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Jon Malin (Jawbreakers) and Mark Poulton (Hawkman) bring you the next chapter in GRAVEYARD SHIFT as the team returns to Earth only to find a werewolf infestation has terrorized the world in their absence. Surrounded by enemies everywhere, they join forces with the dimension hopper BRAM and his commando unit of super-powered monsters. There are millions regularly working the graveyard shift. Could the costs to their health and the knock-on effects for the global economy be mitigated? Define graveyard shift. Graveyard shift synonyms, graveyard shift pronunciation, graveyard shift translation, English dictionary definition of graveyard shift.

Appalshop, Inc., Documentary Survey Project, by Earl Dotter, c. 1975. Smithsonian American Art Museum, transfer from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1983.

Just before midnight on November 19, 1968, ninety-​nine men working on the “cat-​eye shift” at Consolidation Coal Company’s Number 9 mine walked into its bathhouse and began pulling on their thick work shirts and darkly smudged overalls. Superstitious, none of them dared call their 12 am to 8 am turn in the mine the “graveyard shift.”

They stepped into steel cages and started their nearly six-​hundred-​foot drop to the mine’s sooty floor. The oldest among them was sixty-​two, the youngest only nineteen. They lived on narrow, pitching streets in little northern West Virginia mining communities called Idamay, Enterprise, and Shinnston. One had mined coal for forty-​two years, another for just eight days. Many of the men on the cat-​eye shift were veterans. By 1968 1,400 men from Marion County had fought in Vietnam.

When they reached the bottom, the miners broke into six- to eight-​man crews and boarded mantrips—​electric train–​like vehicles that ran on rails or had rubber tires—​that carried them through Number 9’s vast network of spidery tunnels to their workstations. For the next eight hours they would cut and load coal. One crew toiled at freeing a large piece of equipment that had been covered with slate and debris during a roof fall while the others clawed coal out of the mine’s rich seams.

But earning a living was not the only thing on their minds. They knew that the shift of miners working before them had had to stop digging three times, once for two and a half hours, while the mine’s four giant surface fans drew fresh air into its tunnels and diluted deadly methane gas.

They also knew that they were working at the most dangerous jobs in the country for a company that was obsessed with extracting as much coal as it could.

In 1963 The Atlantic called coal mining a “mortician’s paradise,” and for good reason. The federal government first began compiling statistics on coal-mining deaths and serious accidents in 1900, and by November 1968 over 101,000 coal miners had been crushed, gassed, electrocuted, or incinerated underground, while another 1.5 million had been seriously injured. Coal mining’s injury rate was four times higher than that of any other industrial job in the United States and fourteen times higher than the national average for all workers.

At least another 150,000 active and retired coal miners had pneumoconiosis, or black lung, contracted by inhaling coal dust, which made their lungs as porous as fishing nets and turned them into wheezing wrecks.

The Consolidation Coal Company and the reckless way it operated Number 9 had added to these grim statistics. In 1954 an underground blast killed sixteen miners working on a chilly Saturday in November. Some engineers argued then that the mine was too dangerous and gassy to reopen, but its coal deposits were too rich for its owners to abandon.

Eleven years later, a four-​man crew was standing on a scaffold 233 feet inside the mine’s 577-​foot-​deep Llewellyn airshaft when a spark below ignited a pocket of methane gas. The four men were orbited up and out of the huge shaft’s mouth as if they had been shot out of a bazooka. Their shredded body parts were found later in a creek, seventy-​five feet from the shaft.

Grave Shift

Consolidation Coal Company simply wrote off these losses as the price of doing business. By 1968 it was the biggest bituminous coal producer in the country. Workers who complained about the mine’s poor safety conditions were ignored, and the coal company gave its loudest critics the most dangerous jobs.

The federal government’s attitude was no better. The United States Bureau of Mines had only 250 inspectors assigned to watch over the country’s 5,400 mines. They had fined only one operator in sixteen years. The bureau was a captive of the coal industry, and its managers fired or transferred inspectors who pushed too hard to close big mines.

Worse, the miners’ own labor union seemed to care more about its fat coffers than the men who filled them. The United Mine Workers of America had a one-​man safety division. Its District 31, where Number 9 was located, spent only $14 on safety training in 1968.

The temperature at midnight on November 20 was a chilly 35 degrees. Coal operators dismissed it as hillbilly folklore, but every miner in West Virginia knew that the months of November and December were the explosion season. Cold air accompanied by dizzying drops in barometric pressure dried out mines and caused them to fill with odorless methane gas and mix with thick coal dust, whipped up by giant electric continuous-mining machines, with rotary bits as big as a railroad boxcar’s wheels. The faintest spark could turn this volatile mixture into something like gunpowder and transform a mine’s shafts into smoking barrels of underground cannons.

This had happened at Monongah, only seven miles from Number 9. On a cold clear day in early December 1907 an underground explosion inside the Fairmont Coal Company’s interconnected mines Numbers 6 and 8 pulverized at least five hundred men and boys. It likely killed a lot more; no one knew exactly how many newly arrived immigrants, mostly from Italy and Poland, worked in the two mines.

Number 9 burrowed into the same eight-​foot-​thick, gassy Pittsburgh coal seam as the Monongah mines. It emitted eight million cubic feet of methane gas a day, enough to heat a small city. The mine’s four towering surface fans, which ran around the clock, were supposed to draw enough fresh air into the mine’s tunnels to dilute and blow away this odorless but explosive gas, but they sometimes broke and shut down for hours.

At 4 am the men on the cat-​eye shift took a short break to eat the packed food they brought with them in the mine’s “dinner holes” and rest.

Just as the men had stopped to eat, the Mods Run fan, one of the mine’s four huge surface fans, ground to a halt and threw off its blades. While the men ate, Number 9’s west-side tunnels began filling with deadly methane gas. Seventy-​eight of them would soon be dead.

Number 9’s safety system was designed to warn its miners after a fan stopped ventilating. Each fan was connected to a display board in the lamp house, a building near the mine’s entrance used to store supplies. When a fan slowed or stopped running, a warning light turned red, an alarm sounded, and the men evacuated. As a fail-​safe, the system was designed to cut off all power to Number 9 if a fan was down for more than twelve minutes.

That is, unless someone in the company decided that shutting off power and evacuating the miners interfered too much with cutting and loading coal. Sometime before the Mods Run fan stopped working, a coal company employee disabled the fan’s alarm system.

At 5:27 am an explosion so violent that it shook the windows in Fairmont twelve miles away tore through the shaft at the mine’s Llewellyn Portal. Billowing mushroom clouds, shot through with orange and blue flames, curled above the mine. The heat was so intense that it scorched several of the miners’ cars in Number 9’s parking lot. Thirteen men, working elsewhere in the sprawling mine, scrambled to the surface. A crane operator, using a makeshift bucket, extracted eight more.

As the mine belched fire and smoke, word raced through the tiny Appalachian communities surrounding Number 9 that it had blown up. Family members, tears in their eyes, gathered in the mine’s cinder-block company store, clustered among its plastic furniture, and stared out at the rolling clouds of smoke. Some of the missing men’s wives were grandmothers, others were still in their teens. Those women who had experienced mining disasters before suspected the worst. They gave up hope of ever seeing their menfolk again and went home soon after they arrived. Others previously untouched by underground explosions clung to hope and waited for any news about a rescue.

The grisly drama of a shift of coal miners trapped in a burning hole a week before Thanksgiving attracted the country’s biggest dailies and news networks, making this the first major mine disaster in United States history to be nationally televised. While the first explosion had killed some of the miners instantly, others had enough time to put on their gas masks. Recovery crews later found an open first-​aid kit and bodies lying on a sheet of canvas, as if some of the trapped men had lain down together to conserve their dwindling supply of fresh air.

The news cameras were still rolling when apologists for the coal industry trooped before reporters to circle the wagons. John Roberts, who headed Consolidation Coal Company’s public relations department, described the explosion as “something that we have to live with,” as did J. Cordell Moore, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of the Interior, and Hulett C. Asus n56vz driver. Smith, governor of West Virginia. Smith, who led a state in which there was more debate about whether there should be sex education in its public schools than about safety in its coal mines, lectured the grieving families that “we must recognize that this is a hazardous business and what has occurred here is one of the hazards of being a miner.”

But the most astonishing performance was that given by W.A. “Tony” Boyle, wearing his signature Washington uniform of a fedora, a pressed suit, and a red rose in his lapel. His few appearances in the coalfields were usually carefully staged, allowing him time to don a new pair of overalls and shiny work boots, but this time Boyle swooped onto the scene in a helicopter furnished by the coal company.

When he stepped up to the hastily erected podium in the company store, Boyle stunned many of those who had gathered to hear his expected words of sorrow and outrage by instead, in a flat, nasal voice, praising Consolidation Coal Company’s safety record and its history of cooperation with the union. He reminded the families, as if they did not already know it, that coal mining was a very dangerous way to make a living. The public spectacle of the UMWA’s president defending the grossly negligent, if not outright criminal, actions of a coal company while seventy-​eight of his coal miners lay entombed in its burning mine shocked many of the onlookers. “I hated him right then,” Judy Henderson, now a widow at just twenty-​one, told the Washington Post. “I couldn’t believe someone could say that right in front of the mine where all our husbands were buried alive.”

Many of the families clung to hope until the day after Thanksgiving. On the evening of Friday, November 29, when they gathered to pray inside the James Fork United Methodist Church, John Corcoran, president of Consolidation Coal, stepped forward and told them the time had come to seal the mine. He had already told a group of local ministers on Thanksgiving that there was no hope, but he had not wanted to give the families such awful news on the nation’s day of prayer and thanks.

The grieving families—​235 children had lost their fathers and 74 women had lost their husbands in the underground inferno—​had little reason to believe that this latest coal mining disaster would be treated any differently than all the ones that had come before it. The nation’s response to tragedies such as Number 9 had always been the same: prayers, an outpouring of sympathy for the widows and children, toothless coal-mining safety legislation, and a return to the collective amnesia that allowed things in the mines to go on as they always had.

Excerpted from Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America. Copyright © 2020 by Mark A. Bradley. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Mark A. Bradley has been a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, a criminal defense lawyer, and a CIA intelligence officer. He is the author of Blood Runs Coal: The Yablonski Murders and the Battle for the United Mine Workers of America. Currently the director of the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives and Records Administration, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Have you ever wondered about the term 'Graveyard Shift’’?
The term has come a long way from just being another time slot for laborersto come to work their shifts until dawns early light. The term has a quiteunnerving and more macabre origin altogether.
In Transylvania the superstitions are so strong that still to this day manybelieve that the dead may come back to life as a vampire or undead creature ifa stake is not driven through their hearts or their heads cut off.
Why would this superstition come to pass? Why would the myths of the undead,zombies and even vampires exist if there wasn't something that started them?Hundreds of years ago, and even thousands of years ago the medical technology wasnot capable to seeing when some were in a comatose state or not, thus peoplesometimes would be buried alive. Sadly, this attributes to the stories ofpeople crawling out of their graves, after being buried. Remember in certaincivilizations they did not embalm the bodies therefore their bodies were buriedfully in tact.
Things to add to the undead and the zombie folklore may have started withthe first mention of the undead creature in the fictional Sumerian story “TheEpic of Gilgamesh” where it is mentioned that Ishtar cried out in a fury andstated,
'Father give me the Bull of Heaven,
So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!'
Ancient Sumerian, Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology all originated fromAncient Babylon and their polytheistic and pagan beliefs. These beliefsincluded the stories of undead, demonic and even vampire like creatures whichare believed to be the precursor’s to inspire the famous vampire stories madefamous in the 18

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^th century.
In the Middle Ages, the belief in a zombie like being thought of as the'Revenant' was wide spread. The belief that the souls of the deadwould return to earth and haunt the living was very common, especially forthose who were murdered. It was believed that they took on the form of askeleton or a decomposing corpse and roamed the graveyard at night.
As far as the name zombie, it has nothing to do with a dead, reanimatedcorpse at all. In fact in Voudoo belief and lore the zombie is nothing morethan a man or woman who is under the spell or control of another, basicallydoing the bidding of the one in control.
So how did the term graveyard shift even come to be then?
Graveyard shift comes from the time in the 1800’s when people would have oneperson, a night watch man sitting in the graveyard all night listening for thebell to ring.
What bell you ask?
Well you see, there were stories that when bodies hadbeen dug up in old cemeteries to make room to bury more people in thegraveyards they noticed many coffins had scratch marks from the inside of thecoffin, meaning that some had been ultimately buried alive and had suffocatedto death after burial.
This started a panic among many during the mid 1800’s. Writer and Poet,Edgar Allan Poe’s works, ‘The Premature Burial’, ‘ The Black Cat’ and ‘ TheCask of Amontillado’ mentioned scenarios such as being buried alive. This alsocaused more dread and fear during this time which actually influenced “safetycoffins” to be created.
Many mention the practice of not being buried as deeply as usually, and infact the hands of the dead would be sticking out of the ground. Then a stringwould be tied to the wrist of the dead person and a vast set of lines in a sortof network would tie into each other and be attached to a bell. When a certainbell would ring the night watchman would know where to run with his shovel toand dig up the buried person before they would suffocate. Some say the term 'dead ringer' came from this very sort of incident, however that is just a myth. In fact, the term 'dead ringer' is just another term for an exact duplicate or something that looks exactly like something else, or someone else.

Safety Coffins
In the case of the “safety coffins,” there were elaborate coffins affixedwith all sorts of gadgets that would allow a motion from the body to signal analert, raise a flag or even shoot fireworks to let the living know that they infact buried someone who wasn’t dead. Some of these coffins were even designedwith escape hatches, which would have been best used during the funeral and notso much six feet under, can you even imagine?

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Although patent records show that the “safety coffins” were made andmanufactured at one point there is no record of any one claiming to havepurchased or used such a device, but then again…how would you know? Thecustomers who bought them, died apparently so they couldn’t really give areview of the product.
So basically, there you have it. A quick history lesson for you today. Now you know where the mythology and superstitions first camefrom, how little by little anxiety and fear added to the dread of being buriedalive, and how many attempted to prevent that from happening. I know a lot ofpeople who do not want to be buried when they die, for fear of waking up buriedalive. I believe a lot of this fear has to do with all of these stories andmovies that have been inspired by these old macabre tales.
I don't know about you, but being buried or burned in an incinerator soundsabout the same to me! Both sound equally frightening if you are alive when ithappens. Thankfully with modern day technology we know that the doctors aren'tgoing to send us to the mortuary unless we are really long gone, so don't letthis story scare you. If you live in Transylvania though, I suppose it may beanother story. I know one thing is for sure, I wouldn't want to be buried aliveonly to wake up thinking I am being rescued and find my rescuers driving astake through my heart!
J'aime Rubio (Copyright 2011)