The corpse came to life at the funeral. Scientists: dead people can actually be revived a day after death

It is not customary for many peoples of the world to bury the dead immediately after death - funeral rituals last several days. And this is no coincidence. There are many cases when the dead regained consciousness before burial.

Imagined death

"Lethargy" is translated from Greek as "oblivion" or "inaction". Science has studied this state of the human body very superficially. External signs of the disease are simultaneously similar to sleep and death. With the onset of lethargy in the human body, the usual processes of life stop.

With the development of technology and the advent of modern equipment, cases of burial alive are almost impossible. However, a century ago, during the excavation of ancient graves, cemetery workers found bodies in rotten coffins that lay in an unnatural position. From the remains it was possible to determine that the person was trying to get out of the coffin.

unexpected awakening

The religious philosopher and spiritualist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky described unique cases of deep "forgetfulness". So, on a Sunday morning in 1816, one Brussels resident fell into Sopor. The next day, heartbroken relatives have already prepared everything for burial. However, the man suddenly woke up, sat up, rubbed his eyes and asked for a book and a cup of coffee.

And the wife of one Moscow businessman stayed in lethargy for 17 days. Several attempts were made by the city authorities to bury the body, but there were no visible signs of decomposition. For this reason, relatives postponed the ceremony. The deceased soon regained consciousness.

In 1842, in the French Bergerac, a patient took sleeping pills and could not wake up. The patient was scheduled for a blood transfusion. After some time, doctors pronounced him dead. After the funeral, they remembered that he had taken medicines, and the grave was opened. The body was upside down.

bad morning

In 1838, an amazing case was recorded in one of the cities of England. One boy, walking along the graves in one of the cemeteries, heard sounds uncharacteristic for this quiet place - someone's voice was heard from under the ground. The child brought his parents to the scene. One of the graves was opened. When the coffin was opened, it became clear that there was an unusual smirk on the face of the corpse. Fresh wounds were also found on the corpse, and the burial shroud was torn. It turned out that the allegedly deceased was alive when he was buried, and his heart stopped before opening the coffin.

A more impressive incident took place in Germany in 1773. A pregnant girl was buried in one of the cemeteries. Passers-by heard moans coming from her grave. Not only did the woman wake up after a lethargic sleep in a coffin, she also gave birth there, after which she died along with the newborn.

Some people were very afraid of such a fate and tried to foresee the details of their death in advance. So, English writer Wilkie Collins was afraid of his own burial alive, so when he went to bed, there was always a note next to his bed. It mentioned, point by point, the steps to be taken before presuming him dead.

Gogol's lethargy

The great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol also suffered from lethargy. To protect himself from an untimely funeral, he recorded on paper the possible incidents that happened to him. “Being in the full presence of memory and common sense, I present my last will. I bequeath my body not to be buried until clear signs of decomposition appear. I mention this because even during the illness itself, moments of vital numbness found on me, my heart and pulse stopped beating, ”Gogol wrote.

However, after the death of the writer, they forgot about what he wrote, and the burial ceremony was performed, as expected, on the third day. Gogol's warnings were remembered only by 1931 during his reburial at Novodevichy cemetery. Eyewitnesses said that there were noticeable scratches on the inside of the coffin lid, the corpse lay in an unusual position, and it also had no head. According to one of their versions, the writer's skull was stolen by order of the famous collector and theatrical figure Alexei Bakhrushin by the monks of the St. Danilov Monastery during the restoration of Gogol's grave in 1909.

Animated corpse

In 1964, an autopsy was performed at the New York Morgue on a man who died on the street. The pathologist, having carried out all the necessary preparations for the procedure, only had time to bring the scalpel to the patient, as he woke up. The doctor died of fright.

And in the well-known newspaper "Beisky Rabochiy" in 1959, a unique incident was described that occurred at the funeral of one engineer. At the moment of uttering the mourning speech, the man woke up, sneezed loudly, opened his eyes and almost died the second time when he saw the environment around him.

In order to avoid the burial of living people in many countries, the presence of a bell with a rope is provided in morgues. A person thought to be dead can wake up, get up and call him.

Ritual burials alive

many nations South America, Siberia and Far North resort to ritual burials of living people. Some peoples carry out burials alive in order to cure deadly diseases.

In some tribes, shamans themselves tend to go to the grave in order to have the gift of communicating with the spirits of the dead. According to the ethnographer E. S. Bogdanovsky, the burial ritual was practiced by the Kamchatka aborigines. The scientist managed to observe such a terrifying sight. After a three-day fast, the shaman was rubbed with incense, a hole was drilled in his head, which was covered with wax. After that, he was wrapped in the skin of a bear and buried in the ground. To make it easier for the shaman to survive the imprisonment, a special tube was inserted into his mouth, through which he could breathe. A few days later, the shaman was "liberated" from the grave, fumigated with incense and washed in water. It was believed that after that he was born again.

Legends are associated with him, novels are written about him. It is probably difficult to find any other phenomenon with which so many prejudices and superstitions are associated. The correct idea of ​​a lethargic dream must be at least just to broaden one's horizons.

Lethargic sleep or lethargy (oblivion, inactivity) is a state of pathological (painful) sleep with a more or less pronounced weakening of all manifestations of life, including immobility, a significant decrease in metabolism, weakening or lack of response to sound and pain stimuli, as well as to touch. There is a lethargic dream in hysteria, general exhaustion, after strong unrest. The changes that occur in the human body during lethargic sleep have not been studied enough.

Myths about lethargic sleep

Myths about those buried alive, in a lethargic dream, come from the depths of centuries and have a certain basis. Once upon a time, in crypts and underground, they found the dead with torn shrouds and bloody hands, who tried to escape from the coffins. Sometimes such people were lucky, and they were saved by cemetery thieves who dug up graves to rob the dead, or simply people passing by who heard the noise from the grave (unless, of course, they ran away in horror). In England, for many years there has been a law (it is still in effect today), according to which all morgues must have a bell with a rope so that the revived person can call for help.

It is known that Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was very afraid of being buried alive and therefore asked his relatives to bury him only when there were clear signs of decomposition of the body. However, in May 1931, during the liquidation of the cemetery of the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, where he was buried great writer, during the exhumation, it was found that Gogol's skull was turned on its side, and the upholstery of the coffin was torn.

The case of the famous 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch would have been exactly the same, but it ended happily. At the age of 40, Petrarch fell seriously ill and "died", and when they began to bury him, he woke up and said that he felt great.

What does a person who has fallen into a lethargic dream look like?

In severe, rare manifestations of lethargy, there is indeed a picture of imaginary death: the skin is cold and pale, the pupils almost do not react to light, breathing and pulse are difficult to detect, blood pressure is lowered, strong pain irritations do not cause a reaction. For several days, patients do not drink, do not eat, the excretion of urine and feces stops, weight loss and dehydration occur.

In mild cases of lethargy, there is immobility, muscle relaxation, even breathing, sometimes twitching of the eyelids, rolling of the eyeballs. The possibility of swallowing remains, in response to irritation, chewing and swallowing movements follow. Partially, the perception of the environment can be preserved.

Attacks of lethargy come on suddenly and end abruptly. There are cases with harbingers of lethargic sleep, as well as disorders of well-being and behavior after waking up.

The duration of lethargic sleep is from several hours to several days and even weeks. Separate observations of long-term lethargic sleep with preserved ability to eat and perform physiological acts are described. Lethargy is not life threatening.

Lethargic sleep in forensic terms

In severe cases of lethargy, especially in forensic practice, when examining a corpse at the scene, the question arises of establishing the reliability of death. In this case, if lethargy is suspected, the patient is urgently sent to the hospital.

The question of the danger of burying alive people in a state of lethargy has long lost its significance, since burial is usually carried out 1-2 days after death, when reliable cadaveric phenomena (signs of decomposition) are already well expressed.

Along with cases of true lethargy, there are also cases of its simulation (usually in order to hide the crime or its consequences). In this case, the person is monitored in the hospital. It is very difficult to simulate the symptoms of lethargy for a long time.

Help with lethargic sleep

Treatment of lethargic sleep is peace, clean air, food rich in vitamins. If it is impossible to feed such a patient, food can be administered in liquid and semi-liquid form through a probe. Intravenously, you can enter solutions of salts and glucose. A person in a state of lethargic sleep requires careful care, otherwise bedsores will begin on the body with prolonged lying, an infection will join, and the condition will sharply worsen.

Incredible Facts

Real life is sometimes worse than fiction.

And some of the horrifying stories of premature burials chill the blood even more than those of Edgar Allan Poe.

In the late 1800s, the American city of Pikeville, in Kentucky, was shaken by an unknown disease, and the most tragic case happened precisely with Octavia Smith Hatcher.

After her little son passed away in January 1891, Octavia was overcome by depression, she did not get out of bed, became very ill and fell into a coma. On May 2 of the same year, she was declared dead of an unknown cause.

Embalming was not practiced then, so the woman was quickly buried on local cemetery due to the sweltering heat. Just a week after her funeral, many of the townspeople were stricken with the same disease, which also caused them to fall into a coma, with the only difference being that after a while they woke up.

Octavia's husband began to fear the worst and worried about what he had buried living wife. He ordered the exhumation of her body, and, as it turned out, worst fears confirmed.

The lining on the inside of the coffin was scratched, the woman's nails were broken and bloody, and the stamp of horror was forever frozen on her face. She died being buried alive.

Octavia was reburied, and her husband erected over her grave very majestic monument which is still standing today. It was later suggested that the mysterious illness was caused by the tsetse fly, an African insect that can cause sleeping sickness.

people buried alive

9 Mina El Houari

When a person goes on a first date, he always thinks about how it will end. Many face an unexpected end to a date, but hardly anyone expects to be buried alive after dessert.

One such horrifying story happened in May 2014, when 25-year-old Frenchwoman Mina El Houary talked with a potential groom on the Internet for several months, before deciding to travel to Morocco to meet him.

On May 19, she checked into a hotel room in Fez, Morocco, to go on her first real date with the man of her dreams, but she was not destined to check out of the hotel.

Mina met a man live, they spent a wonderful evening together, at the end of which she collapsed dead on the floor. Instead of calling the police or an ambulance, the man thought that Mina died, and decided to bury her, burying her in his garden.

Everything would be fine, but Mina actually did not die. As is often the case with people with diabetes, Mina fell into a diabetic coma and was buried alive. Several days passed before the girl's family reported missing and flew to Morocco to try to find her.

The Moroccan police managed to find this poor fellow. Before the discovery of the grave in the yard, they brought dirty clothes and a shovel, which he used to bury the girl, in his house. The man confessed to the crime and was charged with murder.

8. Mrs. Boger (Mrs. Boger)

In July 1893, farmer Charles Boger and his wife were living in Whitehaven, Pennsylvania, when Mrs. Boger died suddenly of an unknown cause. Doctors confirmed that the woman was dead and she was buried.

This was supposed to be the end of the story, but some time after her death, a friend told Charles that before meeting him his wife suffered from hysteria and may not have died.

The very idea that he could bury his wife alive haunted Charles until he himself fell into hysterics.

The man could not live with the thought that his wife was dying in a coffin and, with the help of his friends, exhumed his wife's body to confirm or refute his fears. What he discovered shocked him.

Mrs. Boger's body was turned over. Her clothes were torn, the glass lid of the coffin was shattered, and pieces were scattered all over her body. The woman's skin was bloodied and covered with wounds, and there were no fingers at all.

She was supposed to have gnawed them in a fit of hysteria as she tried to free herself. No one knows what happened to Charles after the terrible discovery.

Stories of those buried alive

7. Angelo Hays

Some of the most scary stories about being buried alive are not so terrible, because the victim miraculously managed to escape.

Such was the case with Angelo Hayes. In 1937, Angelo was an ordinary 19-year-old boy living in St. Quentin de Chalet, France. One day Angelo was riding his motorcycle lost control and hit a brick wall.

Without hesitation, the boy was declared dead and buried three days after the accident. In the nearby city of Bordeaux, an insurance company became suspicious after learning that Angelo's father had recently insured his son's life for 200,000 francs so an inspector went to the scene.

The inspector requested the exhumation of Angelo's body two days after the funeral to confirm the cause of death, however, he was faced with an absolute surprise. The boy wasn't actually dead!

When the doctor removed the funeral clothes from the guy, his body was still warm, and his heart was barely beating. He was immediately taken to the hospital, where Angelo underwent several more surgeries and general rehabilitation before fully recovering.

During all this, he was in an unconscious state, because he received severe head injury. After recovery, the guy began to release coffins, from which one could get out in case of premature burial. He toured with his invention and became somewhat of a celebrity in France.

6. Mr. Cornish (Mr. Cornish)

Cornish was the beloved mayor of Bath, who died of a fever about 80 years before Snart published his work.

As was customary at the time, the body was buried fairly quickly after the declaration of death. The gravedigger was almost halfway done with his work when he I decided to take a break and have a drink with passing acquaintances.

He moved away from the grave to talk to the visitors, when suddenly they all heard choking groans from the grave of the half-buried Mr. Cornish.

The gravedigger realized that he had buried the man alive and tried to save him while there was still oxygen in the coffin. But by the time they had scattered all the dirt and managed to remove the lid of the coffin, it was already too late, because Cornish died, bleeding his elbows and knees.

This story frightened Cornish's older half-sister so much that she asked her relatives to cut off her head after her death so that she would not suffer the same fate.

people buried alive

5 Survivor 6 year old

Burying a person alive is terrible, but it becomes unimaginably scary when a child becomes a victim of such a catastrophe. In August 2014, this is exactly what happened to a six-year-old girl, a resident of the Indian village of Uttar Pradesh.

According to the girl's uncle, Alok Awasthi, a couple who lived nearby, told her that her mother asked them to take the baby to a nearby village. The girl agreed to go with them, but when they reached the sugarcane field, the couple decided for some unknown reason strangle the girl and bury her on the spot.

Fortunately, some people working in the field saw the couple walk out without the girl. They found her unconscious in a shallow, hastily made grave right in the middle of the field.

At the very last moment, caring people managed to deliver the baby to the hospital, and when the girl came to her senses, she was able to tell about her kidnappers.

The girl does not remember that she was buried alive. The police are not aware of the reasons why the couple decided to kill the girl, and no suspects have yet been found.

Luckily, the story didn't end tragically.

4. Buried alive by choice

As long as a person is alive, fate will be challenged. Nowadays, there are even textbooks that tell you what to do if you are buried alive and how to avoid death.

Moreover, people go so far as to voluntarily bury themselves in order to play with death. In 2011, a 35-year-old resident of Russia did just that, and, unfortunately, died tragically.

It is not for nothing that in almost all countries of the world, it is customary to carry out funerals not immediately after death, but only after a few days. There are many examples when the "dead" suddenly came to life before the funeral, or, worst of all, already directly in the grave, being buried alive ...

Imaginary death

The ritual of "pseudo-burial" occupies an important place among the attendants of shamanic cults. It is believed that, lying alive in the grave, the shaman is given the gift of communication with the spirits of the earth, as well as with the souls of dead ancestors. Some channels seem to open in his mind, through which he communicates with other worlds unknown to mere mortals.

Naturalist and ethnographer E.S. Bogdanovsky was lucky in 1915 to witness the ritual funeral of a shaman of a Kamchatka tribe. In his memoirs, Bogdanovsky wrote that before the burial, the shaman fasted for three days and did not even drink water. After that, the assistants made a hole in the crown of the shaman's head with a bone drill, which was then sealed with beeswax. Then the body of the shaman was rubbed with incense, wrapped in the skin of a bear and lowered into the grave, which was arranged in the center of the family cemetery, accompanied by ritual singing. A long reed tube was inserted into the shaman's mouth, which was brought out, and his motionless body was covered with earth. A few days later, during which ritual actions were continuously carried out over the grave, the buried shaman was taken out of the grave, washed in three running waters and fumigated with incense. On the same day, the village celebrated the second birth of a respected fellow tribesman, who, having visited “ realm of the dead”, took the top step in the hierarchy of the ministers of the pagan cult ...

IN Lately there was a tradition to put next to the dead charged mobile phone- suddenly it’s not death at all, but a dream, suddenly a dear person comes to his senses and calls his relatives - I’m alive, dig me back ... But so far this has not happened - in our time, with perfect diagnostic devices, in principle it is impossible to bury a person alive.

However, people do not trust doctors and try to protect themselves from a terrible awakening in the grave. In 2001, a scandalous incident occurred in America. A resident of Los Angeles, Joe Barten, who was terribly afraid of falling into a lethargic sleep, bequeathed to make ventilation in his coffin, leave food and a telephone in it. And at the same time, his relatives could receive an inheritance only on the condition that they call his grave 3 times a day. It is curious that Barten's relatives refused to receive an inheritance - the process of making calls seemed rather creepy to them ...

"Secrets of the XX century" - (Gold series)

The tradition of burying the dead with things that may be useful to them in the afterlife existed already in ancient egypt. A dozen and a half years ago, several residents of the South African Cape Town, who were afraid to fall asleep under the influence of witchcraft spells ill-wishers and being buried alive, were asked to put phones with spare batteries in the coffins in the hope of waking up and calling for help.

In America, cases have been recorded when corpses were even cremated with phones. Fulfilling the last will of the deceased, relatives and friends stuffed cell phones into their pockets without informing the workers of the crematoria. This arbitrariness can lead to trouble, because batteries tend to explode at high temperatures.

Fears of eccentrics being buried alive are not groundless. No one knows exactly how many people who fell into a lethargic sleep were buried. No one has ever kept such statistics, but without much risk of making a mistake, one can assume that the number goes into the thousands!

Sailors have long had the custom of sewing up the dead man in a shroud and throwing it into the sea. In order not to accidentally bury a living person, the last stitch was made through ... the nose of the deceased. If there was no reaction, the body was thrown into the water.

Mummy in the museum

People have always been afraid of being buried alive, but in XVIII-XIX centuries this fear turned into a real hysteria. Panic seized not only illiterate peasants, but also very educated people. First President of the United States George Washington, for example, demanded to bury himself no earlier than two days after the doctors declared him dead.

There were originals who insisted that before burial they ... cut off their heads. All, perhaps, outdone Miss Beswick, a resident of Manchester, who died at the end of the 18th century. She wrote to her doctor in her will 20,000 guineas, very large money for those times, but set one condition: her body should not be interred. The old woman wanted the doctor to embalm her, put her in his operating room and carefully examine her every day for signs of life. For several years, the poor fellow honestly fulfilled a terrible condition. When his patience came to an end, he hid the mummy in a huge grandfather clock. After the death of the doctor, the embalmed body of the eccentric was kept for some time in the Manchester Museum, after which it was interred.

The fear of being buried alive reached its apogee in mid-nineteenth century. In 1846, a competition was even organized, the participants of which competed in the invention of a reliable way to determine whether a person died or fell into a lethargic sleep. One Frenchman made pincers, which were to pull the corpse with all his might by the nipples. Wild pain, in his opinion, should have raised even the dead from the grave. An inventor from Sweden advised launching insects into the ear of a dead person. The French doctor Bosho was recognized as the winner of the competition. He received 1.5 thousand gold francs for a completely reasonable offer - to check shortly before that with a stethoscope invented, whether the dead man's heart is beating.

The coffins were equipped with a wide variety of devices and devices that allowed the "living" dead to report that they were alive. The bell tower of the British engineer was very popular Bateson. A rope with a bell was tied to the hand of the corpse. When a person came to his senses, he pulled the rope, resulting in a ringing. The Bateson bell tower was such a success that its inventor even received the Order of the British Empire from the hands of Queen Victoria. Alas, further fate the engineer himself turned out to be sad. By the end of his life, he went crazy from the same fear. First, Bateson stopped trusting his own invention, then asked to be cremated. Fearing that his request would not be fulfilled, he doused himself with linseed oil and set himself on fire.

The Germans approached the solution of the problem with their inherent pedantry. They were in no hurry with the funeral and kept the coffins in the mortuary until the bodies began to decompose - until late XIX For centuries, decomposition was considered the main evidence of irreversible death.

The fashion hobby did not bypass Russia either. In 1897 Count Karnissky, a former chamberlain of Nicholas II, presented a modernized coffin to the Parisians. It was equipped with a long tube that went to the surface, a bell and a red flag. When the deceased came to his senses and began to move, the tube automatically provided oxygen access. At the same time, the bell began to ring loudly and the flag to sway.

The inventor thought of everything but one detail. He did not take into account the fact that during decomposition, some “stirring” also occurs. The result of this omission was hundreds of cases when cemetery workers ran to the ringing, dug up the coffin and found a half-decomposed body in it.

Super coffins of the 20th century

Although at modern development medicine, the probability of being buried alive is practically reduced to zero, such cases still occasionally occur today.

In the late 90s, a British doctor mistakenly declared dead Daphne Bank, the wife of a farmer from Cambridgeshire. It is not known how the case would have ended if it were not for the observant undertaker. Arriving at the morgue for the body, he noticed that the corpse's leg was twitching slightly, and heard a barely audible snoring. In the case of Daphne, who is now alive and well, everything ended well. Alas, tragic stories much bigger.

Two days after the funeral, the Guinean Mbaswa woke up from sleep and with all his might began to beat on the lid of the coffin. The poor man was saved, but the “second birth” did not bring him happiness. Considering him "marked" with death, not only friends and acquaintances turned away from him, but also relatives with the bride.

Ali Abdel Rahim Mohammed, an Arabic teacher from Egypt, suddenly passed out while on vacation in the Mediterranean. The doctor from the first-aid post on the beach did not find any signs of life in him and decided that he died suddenly from sunstroke. Five hours later, Ali's body was removed from the refrigerator and taken for an autopsy. On the operating table, the teacher... woke up. After spending several hours in the refrigerator, he was so cold that he could not speak. The pathologist, whom the “dead man”, like a vise, grabbed by the hand, ran out of the operating room in horror. Ali stood up with difficulty and hobbled to look for a phone to inform his family that the rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated.

The pathologist from Alexandria was lucky. The same cannot be said about another Egyptian doctor who heard screams coming from the mortuary refrigerator. The heart of a doctor who saw the resurrected corpse could not stand it, and he collapsed dead. In February 2000, a businessman James McCarthy suddenly got sick. On the way to the hospital, he fell into a coma. Deciding that James had died and now they had nothing to do in the hospital, the relatives turned around and went to the morgue.

When McCarthy was taken out of the refrigerator the next day, he was dead, but his entire body was bruised. Waking up, James tried to get out of the refrigerator, but could not free himself and eventually froze to death.

Of course, people who were afraid of being buried alive did not stop fighting in the 20th century. In the 70s, fancy coffins worth $7,500, which had almost everything necessary to sustain life, gained popularity among wealthy Americans. An impressive supply of provisions made it possible to live underground for a long time. A complex control panel regulated the air supply. If the "deceased" was stuffy, he could even turn on the fan. For the administration of natural needs, the supercoffin was equipped with a chemical toilet. In addition to these vital things, ingenious undertakers provided an electric alarm clock, a shortwave transmitter, a telephone and a small television. Particularly demanding customers were offered for an additional fee not provided for in standard set miniature oven, refrigerator and even a tape recorder.

Not a single case of rescue of the owner of the supercoffin was recorded. There is nothing particularly surprising here. On the one hand, all the owners of super-coffins most likely did not fall asleep, but died for real. On the other hand, it is not very clear why a person who wakes up in such a coffin should strive back to the sinful earth?