GRAVE MISGIVINGS

Our latest round-up of premature burials, miraculous resurrections, and people who just wouldn’t stay dead

• A Brazilian woman is believed to have spent 11 days trying to break out of her coffin after being buried alive. Rosangela Almeida dos Santos, 37, was declared dead in hospital on 28 January 2018 after suffering cardiac arrest and septic shock, and was buried the next day in Riachao das Neves, Bahia state. Locals reported screams from the cemetery on 9 February, and about 500 people gathered to see the coffin taken from its stone tomb and opened. Some called for an ambulance, as the woman’s feet were still warm, but it was too late. Her body had turned around and cotton wool that had been in her ears and nostrils had fallen out. Nails around the coffin lid were pushed up and there were scratches and blood on the inside. Local Natalina Silva said she heard banging from the tomb. “I thought kids were playing a joke,” she said. “Then I heard her groan twice.” Sun, D.Mirror, 17 Feb 2018.

• A newborn baby girl was discovered alive after being buried for seven hours in Brazil. The mother was 15 when she gave birth. Believing the baby was dead, she buried her in the family’s back garden. After an anonymous tip, police dug her up. She was taken to hospital and, despite some respiratory issues, was in a stable condition. Queensland Times, 19 June 2018.

• Fearing her parents would be angry with her, a girl aged 15 buried her newborn baby near a farm in Ban Nong Kham, northeastern Thailand. Cattle herder Usa Nisaikha, 41, rescued the child almost at once when he heard his three-legged dog Ping Pong barking and found him digging in a field. (Ping Pong lost a leg after being hit by a car.) At the time of the report, the child was recovering in hospital and the mother was charged with attempted murder. Sunday Telegraph, Sunday People, 19 May 2019.

• An unnamed woman was one of several people involved in a car accident outside Carletonville, South Africa, in the early hours of 24 June 2018. Declared dead by paramedics, she was taken to the morgue. However, when a morgue worker returned to check on the body in the fridge, he found the woman was breathing several hours after the crash. “This did not happen because our paramedics are not properly trained,” insisted Distress Alert operations manager Gerrit Bradnick. “Equipment used to determine life showed no form of life in the woman.” At the time of the report, she was recovering in hospital. BBC News, nydailynews. com, 2 July; D.Mail, 3 July 2018.

• A 62-year-old woman was drinking with relatives at a party in Vasilyevka, Russia, when she appeared to have passed away. A policeman certified her as dead and took her ‘body’ to the morgue. However, she was still alive, and started moving while a morgue worker tried to fit a tag to her foot. She was taken to Belogorsk hospital, but died the same day from hypothermia. Metro, 13 Jan 2019.

• Last February, a freak wave washed Shelby Burns, 19, into the sea at night near Blackpool’s North Pier, and knocked her out when she hit the sea wall. Lifeboatmen found her face down in the water without a heartbeat. She was given CPR and rushed to hospital, where her heart started beating again after 40 minutes. In her case, hypothermia had saved her. She was allowed home after six weeks. Sunday Mirror, Sun on Sunday, 7 April 2019.

• A 53-year-old man had a heart attack on 12 March while walking back from his brother’s house in Béziers, near Montpellier in southern France. When he failed to return home, relatives search for him and discovered him unconscious by a river. It was 18 hours before he was revived; his survival was down to hypothermia, which caused his body temperature to plunge, protecting his brain and other organs. He had a body temperature of 22˚C (71.6˚F), instead of the normal 37˚C (98.6˚F). Paramedics performed heart massages for more than four hours before the man could be placed on a heart-lung machine, which kept him alive until his body temperature rose sufficiently (to 32˚C/89.6˚F) for doctors to make one last, successful, attempt to get his heart going. The man had several broken ribs because of the massages and needed to stay on the machine for three days. At the time of the news report, he was on the way to total recovery. “The medical team were stupefied,” said Jonathan Charbit, in charge of the intensive care unit at Montpellier University Hospital. “This is a textbook case. It’s also an extraordinary medical and human adventure. The probability of him surviving was near to zero.” Emergency medics, apparently, have a saying: “Nobody is dead until warm and dead”. Times, D.Mail, 7 April 2019. The classic case of hypothermic resurrection is that of Ann Elisabeth Begenholm, trapped under a sheet of ice in a freezing mountain stream in Norway in May 1999. Her body temperature plummeted to 13.6˚C (56.5˚F) and her heart stopped for four hours [ FT131:8].

• After the death of Alexander the Great, his followers marvelled at his body’s failure to decompose in Mesopotamia’s intense heat, regarding it as proof that he was divine. Another explanation has now emerged: he wasn’t dead. Over the centuries, the cause of his demise in Babylon in 323 BC has been variously attributed to alcoholism, poison and typhoid. After analysing ancient accounts and modern medical literature, Katherine Hall of the Dunedin School of Medicine in New Zealand argues that he had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare auto-immune disorder that left him paralysed. She suggests that his staff failed to recognise, for nearly a week, that he was still alive. “His death may be the most famous case of pseudothanatos, or false diagnosis of death, ever recorded,” she writes in The Ancient History Bulletin.

The first signs of illness appeared after a night of heavy drinking, during which Alexander is said to have drunk 12 pints of wine. The next morning, he suffered from fatigue and “generalised aches”. That evening, he drank a similar quantity of wine and experienced a pain in his abdomen, sharp enough for him to cry out. An increasingly severe fever took hold. By the eighth day of his illness he was unable to speak and could make only small movements of his eyes and hands. On the eleventh day, according to Plutarch, he died. His embalmers were probably right to hesitate, Dr Hall concludes, “although it is very likely Alexander was in a deep coma by this stage and would have had no awareness when they began their work”. Times, 29 Jan; D.Mail, 30 Jan 2019.

For the most recent round-ups of the “Lazarus phenomenon”, see FT334:10-11, 357:23, 363:12.