Throughout history, immurement, also known as live entombment, was a cruel form of punishment in which a person was enclosed in a tight confinement without an exit. A person could, for example, be stuffed inside a locked coffin or a wooden box. Or, perhaps, brick walls are constructed around them from which they can not escape.
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One famous example of this vile practice comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Cask of Amontillado,” which tells the story of a man recounting to a friend how he had his revenge on a former acquaintance by luring him into the catacombs with the promise of a highly prized cask of wine. The story’s narrator then describes how he chained his enemy to the wall and proceeded to seal him into his tomb with brick and mortar, leaving him to die a miserable death within:
“I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble rays upon the figure within.”
And though Poe’s 1846 work is indeed one of fiction, the process of immurement is frighteningly real, with a history as dark, if not darker, than Poe’s story.