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Dead—Not Dead! (Mistaken Reports & Declarations Of Death)

'Dead man' walking panics village

An Indian man believed dead by his family and fellow villagers caused panic when he returned over fears he had come back as a ghost, the Times of India reports.

Children screamed "Ghost! Ghost!" and villagers locked their doors when Raju Raghuvanshi returned from jail earlier this month to his village in Mandla district in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.

Raghuvanshi's brothers, who had shaved their heads to mourn his death in line with Hindu tradition, fled when he appeared, the paper reports.

Villagers and family members have ostracised him, forcing Mr Raghuvanshi to file a complaint with local police.

The village council has demanded he prove he is not a ghost, but the paper did not say what kind of proof the elders wanted.

Mr Raghuvanshi's troubles arose after he was jailed last year.

In prison, he was admitted to hospital with a stomach ailment from which he recovered but a distant relative told his family he had died.

source
 
Another report on that:

Ostracised 'ghost' seeks help to prove he is alive
(DPA)

17 January 2006


NEW DELHI — A man in Madhya Pradesh, who is believed to be a ghost by his family and villagers, has approached the police after a local committee asked him to produce evidence to prove he is not dead, a news report said yesterday.

The family of Raju Raghuvanshi believe he died after a distant relative told them that he succumbed to a stomach ailment at a hospital in another city. The family, which lives at Katra village, 510km northeast of Bhopal, had performed last rites and organised a community feast to ensure peace for his departed soul, the Times of India reported.

When Raghuvanshi reached Katra on January 1, villagers locked their doors when they saw him and his friends and brothers fled when he approached them.

Raghuvanshi contended that none of his family members visited him at the hospital and instead believed the word of the relative that he had died.

"I don’t know why they are doing this to me. The panchayat (village committee) wants proof that I am alive".

Source
 
Whoops, wrong corpse

Whoops, wrong corpse


A Serbian funeral director is facing legal action after organising the burial of a man who was still alive. The mistake was noticed only as the coffin was being lowered into the ground, prompting angry scenes from relatives who had flown in from as far as America. The Topalovic family from Novi Sad in Serbia rang relatives to inform them of the death of the head of their family, Bogoljub Topalovic, 84, who they were told had passed away in hospital. But they realised a mistake had been made when Bogoljub rang his daughter on her mobile during the funeral service to ask why no-one had been to visit him for a few days. An investigation into the mix-up exposed a system where medical staff tipped off funeral staff about deaths. A nurse noted down the wrong name as she hurried to be the first to inform the funeral parlour and claim a cash bonus. Slobodan Curic, head of the haematology clinic in Novi Sad, said: 'We are extremely sorry for the mix-up and are taking the matter very seriously. 'It was not in the nurse's jurisdiction to inform the funeral company about the death of a patient, and we shall be taking disciplinary measures against her.'

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1722396.html?menu=
 
Back From the Dead

A small but passionate group of doctors say that electricity applied deep in the brain can jolt patients out of irreversible comas. That's when the real problems begin.

By Gary Greenberg

For someone left for dead 12 years ago, Candice Ivey seems to be doing pretty well. She's still got her homecoming queen looks and A-student smarts. She has earned a college degree and holds a job as a recreational therapist in a retirement community. She has, however, lost her ballerina grace and now walks a bit like her feet are asleep. She slurs her words a little, too, which sometimes leads to trouble. "One time I got pulled over," she says in her North Carolina twang. "The cop looked at me and said, 'What have you been drinking?' I said, 'Nothing.' He said, 'Get out here and walk the line.' I was staggering all over the place. He said, 'All right, blow into this.' Of course I blew a zero, and he had to let me go."

In November 1994, when Ivey was 17, a log truck T-boned her Chevy Blazer. She remembers nothing of the next two months. But it's all seared into the memory of her mother, Elaine, especially the part where the doctors told her that Candice, who was in a coma and breathing by respirator, should be pronounced dead. Her brain, they said, was entirely and irreversibly destroyed by a week of swelling and bleeding and being pushed up against the inside of her skull like a ship scuttled on a reef.

A few days later, however, Candice proved the doctors wrong. Unhooked from the respirator, she continued to breathe on her own – something she couldn't have done if she were truly brain-dead. Now Elaine faced the horrible decision of whether or not to feed her child. The doctors warned her that Candice would probably never wake up, and if she did, she almost certainly would be unable to live independently. In the worst case, she would enter the permanent twilight known as a persistent vegetative state, in which she might sleep and wake and move her limbs, yawn and sneeze and utter sounds, but not in a way that was purposeful. Elaine decided to keep the feeding tube in place, which, she recalls, made the neurosurgeon furious. "He thought I was just prolonging her agony and that I would have a vegetable on my hands," she says. "But when it's your child lying there, you'll do anything."

In this case, anything included letting an orthopedic surgeon named Edwin Cooper try an experimental treatment. He approached Elaine out of the blue soon after the accident and urged her to let him put an electrified cuff on Candice's wrist. It sent a 20-milliampere charge – enough to make her hand clench and her arm tremble a little – into her median nerve, a major pathway to the brain. It might rouse her from her coma, he said.

"I thought it was hokey, if you want to know the truth," Elaine says. She agreed nonetheless – she was, she says, "drunk as a coot" from a combination of "nerve pills and a full glass of whisky" – and the cuff went on. Within a week, Elaine was sure that Candice was stirring. Her doctors doubted it. "They kept telling me it was just reflexes, but a momma knows." Then, just before New Year's Day, a month after the accident, Cooper asked Candice how many little pigs there were. She held up three fingers.

Now 29, Candice Ivey is thrilled to see the 64-year-old Cooper when he shows up at her door. She gives him a big, warm hug and sits close to him on the couch. They chat about the presentation on traumatic brain injury that she recently gave to nurses at Cooper's hospital, and how hearing the story of her ordeal again brought him to tears. As she tells me of her injury and its aftermath, she comes back time and again to her gratitude. "The wreck was my fault," she says. "But getting better, that was God's doing. He sent Dr. Cooper to my momma, didn't he?"

Edwin Cooper has been sent, or has sent himself, to about 60 severely brain-injured people since the mid-1980s, when he first made the accidental discovery that electrical stimulation had effects on arousal. He was using a neuro-stimulator to relieve spasticity in the limbs of microcephalics, people with abnormally small skulls who often have reduced mental capacity and poor muscle control. During the treatment, he recalls, one patient started looking around his room and smiling when people walked in, instead of staring blankly. Cooper had already observed that when he placed the stimulator on one arm of a quadriplegic patient to strengthen the muscles there, the opposite arm also got stronger. He concluded that the electricity was making its way to the brain, crossing to the opposite hemisphere, and stimulating arousal centers in the process. He began to wonder about the effect this might have on unconscious people. "I thought, if someone were normal and able-bodied but in a coma, maybe this would make a difference, maybe help wake them up," Cooper says. "It was like maybe we could reboot the brain."

Cooper started testing this hypothesis in 1993. Candice Ivey was one of his first research subjects, and her recovery remains the most spectacular. But Cooper has gathered data on 37 other patients in two studies (at the University of Virginia and East Carolina University). The results indicate that people given electrical stimulation emerge from comas sooner and then regain function more quickly than if they are given only traditional treatment. They're more likely to leave the hospital under their own steam, with less-severe disabilities than would be predicted by the nature and extent of their injuries.

Still, Cooper knows that 38 patients is a tiny sample, especially in a field where so little is understood and in which unexplained spontaneous awakenings, even after long periods of unconsciousness, are not uncommon. But despite being published in the peer-reviewed journals Brain Injury and Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, his work has yet to attract the attention of mainstream researchers. So, in the meantime, he hustles for every patient. He heard about Candice while at a friend's wake, waiting to view the body. Another mourner mentioned that there was a girl in a coma at ECU's Pitt County Memorial Hospital. "I got right out of that line and went to find her," he says. He adds that he has Google news trackers set up for "brain stem injury" and "teenage coma." But the patients and doctors he contacts rarely respond, and Cooper and his stimulator remain on the margins of medicine, frustrated. "It's so easy. Why don't people just use it?"

Cooper's best hope may lie overseas in Japan, where over the last two decades doctors have used electrical stimulation on hundreds of patients – some of whom have been unconscious for many years. The evidence that the Japanese doctors have amassed could confirm Cooper's claims and bring hope to the families of patients most American doctors consider beyond cure. But it may also undermine the hard-won yet fragile consensus on what, neurologically speaking, makes someone alive and when it is acceptable to pull the plug.

Cooper may be without honor in his own home, but mention his name at the Fujita Health University Hospital, just outside the industrial city of Nagoya, Japan, and surgeons light up with recognition. He's been there a few times, collaborated with them on a book chapter, and told them about Candice Ivey and his other patients. They're glad to have a fellow traveler in the US, but they're quick to point out – politely, of course – that they've been doing this work longer than Cooper and have treated many more patients.

The Japanese also use a more spectacular method: They implant the electrodes right into the spine. That's what Isao Morita is doing today. Trained at the Cleveland Clinic, he's a neurosurgeon who wears his hair in a brush cut and speaks passable English. The patient, Katsutomo Miura, lies facedown on the table. He's anesthetized, even though he was already unconscious when he was passed through the doors separating the sterile surgical wing from the rest of the hospital. He's been unconscious for nearly eight years. He was 23 when an ambulance crew found him bleeding and unresponsive on the road near his home in Osaka, next to his wrecked motorbike and his helmet. His legs were shattered, and one of them is now permanently bent at the knee, like he was frozen in place as he was about to run away. It sticks up from the table, making a little pup tent of the blue surgical drapes.

"Yoroshiku onegai shimasu" ("Thank you in advance for your cooperation"), Morita says, and waits for the five-person surgical team to respond in kind before he slices into Miura's neck. It takes 20 minutes of cutting and cauterizing, of spreading muscle and clearing away blood and gristle, for Morita to burrow down to Miura's spine. "C-5," he announces to me, a little triumphantly, as he points into the cavity he has created. Peering over his shoulder, I can see the vertebra that was his target. It is pure white and glistening. Morita takes a pneumatic drill and tunnels along the spine, toward Miura's head, explaining that, so far, this is exactly how a disc surgery would go. I resolve to take better care of my back.

Morita tries to thrust an inch-and-a-half-long, quarter-inch-wide flat metal bar into the tunnel, but it won't go. He drills and pushes four more times until the electrode finally settles into place along the second and third cervical vertebrae. He snakes a wire from there under Miura's skin to a second incision he has made between the shoulder blades. Meanwhile, another doctor has been working at Miura's waist to create an internal pouch for the battery pack that will power the electrode on his spine. Now she runs a wire up to the opening in his back, and Morita, using four tiny screws, splices it to the lead to complete the circuit. Once the swelling goes down and they switch the implant on, it will send a train of electrical pulses through his spinal column and into his brain. The hard part over, the surgeons begin to chat easily as they close up Miura, even laughing a little bit about the anesthesiologist, who has dozed off at his station.

I've already seen this kind of operation. It was part of the PowerPoint presentation I got the day before from Tetsuo Kanno, Morita's mentor and the originator of the surgery. Kanno discovered the virtues of the dorsal column implant accidentally, he says, when he was using it to stimulate muscles in stroke patients. He shows me statistics on the 149 people he and his staff have treated. He cites one study of patients who had been unconscious for an average of 19 months. A vegetative state is considered permanent after one year, but 42 percent of Kanno's patients showed significant improvement. He explains that even a guy like Miura stands a chance. If the electric current keeps flowing into his brain for long enough, maybe years, Miura is likely to make "some recovery."

Which is either good news or bad news, depending on how you feel about Kanno's definition of recovery. Most of the implant recipients, he says, move up a notch in their level of consciousness, from a persistent vegetative state to a "minimally conscious state," a condition in which people are able to muster small but unmistakable signs of awareness. "Maybe the patient just smiles or follows with their eyes," Kanno says. Other Japanese doctors using deep brain stimulation – in which electrodes are implanted directly in brain tissue – have reported similar results: patients who improve to the point where they are severely disabled rather than entirely unresponsive.

But this is enough for Mariko Miura, who spent $30,000 on her son's implant. The day after the surgery, she declares through a translator that she senses her son is calm and comfortable. "If he could just show what he feels," she adds, "yes or no, maybe blinking once or twice, maybe holding hands, maybe a smile, that would be great." The doctors say this is exactly their goal, even though the patient's MRI shows that the right hemisphere of his brain is almost entirely atrophied. "There is no medical indication in this case," Morita says. "This surgery is socially indicated. It is the family's decision if they want to go on, and our job to do what they wish."

These doctors know how strange this kind of reasoning sounds to American ears. "US doctors say that it doesn't mean anything. But even if the patients can't talk," Kanno says, "if they just look up when the family comes in the room, it makes the family very happy." Then again, he says, "you are very dry people in America, dry and cool. Here we are very wet and warm. You see just a body; you say, OK, stop feeding it. But we think a person in a vegetative state has a soul."

No one is sure exactly why electrical stimulation works, but there is strong evidence that it has undefined but profound effects on the brain. We know that electricity can rouse unconscious animals and that deep brain stimulation is widely used to treat Parkinson's disease and dystonia, a disorder in which muscles twist and contract uncontrollably. Kanno and his team have also recorded that patients receiving stimulation have higher levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, as well as increased blood flow in the brain – both conditions are associated with arousal. This increased activity could well lead to nerve cells in the brain forming new connections more quickly, which a recent paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation showed can lead to minimally conscious patients reawakening.

There are critics, of course. Electrical stimulation as a treatment for vegetative state "is junk science," according to the recently deceased Ronald Cranford, an expert in the clinical and ethical aspects of prolonged unconsciousness. Joseph Giacino, a rehabilitation psychologist at New Jersey's JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute who has led efforts to define the minimally conscious state, says that he thinks much of the "success" reported by Kanno occurred because his patients were minimally conscious, not vegetative, to begin with.

Giacino does agree, however, with Cooper and the doctors in Japan that there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation. But the doctors who would like to conduct the necessary research are finding the scientific and political climate inhospitable to their work. Among the obstacles they face is the consensus that emerged following the 1976 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that Karen Ann Quinlan, a 22-year-old who had suffered severe brain damage, was beyond hope of regaining sentience and could be allowed to die of starvation. According to bioethicist Joseph Fins, who directs the medical ethics division at Cornell's Weill Medical College, this has led doctors to abandon severely brain-injured patients too quickly. The result: statistics indicating that these patients don't get better. Families and doctors then give up, and researchers are discouraged from pursuing possible treatments – a vicious circle that Fins calls therapeutic nihilism. He says this approach ought to be reconsidered. "We've spent a long time allowing people to die. Maybe they deserve more intellectual, diagnostic, and therapeutic engagement than we have acknowledged."

To Fins, that engagement could well include electrical stimulation. He and a Weill colleague, neurosurgeon Nicholas Schiff, have laid out a framework for testing deep brain stimulation on the severely brain-injured, but they're a long way from actually doing any treatment. Fins knows, however, that they're up against "proponents of the right to die who have been concerned about … the hard-won right to forgo life-sustaining therapy," and that getting the research under way may be difficult as a result.

Things will get especially complicated if firm evidence shows, as Cooper believes it will, that electrical stimulation often pushes people out of a persistent vegetative state and into a minimally conscious state. If it becomes clear that a PVS is not entirely hopeless and irreversible, then the diagnosis, which has functioned as a rationale for ending life support, will no longer provide moral clarity. If that happens, Giacino says, "people are going to have to really think about what this all means before nonchalantly pulling the plug."

Of course, it is hard to imagine that anyone makes that monumental decision nonchalantly. But perhaps people do take as certain some things that might not be quite true – namely, that vegetative states cannot be treated. This, of course, was the pivot on which the Terri Schiavo spectacle turned: People argued that her doctors were wrong about the hopelessness of her condition, that maybe that little smile meant starving her might be murder, rather than mercy. As it happens, she would have been unlikely to respond to any form of electrical stimulation; cases in which the brain has been deprived of oxygen, rather than injured by force, are the hardest to treat. But accident victims fill emergency rooms, and it is hard to picture how much more tortuous our decisions will get if new truths about electrical stimulation displace old certainties about hopelessness.

Even with current guideposts, the complexities seem mind-bending. Just ask Candice Ivey. She has impaired short-term memory, a lack of stamina, and difficulty with impulse control that makes it tough to keep friends. Because of that, her life – one of the best possible outcomes after so severe an injury – is still immeasurably harder than it was before her accident. "God's allowed me to do a lot of good things," she says. "But I remember what life used to be like and what I used to do mentally and physically, and I wouldn't want to do this again. If this ever happens again, I want them to terminate me." Later, her mother draws deeply on her cigarette when I ask her about this. "It goes through my head every day," Elaine says. "If I had let her die, she'd at least be at peace. And I keep thinking there has to be a reason for this – her life will turn around. But when it doesn't happen … I mean, it's been 12 years now."

Things are no simpler in Katsutomo Miura's hospital room the day after his surgery. He's entirely still except for his lips, which are rooting ceaselessly like a hungry infant's. His mother, who is bustling over him, leans into his face, squeezes his cheek, and talks to him. I realize she is introducing me to him. "My son and I, we are one person," she told me earlier, and, as if to prove her point, she picks up his right hand and extends it for me to shake. It is warm and wet.

Not for the first time in my three days at Fujita, I'm reminded of another doctor who more famously applied electricity to a lifeless body to animate it. Of course, Victor Frankenstein's wish to cheat mortality lies behind all medicine, but you don't often see its monstrous implications displayed as clearly as in this poor man suspended by good intentions between two worlds. "We produce these patients," Kanno says. "It is the dark side of neurosurgery."

Unintended consequences, and the impossibility of unraveling them, are on my mind as I finish my visits with Japanese implant patients and their mothers. No one seems to be much concerned about what this is like for the patients ("We have no discussion with them," Kanno says), and I'm wondering why these women can't see that their children are gone forever, why they can't move on. I want to say something like this to my translator as we get into the elevator, but there are tears in her eyes. "They're so well loved," she says, and I can't help but think that I am not only on the other side of the world, but on the other side of our beliefs about what makes a life worth living, that I am grasping the moral chaos that will ensue if science proves these doctors right. 

Gary Greenberg ([email protected]) is a Connecticut-based writer and psychotherapist.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.0 ... ck_pr.html
 
(Copied from: 10 Most Bizarre People on Earth
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/10-most-bizarre-people-on-earth.28487/)

...Bihari: most officially dead person
Lal Bihari (born 1961) is a farmer from Uttar Pradesh, India who was officially dead from 1976 to 1994. He founded Mritak Sangh or the Association of the Dead in Uttar Pradesh, India. He fought Indian government bureaucracy for 18 years to prove that he is alive.
When Lal Bihari tried to apply for a bank loan in 1976, he found out that he was officially dead. His uncle had bribed a government official to register him as dead so he would get the ownership of Bihari's land.
Bihari discovered at least 100 other people in a similar situation, being officially dead. He formed Mritak Sangh in the Azamgarh district. He and many other members were in danger of being killed by those who had appropriated their property. Nowadays the association has over 20,000 members all over India. By 2004 they had managed to declare four of their members alive. In 2004 he ran for a seat in the parliament of Lal Ganj. ...

10 Most Bizarre People on Earth
Link is dead, and so is the website. No archived version found.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Heart attack baby back from dead

A baby boy who was pronounced dead after a heart attack came back to life 30 minutes later as he lay in his grieving parents' arms.
Medical staff at Leeds General Infirmary had tried in vain to resuscitate two-week-old Woody Lander.

He was handed over to parents Jon and Karen Lander so they could say goodbye.

After half an hour the couple heard the boy cough and doctors started his heart. Now 14 months old, Woody has been given a clean bill of health.

Mr Lander, 34, a civil servant from Farsley, Leeds, had been travelling with his 32-year-old wife to his parents' house in Norfolk in December 2005 when they noticed their child turn white and cold.

Woody was rushed to the emergency ward at Leeds General Infirmary where he had a heart attack. It was later discovered he had a blocked aorta.

Mr Lander said: "We were in bits. After what seemed like an eternity the doctor came out and said 'I think we have done all we can'.

"They reached the cut-off point for resuscitation and said 'that's it' and handed Woody to us to say goodbye.

"They started taking tubes out and that's when he started twitching.

"They managed to get his heart going and he came back to life in front of us."

Full recovery

Brain scans have now shown no lasting damage and the Landers have been told their son can expect to lead a full and active life.

Mr Lander said: "We still don't know how it happened. We just know he's a little miracle.

"The doctors said they had never heard of anyone coming round after 30 minutes of apparent lifelessness, let alone a young baby.

"But the people at the hospital were unbelievable and they made the miracle happen."

Mr Lander is hoping to thank Leeds General Hospital by running in the Leeds 10k Run for All, set up by fund-raiser and terminal cancer sufferer Jane Tomlinson, later this year.

He is raising cash for the Children's Heart Surgery Fund at the hospital.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west ... 403389.stm
 
How do you diagnose death?

Two-week-old Woody Lander "came back to life" half an hour after being pronounced dead by medical staff. So how do you diagnose death?

His parents call him their "little miracle" and those in the medical profession say the case is "amazing".

Woody Lander - now a healthy 14 months old - was pronounced dead at Leeds General Infirmary after frantic attempts to save him by medical staff apparently failed. He had stopped breathing following a heart attack.

He was handed to his parents so they could say goodbye but when nurses started removing tubes from his body he began "twitching". Staff tried again to resuscitate him, this time successfully starting his heart 30 minutes after he was pronounced dead.

The case highlights how it is not always as straight forward as it may seem to tell if someone has died. So how do you know if someone is dead?

Diagnosing death is about excluding all possible signs of life, say Doctor Rodger Charlton. But as a body's organs and tissues do not die simultaneously there can be doubt about the actual moment of death.

In hospital someone is usually considered dead when there is no electrical activity from the heart or brain, he says. However, even these measurements are not completely reliable indicators of death.

Circumstances play a big part in each case, but hospitals have guidelines and procedures to follow in certain situations, says the Royal College of Physicians.

These include the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), a standardised points system based on eye movements, spoken responses and other physical movement.

Reversible

All three things are tested and considered separately, then added together. The lowest possible score on the scale is 3, but even that is not definitive as it can indicate a deep coma as well as death.

When attempts are made to resuscitate someone after a heart attack - as in Woody's case - there are specific steps that must be taken. Eight reversible causes have to be checked one at a time before someone is pronounced dead.

These include:

Hypoxia - lack of oxygen

Hyperkalemia - high potassium

Hypothermia - low body temperature

Checking all the possible causes can take time, anything up to 45 minutes in extreme cases. The cut-off point for resuscitation - when a person is pronounced dead - is when all eight have been checked and there are still no signs of life.

"Sometimes death is diagnosed quickly and in other cases it can take much longer, usually when the person is in hospital and there is more equipment to try and restart the heart," says nurse and resuscitation trainer, Alan Samuels.

"Normally the longer resuscitation goes on, the less chance there is of someone surviving, which is what makes the baby's case even more remarkable."

Patients who have hypothermia or are drugged can seem dead. It can be difficult to feel a pulse if the heartbeat is very slow.

Phobia

Size is also a factor, as it is sometimes harder to hear a heart beat of a heavier person as there is more fat and muscle between the medical apparatus and the heart.

"A lot of people have a phobia of being wrongly diagnosed as dead," says Mr Samuels.

"I think that stems from centuries ago when medicine was less sophisticated and most people did not die in hospital. In this day and age it is very rare to misdiagnose death.

"Death usually takes place in a hospital setting, where sophisticated equipment is used to revive the person and test for vital signs. In a hospital it is generally very obvious when someone has died."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6404593.stm
 
I can recommend Sherwin B. Nuland's 'How We Die' for anyone who wants to know, well, why we die. :D

(What kills us, no matter what the named cause of death, is the failure of the oxygen supply to the brain. When the brain dies, we're dead.)

Nuland goes into questions of rescusitation, actual time of death, diagnosis of death and so on, and mentions that the only way to be sure of a person's death is when they start to decompose, which sign would have been evident in earlier times when most deaths occurred at home.

So I'm not surprised when, now and then, someone who appears dead is still alive. Life is more than a chemical process - it is a mystery. 8)

Little Woody's survival is fantastic, a wonderful miracle for his family. I am thrilled for them. :D
 
Man returns from the dead
By Tom Peterkin Ireland Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:55am BST 27/04/2007

A man, who was pronounced dead in hospital, was later found to be very much alive when mortuary staff came to collect him from what they thought was his deathbed.

His family had been informed that he had died and were grieving before the mistake was noticed.

The unnamed disabled man in his 30s has since been discharged and returned home.

His death was mistakenly certified in Dublin's Mater hospital on Easter Sunday – a date closely associated with miraculous resurrections although in this case the patient did not die in the first place.

Today a spokesman for the Mater, which was established by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in 1861, confirmed that the incident took place.

While management have set up an inquiry to establish how the error happened.

”This incident has occurred and it is under internal investigation at the moment,” a spokesman said.

It is understood ward staff declared the man dead and contacted morticians so that the body could be collected.

The man's family were contacted around the same time and informed of their supposed loss.

A source close to the hospital told the Irish Times: “This man certainly was pronounced dead and, some time later, I understand he was very much alive.”

Another source said: “Relatives were informed that this man had died, and when a guy from the morgue came up to collect his body, he said he wasn't dead at all.”

He added: “Needless to say, the hospital is very perturbed at what happened.”
http://tinyurl.com/3cffyu
 
Bank tells woman 'you are dead'

Mary Welsby insists she is very much alive
A bank has apologised to a 77-year-old woman for refusing to hand over her £3,000 savings because she was listed as dead.
Mary Welsby, of Albrighton, Shropshire, was told her Abbey Isa account had been closed.

She battled for nine weeks to get the money back, but only received the apology after the BBC investigated.

The bank blamed the mistake on an accident and said she would receive the money back plus compensation.

Mrs Welsby said when she visited her branch to investigate, the cashier told her: "I don't really know how to tell you this Mrs Welsby but according to our records, you are dead.

'My savings'

Mrs Welsby added: "It really was quite a shock to me. I'm 77 years old, a widow, and I simply don't know how I got home from that interview.

"There's no doubt in my mind what the problem is - they have given my money away.

"I just don't want this to happen to other people - £3,000 may not be much to Abbey, but it's my savings."

When Mrs Welsby initially complained in April, the bank phoned her on 11 May to apologise and said it would investigate.

On 25 May she received a standard letter saying an inquiry would take four weeks.

But on 23 June she received another letter from Abbey saying it was not sure it "understood the problem".

Following investigations by the BBC, the bank issued a further apology and promised compensation.

Banks should not release savings of people believed dead without a death certificate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engl ... 244452.stm
 
i was once told an apocryphal tale about a goth in stoke on trent who received a letter telling him that he was excempt from paying his poll tax on account of his being deceased :eek:
 
This one strikes REALLY close to home for me.

A girlfriend lived on a resididual inheritance....until the checks stopped depositing. It turned out that the bank had not only unilaterally declared her dead, but broken up the entire trust fund and distributed the cash to the residual legatees!

And of course those inheritors had no interest in returning the money.

The bank eventually took a hit from both ends.

It also turned out that the family which controlled the various trusts through this bank had been trying for years to break its contracts with that institution.

They did.
 
From Breaking News:
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Afri ... 84,00.html

Wife sees 'dead husband' begging
15/01/2008 09:11 - (SA)

Pretoria - A woman from Lindo Park in the east of Pretoria thought she was seeing a ghost when she saw her "dead husband", whom she buried in September last year, begging at a shopping centre in East Lynne on Friday.

Elizabeth Rossouw, 41, said she nearly died of fright.

Her husband, Dawid "Mossie" Rossouw, left home about six years ago. Since then she had seen him only once in a while.

A family friend told her "Mossie is dead" after she had not seen him for quite a while. "I believed it".

Wouldn't believe it

Rossouw and her friend, Neels Bezuidenhout, went to the Pretoria mortuary where they found a badly decomposed body.

"I personally identified the body and was positive that it was my husband. "

"The police took his fingerprints and thus determined it was Mossie."

According to a death certificate he died of double pneumonia on July 13 2007. He was buried in Zandfontein cemetery on September 3.

Rossouw and her son Quinton, 20, were nearly "shocked out of our shoes" when they saw the "deceased" at a shopping centre in East Lynne.

"We were so shocked that we didn't even talk to him. On our way home I asked Quinton to turn back so that we could check whether we had really seen him."

They went home and told Bezuidenhout about the incident.

"He said: 'Bullshit, I personally helped carry his coffin and cover it with earth'."

Had the right ID number

Bezuidenhout said he jumped into his minibus and drove to the shopping centre to investigate. "I asked him who he was and he wrote down Dawid Erasmus 'Mossie' Rossouw. He also wrote down his identity number."

Bezuidenhout and Rossouw blamed the police for not doing their job properly.

They found out on Tuesday they had buried Jacobus Willem Dreyer. "I hope his family read that he had a nice funeral."

Beeld accompanied Rossouw in a search for her husband on Tuesday. He was found in East Lynne. He had cooldrink, a bottle of wine, a blanket, a jacket and a few personal possessions in a plastic bag with him.

Rossouw explained to her husband that she and Bezuidenhout would pick him up on Wednesday morning to have his fingerprints taken at the department of home affairs so that he could be declared alive again.

Police spokesperson captain Prince Mokhabela said the incident would be investigated.

Easy mistake to make if she hadn't seen him for a while (pre-supposed death). Not often you see the word "bullshit" in a news report, is it?
 
Revived swimmer was dead for an hour
By Sebastien Berger in Johannesburg
Last Updated: 2:06am GMT 18/01/2008

A man has survived after his heart stopped beating for up to an hour when he drowned while swimming in the sea near Cape Town.

John Deeks, 35, who was born in South Africa but has British citizenship, got into difficulties while swimming in unusually heavy seas off Glencairn.

A shark spotter on shore raised the alarm when he saw Mr Deeks's lifeless body floating face down.

Two men, who have not been identified, brought Mr Deeks back to the beach.

He was not breathing and had no heartbeat, but a volunteer doctor with the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI), South Africa's lifeboat service, began cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and advanced life support paramedics took him to hospital.

His heartbeat was only restored almost an hour later, and he spent several days on a ventilator before making an apparently full recovery.

Mr Deeks, an architectural technician, from Colliers Wood, south London, returned to his mother's house in Glencairn, yesterday.

He said that being brought back from the dead "feels great".

"From the point of surviving something like that it's fantastic. They said I was clinically dead. Apparently people in these situations do survive, but you have got about a four per cent chance, so I was very lucky.

"Actually I don't remember anything of the event. Basically I went out for a swim and the sea was very rough and the tide was very high and I got into difficulties. I must have got pulled over by a wave and caught in a current."

He put his survival down to being a healthy person with a healthy lifestyle "and a bit of luck".

Craig Lambinon, a spokesman for the NSRI, said resuscitation efforts began between 20 and 30 minutes after Mr Deeks's heart stopped beating.

Mr Lambinon said that a woman in Alaska was known to have been revived after spending 40 minutes under water, but Mr Deeks's survival was at the extreme end of human possibility.

"It's not unheard of but to recover to that extent that quickly, it's very seldom that that happens.

"There's normally some sort of therapy that's needed, for things like slurred speech, muscular abnormalities, neurological problems, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes for years."

He put Mr Deeks's survival down to a combination of factors. "It's assumed that the cold water plays a part. It would have been relatively cold, 14 or 15 Celsius," he said, adding that the expert care he received the moment he left the water was vital.

"All of those people and all of those systems all worked the way they would in an ideal world. He had luck on his side, that's really what saved his life."

Mr Deeks's girlfriend, Rosie Avalon, 21, from Southend, Essex, has flown to South Africa to be with him.

http://tinyurl.com/22le66
 
Around a decade ago a local street person was killed by a speeding automobile in downtown Cincinnati.

At least that's what I was told by his best friend, plus an elderly woman who had acted as his surrogate mother, plus my own girlfriend, plus almost all the shopkeepers in my neighbor.

More than a year later I took a shortcut through an alley and discovered the "dead man" sitting on a trash can and reading a day-old newspaper.

I blurted out: "I thought you were DEAD!"

He replied, calmly, "That seems to be a widely-held opinion."

No, he wasn't a ghost, because he again became a regular neighborhood fixture.
 
I've spent ages scanning the papers, and had almost decided this must be a 'No News' day when I came across this:

'Dead parents' show up at press conference about their murders
By RICHARD SHEARS
Last updated at 15:51pm on 10th March 2008

Searching for the bodies of the owners, police dug into the garden and tore up the verandah of a country house.

Then they called a press conference to announce their concerns that Dr Roy Ostell, 63, and his wife Heather, 58, had been murdered.

But just as TV crews were setting up their cameras and reporters were opening their notebooks at the couple's home north of Melbourne, a Volkswagen campervan rumbled up the driveway.

Dr Roy Ostell and wife Heather burst into tears of laughter when they were told police thought they had been murdered

At the wheel was the "dead" doctor and his "murdered" wife.

"What on earth is going on?" asked Mrs Ostell.

"Never mind that," exclaimed her daughter, Angela, who had contacted police to report her fears that something terrible had happened to her parents. "Where have you been?"

On hearing police fears that they had been murdered, the couple - who had merely been away for a short holiday - burst out laughing.

Their daughter had raised the alarm when she called at the home, near the small town of Narre Warren, to find the campervan missing, the front door wide open and no sign of her parents.

"That was my husband's fault, leaving the door open like that," said Mrs Ostell. "He's always doing it. :roll:

"It was very much a spur of the moment thing to go away to the coast last Friday.

"We told our other daughter, Melanie, about our plans but we couldn't contact Angela. It seems that nobody could get in touch with her, so she didn't know we'd taken the unusual step of of taking an instant short holiday."

The couple had arranged for their dog and ponies to be cared for by a neighbour, but Angela had not thought to check with neighbours about her parents' possible whereabouts.

"We're very sorry for all the trouble we've caused," Mrs Ostell told the police and the crowd of journalists who had turned up to hear details of what they expected to be a murder mystery.

The couple now plan to spend a few days filling in the holes in the garden and repairing the verandah. :D

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a ... ge_id=1811
 
Man who was declared dead feels 'pretty good'
By Megan Levy and agencies
Last Updated: 1:57am GMT 25/03/2008

A man who was about to have his organs removed after doctors pronounced him brain dead says he now feels "pretty good" just four months later.

Zach Dunlap was injured in a quad biking accident in the United States and was pronounced dead at United Regional Healthcare System in Texas on November 19.

But as Mr Dunlap's family gathered to pay their last respects to the 21-year-old, they were shocked to see him moving his foot and hand. He then reacted when a pocketknife was scraped across the bottom of his foot.

After just 48 days in hospital, he was allowed to return home.

Appearing on NBC's Today show in New York, Mr Dunlap said he had no recollection of the crash.

"I feel pretty good, but it's just hard ... just ain't got the patience (for the long recovery)," he said.

Mr Dunlap said one thing he does remember of his time in hospital was hearing the doctors pronounce him dead.

"I'm glad I couldn't get up and do what I wanted to do," he said.

Mr Dunlap's father, Doug, said he saw the results of the brain scan which showed "there was no activity at all, no blood flow at all."

His mother Pam said it was a miraculous feeling when she discovered her son was still alive.

"We had gone, like I said, from the lowest possible emotion that a parent could feel to the top of the mountains again," she said.

As a reminder of his close call, Mr Dunlap has kept the pocketknife that was scraped across his foot.

"Just makes me thankful, makes me thankful that they didn't give up," he said. "Only the good die young, so I didn't go."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ead124.xml
 
The mother who came back from the dead - ten minutes after her life support machine was turned OFF
By Paul Thompson
Last updated at 11:11 PM on 25th May 2008

A mother of two has stunned doctors by apparently coming back from the dead.

Velma Thomas's heart stopped beating three times and she was clinically brain dead for 17 hours. Her son had left the hospital to make funeral arrangements, having been told she would not survive.

But ten minutes after her life support system was shut down and doctors were preparing to take her organs for donation, the 59-year-old woke up.

Heart specialist Kevin Eggleston said: 'There are things that as physicians and nurses we can't always explain. I think this is one of those cases.'

He said Mrs Thomas had no pulse, no heartbeat or brain activity after her admission to hospital. She had been found unconscious after suffering a heart attack at her home in West Virginia.

While at the Charleston Area Medical Centre she suffered two further heart attacks and was placed on a life support system.

About 25 family members and friends gathered inside the hospital waiting room. 'We just prayed and prayed and prayed,' said her son Tim, 36. 'And I came to the conclusion she wasn't going to make it.

'I was given confirmation from God to take her off the ventilator and my pastor said the same thing. I felt a sense of peace that I made the right decision. Her skin had already started hardening, her hands and toes were curling up. There was no life there.'

He said after he left the hospital he was called and told she had shown signs of life.

By the time he got to her hospital room, Mrs Thomas was alert and talking. 'She had already asked, "Where's my son?",' he said.

Dr Eggleston added: 'It's a miracle.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1021818/The-mother-came-dead--minutes-life-support-machine-turned-OFF.html
 
'Dead' man wakes as transplant surgeons prepare to remove his organs
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last Updated: 9:35PM BST 10/06/2008

A man whose heart had stopped beating woke up just as surgeons were about to remove his organs for donation, it was disclosed yesterday.
Doctors in Paris earlier this year called in transplant surgeons after failing to resuscitate a 45-year old man believed to have suffered a massive heart attack in the French capital.

According to a report by the Paris university hospital's ethics committee - seen by Le Monde newspaper - doctors continued providing a heart massage for an hour and a half while they waited for the surgeons to arrive.

When the surgeons began operating on the man to remove his organs, he began to breathe, his pupils became responsive and he reacted to a pain test.

"After a few weeks chequered with serious complications, the patient is now walking and talking," said the report. It is not known whether the man is aware of how close he was to losing his organs.

The incident highlights the ethical problems doctors face in deciding when a donor is really dead.

Emergency service staff interviewed in the report said they knew of other situations where "a person who everyone was convinced was dead survived after prolonged re-animation moves well beyond usual timeframes or even those considered reasonable."

They pointed out that if they had followed the rules to the letter, such patients "would probably have been considered deceased."

In particular, the case is likely to ignite public debate over so-called controlled non-heart-beating organ donation (NHBOD) – retrieving organs when the heart stops, which has only been legal in France since last year. Before then a patient had to be declared brain dead before transplant could occur. NHBOD is legal in the UK.

"All specialised medical literature on the subjects allows one to conclude that a person who has suffered cardiac arrest and has had proper heart massage for over 30 minutes is, for all purposes, brain dead," said Professor Alain Tenaillon, in charge of organ transplants at France's biomedical agency. "But one must acknowledge that exceptions do exist ... there are no hard and fast rules on best practice," he told Le Monde.

Some 13,000 people are awaiting organ donations in France, a far higher number than in Britain, with 7,700 awaiting organs, despite France's a so-called opt-out system. This means everyone gives their "presumed consent" to having their organs removed after death unless either they have refused permission or if their family objects.

In the UK, people "opt in" to the donation system by carrying a donor card or signing the Organ Donor Register. A Department of Health task force is currently looking into the opt-out system.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... rgans.html
 
Some 13,000 people are awaiting organ donations in France, a far higher number than in Britain, with 7,700 awaiting organs, despite France's a so-called opt-out system. This means everyone gives their "presumed consent" to having their organs removed after death unless either they have refused permission or if their family objects.

How is the french system more inefficient then?
 
'Dead' Indian stampede victim wakes up in morgue

Mange Ram, 19, lost consciousness in the stampede triggered by rumours of a landslide that caused panic among thousands of people climbing a steep mountain path, the Times of India reported.

Mr Ram told the newspaper that he awoke in a hospital morgue after Sunday's tragedy at the Naina Devi shrine in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.

"When I woke up, I was in the middle of a row of bodies waiting for postmortem," he said.

"My throat was parched and I asked for water. Towering over me the doctors and nursing staff at Anandpur Sahib Civil Hospital looked dazed.

"They must have been surprised to see a dead man come alive like that," he said.

Sat Pal Aggarwal, a doctor on the pilgrimage, said few checks were carried out to see if victims were alive and might have been saved.

"People were dumped quite haphazardly into trucks without following any procedure or checking if they were alive," he told the paper.

Despite the mass deaths, the pilgrimage continued only hours after the corpses had been cleared.

The temple, devoted to the goddess Naina Devi, sits on a hilltop in the Himalayas and devotees must climb a narrow stairway to reach it. It has been the site of previous deadly accidents.

Crowd control is poor in India and stampedes are common. Three years ago, 257 Hindu devotees, mainly women and children, were crushed to death in a stampede at a religious pilgrimage in western India.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... orgue.html

maximus otter
 
He might not be well recieved when he comes back. I think people who come back from the dead are viewed with a lot of suspicion in India.
 
thats quiet worrying that no one really bothers to check if your alive beofre sticking you in a morgue read yto be cut open :roll:

it would not take more a minute to check if someone is breathing or has a pulse two really good signs not to be stuck in a morgue and signs you are alive albeit unconcious main part being "alive" :lol:

i know things like these in india are very common because of their religion, but goes to show you cant believe everything you hear!!!

could there not be some knid of safety measures put into place especially an area where alot of small children are?
 
Sat Pal Aggarwal, a doctor on the pilgrimage, said few checks were carried out to see if victims were alive and might have been saved.

"People were dumped quite haphazardly into trucks without following any procedure or checking if they were alive," he told the paper.

It all looks rather haphazard. :(
 
This is nothing new. I find myself uncomfortably reminded of the Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz' famous mid-19th Century painting of the "dead" cholera victim waking up in his coffin.
 
Dead baby 'comes back to life'
An Israeli baby who was pronounced dead by doctors "came back to life" on Monday after spending hours in a hospital refrigerator.
By Our Foreign Staff
Last Updated: 10:58PM BST 18 Aug 2008

The baby, weighing only 600 grams at birth, spent at least five hours inside one of the hospital's morgue refrigerators, before her parents, who had taken her to be buried, began noticing some movement.

"We unwrapped her and felt she was moving. We didn't believe it at first. Then she began holding my mother's hand, and then we saw her open her mouth," said 26-year-old Faiza Magdoub, the baby's mother.

The baby was pronounced dead several hours earlier, after doctors at Western Galilee hospital in northern Israel were forced to abort her mother's pregnancy because of internal bleeding. Mrs Magdoub was in the fifth month of her pregnancy.

"We don't know how to explain this, so when we don't know how to explain things in the medical world we call it a miracle, and this is probably what happened," hospital deputy director Moshe Daniel said.

"We've informed the Health Ministry and I guess they'll appoint a commission of inquiry. The hospital will ask for an external investigation of the case."

The baby has been taken to the hospital's neo-natal intensive care unit for further treatment, but doctors were not sure how long she will live.

Hospital director Dr. Massad Barhoum told Israeli media that her chances of survival are "very, very slim" because she was born so early.

Motti Ravid, a professor of internal medicine, told Israel's Channel 10 that the low temperature inside the cooler had slowed down the baby's metabolism and likely helped her survive.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... -life.html
 
'Cremated' father turns up on TV

A man has been reunited with his father after spotting him on television - five years after he thought he was cremated.

John Renehan's father John Delaney went missing in 2000 and when a decomposed body matching his description was found in 2003 he was identified by a coroner.

But it has emerged that Mr Delaney, of Oldham, had actually been put in a care home after being found wandering around the town with memory loss.

Police admit "mistakes were made" in the identification process.

When Mr Delaney was found in 2000 in a confused state in Copster Hill Road he was unable to give any clues about his identity.

He was given the name "David Harrison" and placed in the care home where he stayed for eight years.

Traumatic ordeal

His family reported him as missing but appeals failed to uncover information about his whereabouts.

The body of a man, which had similar clothes and historic wounds to Mr Delaney, was found in the grounds of Manchester Royal Infirmary in January 2003.

It was identified as Mr Delaney and a funeral was held.

More than five years after the cremation service, Mr Renehan, from Didsbury, saw a television appeal about finding the family of the man in the care home, who he recognised as his father.

He contacted the authorities and DNA tests confirmed their relationship.

In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said the identification mix-up was a matter for the coroner, who is no longer in the post.

But a spokesperson said: "Greater Manchester Police accepts that mistakes were made and that Mr Delaney's family has been through a traumatic ordeal."

It said that inquiries in 2003 to establish the unknown man's identity were "not sufficient".

"At that time, only paper records of people reported missing from home existed," the spokesperson added.

"Today, Greater Manchester Police has advanced systems in place to ensure that mistakes of this nature are not made and robust checks are made to establish the identity of people who cannot immediately confirm who they are."

The spokesperson said the officer who dealt with the case in 2000 had since retired from the force.

An investigation is under way to try to establish the identity of the man cremated in 2003.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manc ... 597500.stm
 
Reported killed 1940, obituary printed today: Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wilson
Ben Macintyre

The oddest moment in the remarkable life of Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wilson came when he discovered that he was officially dead, and thus joined the distinguished band of people prematurely consigned to the hereafter.

Colonel Wilson died last week at the age of 97, but his first “death” took place 68 years earlier, in the desert sands of East Africa.

On August 11, 1940, Colonel Wilson, then a captain commanding the Somaliland Camel Corps machinegun company, was involved in a ferocious firefight with Italian troops near Tug Argan Gap. On the first day he was wounded in the shoulder and eye and his spectacles smashed. Within four days, two of his frontline guns had been destroyed and his Somali sergeant killed, but he manned his machinegun as the enemy closed in.

He was formally listed among the war dead, his family was informed of his passing and he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross “for most conspicuous gallantry”.

Captain Wilson, however, was very much alive, held in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp in Eritrea. Badly wounded and suffering from malaria, he had stumbled from the battlefield into an Italian unit who forgot to inform the Red Cross of his capture.

While a prisoner, he met a newly captured RAF officer who informed him that he had been declared dead and awarded a posthumous VC.

“He flatly refused to believe it,” Hamish Wilson, his son, said yesterday. “He said that his Somali soldiers deserved at least equal credit and he had just done what he was supposed to do.” Captain Wilson’s “death” was announced in The Times in November 1940 - and his obituary appears in the newspaper today.

He is not the first person to receive a double death notice. In July 1900 George Morrison, the Peking correspondent of The Times, read of his own death in his own newspaper after he was believed to have perished during the Boxer Rebellion. His obituary described him as devoted and fearless. A friend remarked: “The only decent thing they can do now is double your salary.” They didn’t. 8)

Mark Twain was twice prematurely reported to be dead. On the first occasion, he remarked: “The report of my death is an exaggeration.” A few years later, The New York Times claimed that he had been lost at sea, prompting Twain to write an article proving that he was still alive.

When Sean Connery was reported by various Japanese and African newspapers to be dead from throat cancer in 1993, he immediately went on the David Letterman chat show to demonstrate his rude good health. When three quarters of Abba were reported dead in a plane crash in 1976, the group appeared on German television - the first of numerous barely credible resurrections for the group.

That remedy was not available to earlier victims of a mistaken obituary, who simply had to put up with their own deaths, sometimes at a cost to their careers. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once came across a man in a hotel reading the poet’s obituary aloud from a newspaper. The man remarked that “it was very extraordinary that Coleridge the poet should have hanged himself just after the success of his play; but he was always a strange, mad fellow”. Coleridge is said to have replied: “Indeed, sir, it is a most extraordinary thing that he should have hanged himself, be the subject of an inquest, and yet that he should at this moment be speaking to you.” :D

The premature death announcement can be a shock, occasionally fatal. Marcus Garvey, the black nationalist leader, suffered a stroke in 1940, and soon after read a most unflattering obituary in the Chicago Defender describing him as having died “broke, alone and unpopular”. He then had another stroke, and died. :(

However, sometimes the shock may be salutary: when the brother of Arthur Nobel died, a French newspaper is said to have run a premature obituary of the Swedish gunpowder magnate, describing him as a “merchant of death”. He subsequently founded the peace prize to ensure that posterity had a better opinion of him than the obituary writer. 8)

Ernest Hemingway, it seems, enjoyed the experience of being thought to be dead, after he was reported killed in an African plane crash in 1954. According to one biographer he would start the morning by happily reading a scrapbook of his own death notices, accompanied by a glass of champagne.

Returning from the dead can have unexpected consequences. St Oran of Iona is said to have risen from his grave after being accidentally buried alive. When he claimed to have seen angels he was denounced as a heretic and reburied, this time permanently. :shock:

The concept of returning from the dead is deeply embedded in our culture, from The Return of Martin Guerre, to Reggie Perrin, to the scene in Twain’s Tom Sawyer when Tom is moved by witnessing his own funeral.

As Colonel Wilson’s story shows, it was easy to disappear in the chaos and fog of war. And it was not so easy to reappear. His survival was not discovered until April 1941, when the Italian PoW camp was captured and he was liberated (midway through the construction of an elaborate escape tunnel).

Even then, some preferred to believe the earlier account of his gallant death. “The idea that he was dead was so firmly embedded that some people later accused him of being an imposter,” Hamish Wilson said. :shock:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 415647.ece
 
Brazil man appears at own funeral

A 59-year-old Brazilian man has surprised his family by turning up at his own funeral, local media report.

Relatives of Ademir Jorge Goncalves, a bricklayer, had identified him as the victim of a car crash in southern Parana state the previous day.

Police told O Globo newspaper that relatives had trouble identifying the corpse because it was badly disfigured.

It emerged that Mr Goncalves had spent the night drinking a rum-like liquor called "pinga" with his friends.

He did not get word of his funeral until it was already happening on Monday morning, his niece Rosa Sampaio said.

She said some family members - including herself and the man's mother - had doubts, but an aunt and four friends had positively identified the body.

"What were we to do? We went ahead with the funeral," she told O Globo.

A police spokesman welcomed the happy ending: "Before long, the walking dead appeared at the funeral. It was a relief," the unnamed officer told the paper.

The body was correctly identified later, he said, and buried in another state.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8343576.stm
 
Death of flight engineer who 'died' 51 years ago
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ire ... 93618.html

Flight engineer Edmund O'Keeffe has passed away in Britain aged 86. The Dubliner always derived great amusement from a mistaken newspaper report of his death in a 1958 plane crash.

ALISON HEALYAN

IRISH flight engineer whose death was prematurely announced 51 years ago has died in Britain, aged 86.



Dubliner Edmund O’Keeffe survived a crash on a test flight of a Bristol Britannia 312 on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1958, but the Evening Press reported that he had died.

Because of the Christmas break, it took his family several days to correct the report and they were inundated with condolences, his sister Maura Greene told The Irish Times : “For nearly a week people thought he was dead.”

His wife, Bernie O’Keeffe, recalled the Evening Press had to be hidden from Mr O’Keeffe’s mother in case it upset her.

The archives show that on Christmas Day, 1958, the front page of The Irish Times carried a brief report about the crash and noted that Mr O’Keeffe was one of the three survivors.

Nine people died in the accident which happened near Christchurch in the south of England.

The Whispering Giant aircraft had left Heathrow shortly after 10am on Christmas Eve to test its airworthiness but crashed in heavy fog.

Mr O’Keeffe spent a year in hospital in England and took great glee in having the newspaper article announcing his death pinned over his bed. His first child was born in April as he recovered in hospital in Bournemouth.

Mrs O’Keeffe said she remembered bringing the baby girl in a taxi from London to visit her father when she was a week old.

The couple had three more children and Mr O’Keeffe went on to have a long and enjoyable flying career. He returned to work with the airline BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) for many years and worked with an airline in Singapore for a year before retiring.

He flew for 31 years and overcame a health scare on his retirement. “We always said he was like Lazarus,” his sister said. “He got 51 more years than some people expected.”

The premature announcement of his death was a great source of fun for the family, his wife said. “About 20 years later, he flew into Dublin and a journalist came up to the cockpit and said to him ‘I was the one who wrote your obituary’. He enjoyed that.”

Ms Greene said their mother had sewed miraculous medals into their clothes and told her son the religious medal had saved his life.

She said her brother had enjoyed celebrating the anniversary of his “death” every year since: “He had his 50th anniversary last year.”

Although the family lived in Berkshire, near London, for most of their lives, Mrs O’Keeffe said they were looking forward to having a big Irish funeral. Arrangements were still being finalised, she said, but it was expected to be held in Dundrum next week.
 
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