Woman buried alive – it actually happened

I wouldn’t have been the man who covered this woman up the second time.

It is told in our mother’s family that her grandmother was buried alive, and the daughter was so insistent on having her dug up that after a few days the father did that and found that it had been true but she had really died again. There is a strong lineage of ESP in the family.

Sittin up with the dead, as Jerry Clower would say…

I have seen many shows where they did up old coffins and the insides of the lids are all scratched from the people trying to get out.

When I was a child, dad’s family sometimes brought the dead home and took turns “sitting up with the dead.”
I always assumed it was out of respect for the deceased but maybe —

I talked with a 68 yr old woman just yesterday. She told me she had been admitted to Bryce Mental Hospital twice. Both times she said “you could her screams and moans coming from in the cemetery. She even witness a dead body out in the shed just laying on a table. Scared her to death. People buried before they are truly dead, you betcha.

Odd as it may seem, there are still today RARE possibilities of someone NOT being dead even though pronounced dead.

I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING MORE HORRIBLE THAN WAKING UP IN A COFFIN OR BEING CREMATED STILL ALIVE. THIS IS WHY I PERSONALLY HAVE LEFT INSTRUCTION THAT BEFORE CREMATION, EVERY DROP OF BLOOD IS TO BE DRAINED FROM MY BODY.

A body being cremated does not have to have embalming. WASTE of money, when cremation is the choice.
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I personally knew one young man that had been declared dead NOT ONCE, BUT TWICE in his life; years before he actually died. He was the spouse of my husband’s classmate and grew up one street over from me in Tuscaloosa, AL.
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I also recall my Dad telling us about one of his crewman that worked on his construction crew for the Alabama Gas Company. He was bad about drinking to passing out intoxication. One night he was out drinking and fell in a ditch. In those days you didnt have to be taken to a hospital first to be pronounced dead, then sent to mortuary. So when he was found, he appeared dead and was taken to funeral home, where he later regained consciousness.

When he got to work next day and was relating what his experience to my Dad (his supervising boss) he said… “Mr. Charles, I jumped off that table and they chased me around it trying to get me back on it!”

YES, TRUE STORY! LOL… they were probably just trying to put him back on the table to examine him and call a doctor. But it sure scared him bad enough to make him WANT to quit drinking. Whither he did or not is anybody’s guess.
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Another real story I recall hearing on local news, was the time a former well-known Commissioner in Alabama was declared dead… i think it also happened to him twice, before he really died in later life.
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HOW COULD SUCH THING HAPPEN? MORE EASILY THAN ONE WOULD THINK. ******

Why waking up in a morgue isn’t quite as unusual as you’d think – Carla Valentine

There are many reasons why what is seemingly someone’s last breath is just the first stage of a process that doesn’t always end in death.

The feet of a body in a morgue with a tag around the toe….

‘Gruesome archaic tests for death, such as shoving needles beneath fingernails and slicing nostrils, may not even work.’

Friday 14 November 2014 11.18 EST Last modified on Wednesday 22 February 2017 13.23 EST
In Poland, a 91-year-old woman has shocked her family – and the public at large – by waking up in a morgue after being refrigerated having been declared dead. Despite 11 hours of cold storage, Janina Kolkiewicz was discovered to be alive and well after mortuary staff detected movements in her body bag. Speaking as an anatomical pathology technologist (or mortuary technician) I can thankfully say that has never happened to me when I’ve been on duty.

But it does happen.

In January this year a 24-year-old Kenyan man, Paul Mutora, was pronounced dead after swallowing insecticide; 15 hours later he woke up in a morgue, causing staff to “take to their heels, screaming”. In March, Walter Williams, a 78-year-old man, was found alive and literally kicking in a body bag at a funeral home in Mississippi. The discovery came as staff were preparing to embalm his body, so he was just spared the gruesome fate of having an artery sliced open and his blood replaced with formaldehyde to preserve his tissues – a process I’m certain some Hollywood stars will eventually adopt in order to stay youthful.

Williams had been declared dead as he had “no pulse”, but it was just a few hours later that he began kicking in the embalming room, causing staff to immediately call an ambulance.

So how does it happen? In Mutora’s case it was thought that the atropine he was given by medical staff to counteract the insecticide may have made him appear dead (it slows heart rate). With Williams, meanwhile, much has been made of the fact that the coroner who pronounced him dead, Dexter Howard, was an elected official who didn’t have a medical degree, as is the case in many US states. UK coroners may also have a medical or law degree, but the difference is they don’t have the power to pronounce people dead. That is left to medically trained staff – and for good reason.

Even within the medical community there is debate over what really constitutes death, and it is seen less as a single event and more as a process. It involves several different mechanisms ceasing, not just one, which is why there can be ethical arguments around brain stem death – when the person is in fact deceased but their tissues can be artificially kept alive.

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When the heart, for whatever reason, stops beating, the tissues it services are deprived of both oxygen and glucose, and are subject to a build-up of toxic waste products. This gradually kills the cells. When enough of them die there is major organ failure and the body as a whole is said to be dead. The delicate cells of the brain are particularly susceptible to a lack of oxygen (anoxia) and they will usually begin to die in around four to six minutes.

However, a reduction in temperature can extend this period considerably: the cold decreases the cells’ need for oxygen and glucose and they go into a type of hibernation state. Many examples of this preservation and recovery exist, from people drowning in icy water to becoming suffocated beneath an avalanche, or simply becoming unconscious and hypothermic until they are found and revived. Conversely, the cells of the skin, for example, can remain alive for 24 hours after the heart has stopped beating, although the idea that nails and hair continue to grow after death is myth.

Now it is becoming clear how the unfortunate Polish woman was able to wake up after 11 hours in this hibernation state with no severe physical damage and nothing but a craving for hot tea and pancakes. The fact is, she is not a modern-day Lazarus who “came back from the dead”, as some headlines are screaming: she quite simply wasn’t dead in the first place. She probably did have a very weak pulse, and was unconscious owing to a medical issue.

Some people have a condition called catalepsy, for example, a nervous disorder that replicates the stiff muscles of rigor mortis, slows breathing and decreases sensitivity to pain. This means gruesome archaic tests for death, such as shoving needles beneath fingernails and slicing nostrils, may not work on the cataleptic patient. (This condition was written about extensively by Edgar Allen Poe, who was terrified of being buried prematurely – a very real fear during the 19th century.)

So people can be mistaken for dead, but it is very rare indeed – and for the most part our sophisticated medical tests and equipment ensure it doesn’t happen. And, as illustrated by the above cases, those unlucky people tend to wake up in mortuaries anyway, and certainly don’t reach the stage where they would be buried alive. But then again, we wouldn’t know about those unfortunate people, would we?

Yep, my great grandpa almost got buried alive.

Yes and back in the early days I remember as a child men in the community would all meet at the cemetery take turners digging the grave sometimes it took all nite, before the next day of the funeral. And according to the signs, some times the dirt would be less or more for the grave according to the signs in the moon,

I remember my grandparents telling stories about sitting through the night with the family.

Some places in the North East a string is tied around the deceased finger and ran through a hole in the casket to a bell mounted over the grave. If the deceased was buried alive he could move his finger to ring the bell to notify anyone nearby that he was still alive. Wow, that article is a nightmare in the making, poor woman.

was called the Wake,was done all the time in my younger days in Alabama! usually,the whole community was involved! they brought foods and stayed overnight watching the body!

Brandon Corley