenced by accounts he had read on the Internet. (More Russia stories.)