Althouse: "When, after almost five hours, they opened the coffin to change her clothes ahead of the funeral, the woman gasped for air."

June 13, 2023

"When, after almost five hours, they opened the coffin to change her clothes ahead of the funeral, the woman gasped for air."

From "'Dead' woman found breathing in coffin" (BBC).

31 comments:

Kevin said...: She was only mostly dead.; 6/13/23, 6:43 AM
Temujin said...: I hate when that happens.; 6/13/23, 6:45 AM
Iman said...: She’d told them she wasn’t feeling well and laid down to take a nap. And they’d thought she had died.

But, thespian at heart, she was only acting.; 6/13/23, 7:18 AM
Lloyd W. Robertson said...: I read something about the burial rites of the Jews in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's life and death. There have been recent archeological findings. It turns out it was fairly common to leave an opening at the mouth of a tomb. It was known to happen that a person who was apparently dead would rise again for one reason or another--some kind of seizure or episode of unconsciousness had not been properly diagnosed.; 6/13/23, 7:27 AM
re Pete said...: "When you're standing on the crossroads that you cannot comprehend
Just remember that death is not the end"; 6/13/23, 7:48 AM
Stephen said...: The unbelievable aspect is that the death certificate was already in hand. It took me two weeks to get one for my 94-year-old dad, who died in a hospital from natural causes.; 6/13/23, 7:50 AM
Aggie said...: Better late, than never.; 6/13/23, 7:55 AM
farmgirl said...: My 1st thought, exactly- Kevin.
Well, after “holy crap!”; 6/13/23, 8:03 AM
AlbertAnonymous said...: There are worse ways to die….; 6/13/23, 8:12 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: *bring out your dead.
*But I'm not dead yet.

Classic British problem. they need to get a handle on it.; 6/13/23, 8:14 AM
Ann Althouse said...: If this happened, you know people have been buried alive.

She was saved from that ordeal, but by failing to die of it, she must live with memories of what it was like.; 6/13/23, 8:17 AM
Ralph L said...: I read or heard long ago that Eleanor Roosevelt left instructions for her veins to be opened before burial to "solve" this problem. They put pine boughs in her coffin instead of embalming.; 6/13/23, 8:29 AM
TaeJohnDo said...: Oops.; 6/13/23, 8:37 AM
Ice Nine said...: Surely it's a miracle. Catholic church investigating...; 6/13/23, 8:55 AM
Enigma said...: Conversely, vampire folklore may follow from specific illnesses that cause freshly dead people to appear unnaturally 'lively,' with full red lips and (routinely perceived) growing hair and nails.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/vampire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire

I'm forever stuck on Kill Bill Volume 2's buried alive scene, and its absurd cartoonish physics of escape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk5fAvpwtKU; 6/13/23, 9:16 AM
Rafe said...: There’s an old tale in my family about a frontier funeral of one of our ancestors in 1830s Kentucky.

A particularly nagging wife had choked on an apple, and apparently died of asphyxiation. As was the necessary custom in those days, the funeral was quickly organized. As the pallbearers carried the casket to the family cemetery, one of them stumbled over a tree root, lost their grip on the casket, and dropped it. The casket broke, the not quite dead woman coughed up the piece of apple, gasped for air and sat upright, quite alive.

She lived for another four years. At the next funeral, as the pallbearers approached the tree root where the stumble had occurred the last time, the woman’s husband quietly piped up, saying “now careful this time, boys.”

- Rafe; 6/13/23, 9:19 AM
Rusty said...: So they put another bullet in her.; 6/13/23, 9:27 AM
whiskey said...: Ann, I don't know if you saw this coffin story, but they dug up an incorrupt nun in Missouri. https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/26/us/catholic-nun-body-incorrupt/index.html The skeptic in the CNN article says it takes 5 years for the body to decompose but you'll note that here https://www.livescience.com/how-long-bodies-take-to-decompose it says that the body starts to break down within a year. And, as you can see yourself if you go visit, her body has not begun to break down. And has no smell. And her eyeballs are still intact.; 6/13/23, 9:58 AM
n.n said...: Check my pulse. Check my nervous system activity. I'm viable! Don't abort me. Can you hear me?; 6/13/23, 10:04 AM
Yancey Ward said...: She should be thankful for not being an organ donor.; 6/13/23, 10:30 AM
WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...: Government run healthcare.; 6/13/23, 10:52 AM
Michael K said...: In the Navy, when burying at sea, when the body bag was sewn up, the needle was put through the body's nose, just in case.; 6/13/23, 10:53 AM
Rocco said...: Iman said...
"She’d told them she wasn’t feeling well and laid down to take a nap. And they’d thought she had died.

But, thespian at heart, she was only acting."

That is some serious Method Acting.; 6/13/23, 11:09 AM
PM said...: Needs a neon "Just Sleeping" for her headboard.; 6/13/23, 11:30 AM
Mr. T. said...: As a licensed funeral director and embalmer, i can say that this is extremely rare in the US, which is why I was not surprised this story comes from overseas where foresnic and medical infrastructure is usually sub par. In the US most states require county officials (coroner or medical examiner) to be notified at time of death pronounced that a death has indeed occurred. Before the funeral home can be notified to come for the decedent, they must confirm with the pronouning physician, hospice nurse, or whoever the pronouncer is before they authorize the "release" of the body.

That being said when something like this happens in the US, it is almost always:
1) A large metropolitan city (Detroit, Chicago, New York), where they hand out medical licenses to any dipshit who believes that DEI is more important than actual medical knowlege. Indeed Chicago for a while was allowing hospice social workers to pronounce death! (Wtf...)
2) Pronouncement was done by someone who should never have been doing it-see social workers above- EmS who are supposed to get an MD to confirm but oftentimes don't, hospice or hospital nursing staff who are more concerned about their pronouns than actually what they are doing, and incompetent physicians who mostly are too lazy and self-centered who believe signing death certificates and pronouncing death are beneath them (and therefore lazily sign off on any pronouncement ems or hospital stagf make). Anyone who has experience with the corrupt quacks at UW Hospital, SSMH, Prairie Ridge Hospital will agree when i say based on professional experience, half of the health care personnel in WI need to have their licenses taken away (same goes for funeral services which is why I don't recommend any of the Madison area funeral home.

And while nothing like this to my knowledge has happened here, I can certainly tell some horror stories about the Dane Co. Medical examiners. They didn't call Tranchida "the Butcher" for nothing.; 6/13/23, 11:35 AM
Yukon Cornelius said...: A common fear of the 18th and 19th centuries was being buried alive. This fear became particularly acute after the cholera epidemics. So enterprising souls came up with various designs for a "safety coffin."

The general idea was that a bell was mounted to the headstone and light rope was run through the earth and coffin to the supposedly dead person's hands and feet. If the cemetery watchman heard the bell ring, he pushed a tube through the ground into the coffin, and pumped in air. No records exist that anyone was actually saved by a safety coffin, but they did give some people peace of mind.

By the way, many people believe this is the source for the phrase "saved by the bell" (rather than arising from boxing).; 6/13/23, 12:02 PM
FullMoon said...: Didn't something similar happen with Hillary?; 6/13/23, 12:18 PM
Narayanan said...: I read something about the burial rites of the Jews in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's life and death. There have been recent archeological findings. It turns out it was fairly common to leave an opening at the mouth of a tomb. It was known to happen that a person who was apparently dead would rise again for one reason or another--some kind of seizure or episode of unconsciousness had not been properly diagnosed.
==========
did not Jesus himself attest to this when he 'revive' Lazarus?!; 6/13/23, 12:33 PM
Narayanan said...: this may be the right post to opine as follows:

in USA !'lady liberty'! in a likewise situation when coffin opened in 2024; 6/13/23, 1:01 PM
Michael K said...: Pronouncement was done by someone who should never have been doing it-see social workers above- EmS who are supposed to get an MD to confirm but oftentimes don't, hospice or hospital nursing staff who are more concerned about their pronouns than actually what they are doing,

Back when I was a surgery resident at LA County Hospital we had a black kid about 20 come in comatose with a compound fracture of his leg. We called the neurosurgeons and one came by who was well known as a jerk. He said, "The kid is brain dead. Call the transplant guys " So we did. His mother was there and I talked to her. She agreed to donate his kidneys. The transplant fellow came by and took tissue samples for typing and set up the usual routine, which included high volume IVs to keep the kidneys going.

I went upstairs to operate on our other customers. I came down in the morning to find our kidney donor awake and demanding breakfast. The high volume IVs revived him.

Then I had to call his mother. She didn't bat an eye., She said, "I knew you boys at the County would keep trying to save him even though I told you you could have his kidneys. Thank the Lord and you boys."

We still had to fix his leg, so he didn't get breakfast.; 6/13/23, 4:45 PM
Mr. T. said...: "She agreed to donate his kidneys. The transplant fellow came by and took tissue samples for typing and set up the usual routine, which included high volume IVs to keep the kidneys going."

Tissue harvesting/organ "donation" is its own seperate crooked racket. They bully the families, they lie about what the tissue is used for, and lie about what organs they are taking. They have no professionalism at all to anyone. The tissue companies are making millions of dollars on tissue "donations" and the corrupt politicians are getting kickbacks for it.

Tony Evers is a prominent example.

Glad you were able to revive the young man after the jerk doctor (pardon the redundancy) sentenced him to death.; 6/14/23, 11:33 AM