13 Gory Details About What It's Like To Be Skinned Alive
Laura Allan
Being skinned alive has got to be one of the most horrifying forms of torture imaginable. It's a bloody, painful, and slow process, and you'll be conscious the entire time. Still, maybe you're morbidly curious about exactly what being skinned alive feels like. Since we don't recommend you try it first hand, let us take you through the experience, step by grueling step, right up to the bitter end.
Being skinned alive (also known as "
flaying") is first documented as happening around 800 BC, and it has been used as a form of torture in just about every century since, somewhere on earth. It was practiced by the ancient Aztecs, as well as ancient people in Greece, China, and on the continent of Africa. Of course, it was also performed all over medieval Europe, especially as a punishment for traitors and other heinous criminals.
While flaying is (thank god) rarely seen nowadays, that doesn't make the concept any less horrifyingly fascinating. So let's look into what it's like to be skinned alive, in all the gory details. Be warned, this list contains very graphic content, so continue at your own risk.
You May Be Tenderized To Make It Easier To Skin You
As you might expect, peeling the skin off of an entire human being is kind of a difficult task. Given this knowledge you may find that, when someone flays you, you're in for a bit of prep work first, to make the skinning easier.
Some cultures liked to warm up the skin, to loosen it from the muscles and make it more easy to peel off, and
there were two common ways of doing that. The first way involves leaving you out in the hot sun all day until your skin gets red and burns. This tenderizes your skin, and it also prolongs your torture. The second method is even worse. You are dipped alive into boiling water to loosen your skin, but removed before you are
boiled alive. This can add blindness, nerve damage, and scorched lungs to your injuries. And this is before anyone even makes a cut.
It Will Start With Long Cuts
So, how does one even go about starting to skin a person? The torture begins with some very specific and calculated cuts. In general,
the first skin to be peeled off is that of the face; after that, your body has to be scored in various places to allow the skin to remove easily in one piece (or at least, in as few pieces as possible). This involves relief cutting around the arms and wrists, the chest and neck, and sometimes the feet.
These cuts will not be incredibly deep, but they will extend through all the individual layers of skin, so as to reach
the area between your skin and the muscle itself. This means you can expect horrifying amounts of pain. It is said that the sharper the knife used, the less painful it will be, so you'd better hope your torturers do regular maintenance on their blades.
Your Skin Will Be Removed In Large Sections
What's the point in having a bunch of human skin if you only have it in a bunch of little pieces? In general, flaying is all about pulling off your skin
in large, unbroken sheets, so it can be better displayed. If you're wondering how we know this, the answer is pretty grim.
Not only do we have historical writing about flaying, but we also have physical evidence. In particular,
the ancient Church of Hadstock in Essex held a legend of a Dane who had committed sacrilege being flayed in punishment. It was said that his skin was spread out and nailed to the door of the church as a sign to others to never mess up as badly as that Dane had. When the door needed repair, it was found to everyone's shock and dismay that there were still pieces of human skin under the door nails, indicating the size of the sheet of skin once held there. Meanwhile, at Worchester Cathedral there is a "large 'slab' of human skin" belonging to another Dane, a Viking who
tried to steal the church's bell.
You'll Feel Every Nerve Ending Severed
The main question everyone is probably wondering is, how much is this all going to hurt? The short answer is that it's going to be the worst pain you've ever experienced.
Your nerve endings extend into the deep layers of your skin, enabling your sense of touch. It's why our fingertips are so sensitive, and it also means that our skin getting damaged causes a strong pain response. This response is caused by nociceptors, sensory nerve cells that respond to pain.
When you are flayed, your skin is literally ripped off, not cut little by little. This ripping motion means that your nerve endings are not severed cleanly; instead, they are torn to shreds, one by one, in a long train of agony. You're going to feel your skin be pulled off your muscles, and you're going to feel your nerve endings dying. In other words, you're going to feel all of it.
You Are Going To Lose So Much Blood
As you might guess, having your skin torn off isn't exactly good for your circulatory system, either. There are several ways that flaying can end your life, and
one of these is blood loss, also called exsanguination. However, this type of death doesn't happen very quickly. Believe it or not, people can actually survive quite a bit of blood loss.
You can lose forty percent or even more of your blood before you actually die from it.
Assuming you're hanging upside down, as is often the case, you'll see and feel the blood rushing past your face and onto the ground, and it'll be coming from all over your body. Not exactly a great thing to see as you feel someone peeling the skin off your entire body.
Infection Will Start To Set In Right Away
Though something else is likely to kill you before this does,
infection is a serious problem with flaying. Your skin is a vital organ that protects your blood and muscle from foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. Without it, every part of your exposed body is open to attack. Infections can get into your blood stream, spread to vital organs, and even make your body septic given enough time. Assuming you survive long enough, despite the blood loss and pain, the ensuing infection will definitely kill you.
Your Brain Will Try To Make You Feel Better
As this is happening to you, your brain is going to be getting a ton of signals from the rest of your body. Your nervous system is going to be pretty much screaming for help, and your brain only has a few ways it can possibly respond. One way it can react is to shut down parts of your body, or shut down the body altogether, and we'll talk about that more a little later. The other is by trying to make you feel better, even as you're beginning to die.
When the brain is faced with extreme pain and stress, it begins to release chemicals to counteract these negative feelings. Some of these chemicals are called
endorphins, and they help to transmit electrical signals throughout the body. They act similarly to morphine, numbing you and giving you a feeling of happiness. Of course, these feelings probably won't be enough to even slightly counteract the horror and agony of the experience, but at least your brain is trying.
You're Going To Get Very Cold
One thing your skin does is keep your body warm. Sure, it doesn't seem that way when you first get out of bed on a cold morning, but your skin is actually one of your strongest defenses against the cold. Without it, your blood, muscles, and nerves will be exposed to the cold air - and even if it's not freezing outside, that can begin to do you in. In fact, one of the causes of death from flaying is actually
hypothermia.
Luckily,
death from hypothermia is actually fairly easy and painless, so that's one much-needed reprieve from your torture.
You May Eventually Go Completely Numb
Although the initial sensation of having your skin ripped off is going to be agonizing, that pain may not last very long. Because your skin is literally being torn off of you, you're not just going to be damaging your nerve endings,
the fatty layer around them (called myelin) will actually be destroyed, so they can never grow back. That means that, before long, they'll stop feeling altogether.
All this is assuming that they take off every layer of skin. In some cases of flaying, people only take an outer layer, and in other cases,
they even take some of the flesh underneath the skin, as well. In other words, you had better hope your torturers are doing it right, or else the pain could last much longer than expected.
You're Going To Go Into Shock
As this starts to happen, your body, brain, and nerves are all going to start completely freaking out. Electrical impulses are going to be misfiring, your brain will be trying to handle it (without much luck), and you'll probably be more terrified than you've ever been in your life. So, as you might expect,
you're going to go into shock.
Shock happens when
there is not enough blood moving through your body to get oxygen to all your cells. You'll be losing blood, and fear will also cause dips in your blood pressure, both of which can lead to shock. This means that you'll feel dizzy, confused, and like you can't breathe. You may experience cold and hot flashes, and you may feel sick to your stomach. And maybe, just maybe...
You May Be Lucky Enough To Lose Consciousnes
One major symptom of going into shock
is a loss of consciousness. Your torturers may try to keep you conscious through various means, including hitting you or hanging you upside down, but even then, sometimes the pain and blood loss will just be too great. Your brain will realize that it's all too much to deal with and, in an act of self-preservation, it will tell the rest of you to simply shut down. Your blood pressure will drop, and you'll just stop being awake, a state from which you will probably never recover.
It's worth noting that this fainting was actually pretty common in flaying victims over the centuries. Some accounts even say that most people who were being skinned alive
lost consciousness before they were even flayed to the waist. Given the horrible sensation of being skinned alive, this fainting is probably a welcome blessing.
You Will, Without A Doubt, Die
One question some people raise is whether you could survive after being flayed. The answer is that you unequivocally could not. Although it might not seem like it,
your skin is one of your vital organs. It keeps out infection, protects your muscles and blood, and acts as an overall barrier between you and the elements. What's more, you can only regrow so much skin so fast, and when you are flayed, much more is taken away than your body can possibly replace.
As proof of this, look at severe burn victims. There are several layers of skin, but with severe burns, as with flaying, the entirety of the skin is just gone.
It takes about a month for skin to grow back, even without burning, and you can't survive that long without most of your skin. Because of that, burn victims require skin grafts in order to protect their body so infection and the elements do not kill them, and even then their chances of survival are low. You lose more blood with flaying, so it's doubtful you'd survive long in this case, either, with or without a skin graft.
It Could Take Days For You To Croak
So, exactly how long are you going to stay alive during and after being flayed? Unfortunately, this is rarely a quick death. It's true that some people die from shock or blood loss within hours, and many lose consciousness so they don't have to experience the rest of the pain. But more likely, you'll be awake and aware throughout the entire ordeal, and may last a while even afterwards. There are reports of
people surviving hours and even several days after being skinned alive, presumably in excruciating agony the entire time.
In these cases, it is not actually blood loss that proves fatal. If you survive a day of being skinless,
infection and hypothermia are going to get to you. Your blood may turn septic, or you may just be unable to keep yourself warm enough to survive. Either way, you'd be better off wishing for a quick death from shock - or just wishing for literally any method of torture other than flaying.
