Don’t fault these vaults; mass extinction idea isn’t true

A debunked conspiracy theory about a field of caskets in Madison, Georgia, is being shared again on social media. 

The TikTok video shared April 9 on Facebook showed a man talking about something he said his friend found during a business trip more than two decades ago. "Listen to this, folks," the man said. 

Another voice begins narrating about what he saw in Madison: "The right side of the road was filled with — which I thought was a portable toilet store, I never looked at them that close. Same in color, maybe black, which was an odd color. And I was sitting there going over my notes and a van pulled alongside of me and it turned out to be the property owner. And he greeted me and he was by himself, and we had a good little dialogue there, and I asked him about the field of black boxes." 

A headline on the screen reads: "They have been preparing for Mass Extinction with these Death Caskets." 

The video clip was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.) 

As we reported in 2021, the burial vaults, or grave liners, in the video are owned by Vantage Product Corp., which stores them for people who prearranged for their funerals. There is no evidence linking the vaults to a mass extinction. 

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The clip is from a video that’s circulated for years on the internet. A longer YouTube clip posted 13 years ago falsely claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is headquartered in nearby Atlanta, owned the plastic bins. 

A  2008 report from the Madison-based newspaper the Morgan County Citizen explained that Vantage leased the land to store the vaults, which are meant to protect interred caskets and keep the ground from caving in at burial. It’s common practice for people to arrange their funerals before they die, including selecting a casket and burial vault.

We rate the claim that "they have been preparing for mass extinction with these death caskets" in Madison, Georgia, Pants on Fire!