Originally published at: Relatives mourning a dead woman for 5 hours suddenly hear a knock — from inside the coffin | Boing Boing
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Good thing that they didn’t pay for embalming.
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Well, this scenario is one of the historical purposes for holding a wake in the first place… so good call!
I wonder what the process for revoking those looks like.
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Just issue a rebirth certificate.
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Is this why they are called wakes?
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Actually, yes!
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Yup! They were basically a “last chance to give us a sign we shouldn’t put you in the ground yet” kind of thing from the days before vital sign monitors.
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Vampires, right? 
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The hell did someone say at the wake that caused her to wake up?
(gasping) “I heard what you said, Ana, you snake!”
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We went through that scenario with a relative (premature declaration cleared up well before the point in the story). It is a nightmare. Getting the official document revoked is nothing particularly difficult, just a few calls with the social security office, the county registrar, and the hospital. It happens regularly enough over the lifetime of any large municipality that the workers have all seen it a few times and they have procedures. The trouble is that third parties draw down this data and duplicate it for ages. We had him declared not dead before he was out of the hospital, but it was probably a decade worth of incidents before we seemed to be in the clear. And that was in the 90s, I imagine the duplication errors would be even bigger and faster now.
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Related, the reason it’s called “sitting Shivah” is because the corpse used to be laid out on a bed of ice and everyone had to sit around and shivah.
Thank you, thank you. I’ll be touring various Catskills resorts all summer.
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For my funeral, I want to have a small audio player put in my pocket.
The first hour or so is silence, then my voice comes on saying “Hey, what’s going on? Let me out of here!”
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my worst fear… buried alive.
from other comments here, it may happen more than we know, which will now creep me out for the rest of my life.
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For my funeral, I want to have a small audio player put in my pocket.
The first hour or so is silence, then my voice comes on saying “Hey, what’s going on? Let me out of here!”
Or Rob Brydon’s:
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My daughter has strict instructions to call the cell phone that will be in my pocket during the funeral.
She’s also supposed to log into my Facebook account about 6 months or so after I’m gone and say “I’m baaaack”.
She’s an awesome daughter, it will get done.
I pay for my parent’s phones, after my dad died I kept his sim card and kept it active on my account. A few months after he died I texted my daughter from his phone.
She freaked out but she knew it was me. We both have the same weird sense of humor.
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“She was then transferred to a better hospital where doctors upgraded her condition to alive”.
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I’m curious as to whether a person could take advantage of that for some sort of legal purposes. Can you collect on your life insurance?
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It’s pretty much everyone’s worst fear, which is why we have entire cultural constructions (wakes, etc) devoted to preventing it. I dunno if that helps or not, but at least you’re not alone. 
There were also a number of patents back in the day for “safety coffins” which were mostly variations on a bell that you could ring from inside the coffin after being buried. I don’t think it was ever sold or used, but it goes to show how common this fear is, at least.
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In case you are confused, they are actually singing in English
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