In In the Vault we find an undertaker trapped in the vault where coffins are stored during winter for burial in the spring, and is mysteriously injured when he escapes. "In the Vault" was based on a suggestion made in August 1925 by Charles W. Smith, editor of the amateur journal Tryout, which Lovecraft recorded in a letter: "an undertaker imprisoned in a village vault where he was removing winter coffins for spring burial, & his escape by enlarging a transom reached by the piling up of the coffins".
