There are two facts that everyone knows about graves, and those two facts are one that they’re really spooky at night and the other fact that they’re always dug six feet deep.
Six feet deep is now primarily known as being synonymous with the very idea of death, but it has nothing to do with burial customs. For starters, the basic rule on how much deep you’re legally supposed to bury someone when they die is not universal. One of the few rules for burying today is that a coffin should be covered in no less than 18 inches of dirt, which means you can technically bury a person in less than three feet deep in many areas. However, it’s often a common practice to bury a dead person deeper than this so that there’s some room left to bury another person in the same grave, mostly the loved ones. There are some places where people dug graves as deep as twelve feet.
As with most things in life, there are some exceptions to even this loose guideline, and it’s possible to bury a dead person in a shallow grave in some rare cases. For example, the graves of babies and children are often shallower than adults. Additionally, in some regions, like the United Kingdom, the fees for a burial of a kid can even be waived off.
Depending on location, there can be some regulations of how much deep a body can be buried. For example, in areas that are prone to high water tables of flooding, the dead bodies can’t be buried any more profound than traditional six feet due to the risk of them becoming waterlogged. Even the risk of a coffin rising from the Earth like a terrifying wooden iceberg.
In several regions in the United States, there are no hard rules set for prohibiting the burying of dead bodies on private property. As long as you’re sure that you’re doing it within the piece of land you own and filling out correct forms, you can technically bury someone on your property as deep as you wish.
In the UK, the guidelines for burying a person on your land is so easy. It’s much harder to build a garage on your land than to bury a person. For burying a person in your private property there are only a handful of instructions to be followed. And same as in the USA, it’s clearly on your wish how much deep you want to bury someone in your private property.
And as for how the six feet figure became synonymous with burial, despite there being very little evidence of the so-called standard either in history or now, it’s really not clear.
Final words
So, six feet under is not the standard figure for burying anyone, and this largely depends on place to place. We can say it has just become a tradition that everyone is following; there’s no clear evidence of how it all started?
