Hey, Answer Girl --

Why is working late at night called the "graveyard" shift?

-- Dan

On his deathbed, George Washington requested that he not be buried for at least a couple of days after death, just in case he wasn't really dead.

There's an old legend, based in truth, that people were so afraid of being buried alive (before modern medicine stopped that from being a common occurrence), that they'd attach bells to their coffins.

This practice would mean placing a bell at the end of a string, which would be looped into the buried coffin. If a person woke up inside his or her coffin, having been buried alive, he or she could simply ring the bell and be saved.

Ingenious system, right?

The problem, here, would be if they awoke in the middle of the night. Who would hear a bell ringing in a graveyard in the middle of the night?

So, the legend goes, the families of the recently deceased would hire boys or young men to work the "graveyard shift," watching over the grave site to be sure the bell didn't ring.

Because this is largely folk etymology, one can only guess that these were the beginnings of the "graveyard shift" term. Just as likely, however, is that the graveyard shift is known as such because it's the quietest and loneliest of shifts. Heck, some research that came out in 2007 found higher rates of breast and prostate cancer among women and men working the graveyard shift -- so, perhaps way back before modern medicine, people were more likely to die early if they worked midnight to 8 a.m.

Another possibility is suggested in "A Glossary of Sea Terms," by Gershom Bradford, in 1927: "Graveyard watch, the middle watch or 12 [midnight] to 4 a.m., because of the number of disasters that occur at this time."

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