In the mid-19th century, death was quick, messy, and hard to control. Wooden coffins leaked and collapsed, the soil above them caved in, and disease seeped out into the living world. In an age terrified of cholera and being buried alive, one man decided the answer wasn’t a nicer coffin, but a new kind of machine for the dead. His name was Almond Dunbar Fisk. Fisk didn’t build a box. He built a shell. A coffin shaped to the human body, made entirely of cast iron, with a glass window over the face and an airtight seal. Once the lid was locked down, the body inside was cut off from insects, air, and moisture. Decomposition slowed. Gases were trapped. The corpse became a sealed specimen, caught somewhere between body and artifact. Wealthy families, politicians, and high-ranking officers rushed to buy them, especially when a body had to travel across long distances before burial. President Zachary Taylor and Dolley Madison both went to the grave inside Fisk coffins. Part of the horror is how clinical it all was. Metal screws bit down into the iron rim. Rubber gaskets tightened the seal. The glass plate framed a face that could be viewed one last time, like a relic under glass. It was memorial, medical experiment, and quiet obsession with beating decay, all at once. You can read it as public health, as status symbol, or as evidence of how badly people wanted to pretend they could manage death if they just engineered it correctly. That is why the Fisk coffin appears in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. A perfect prop for a century torn between reverence and resurrection. It was not just a container. It was a 19th-century attempt to bend time, chemistry, and mortality to human will. Very few survive now. A handful sit in museums. Others are still buried, iron ribs hidden under old cemeteries, lids unbroken, rooms of stale air wrapped around bodies that may be far better preserved than anyone above them suspects.