FT New Yorker Julia Carson was pronounced dead from heart disease, and preparations for her burial began. At the funeral parlour she 'came back to life', sat up in her coffin and asked what was going on. Her daughter Julie promptly dropped dead of shock. Anja Rueschel, 19, of Stenda, Germany, was pronounced dead after being run down by a car, but woke up inside a zinc coffin used to carry the dead from traffic accidents. She banged on the lid and fainted as medics unscrewed it. She recovered from her head injuries. Daily Star, 8 Mar 1996. David Dobson, 56, died for more than five minutes on 20 April after a 30,000-volt shock blew him off his feet and melted his 30ft (9m) CB radio ærial when it touched an overhead power line next to his mobile home near Farnborough, Hampshire. Although clinically dead, his heart was restarted by another shock delivered by paramedics. Western Daily Press, Guardian, 29 April 1996. Chen Chun-nan, 34, started to sweat while his wife was crying over his "dead" body at a funeral house in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, after a car crash. Also in southern Taiwan, Kuo Lee-huang, 61, was found "dead" in his house, but when a policeman went to inspect the funeral, Mr Kuo "moved all of a sudden". South China Morning Post, 29 April 1996. Asuncion Gutirrez, 100, startled her mourning family and friends in Managua, Nicaragua, when she sat up in her coffin at her wake and asked for food. "This is the third time she has done this to us," said her grandson. [AFP] 4 May 1996. Undertaker Richard Blake, 27, was attacked by a "corpse" which came to life as he was embalming it. Blake suffered broken ribs in the New York assault. The attacker then suffered a massive heart attack and died again. Daily Record, 13 May 1996. Micaela Velasco, 101, was declared dead by a doctor in Zamora, north-west Spain. A few hours later, undertakers were preparing her for her burial when they saw her lips move. Three days later, she was "as fit as a lady of her age can be". D.Telegraph, D.Mail, 30 Sept 1996. Two morgue attendants in Havana, Cuba, playing chess on the night shift to pass the time, got the shock of their lives when a "corpse" suddenly sat up, reached over and moved one of the chessmen. Coroner Jose Muñoz said Miguel García suffered a heat attack and had been incorrectly pronounced dead. He came to on the slab and, disoriented, grabbed the first thing he saw- the black bishop . He moved it three squares and dropped it. At the time of the report, he was recovering at Havana General Hospital. People & Places (Ghana), 17 Oct 1996. A farmer "dead" for 40 minutes was brought back to life by doctors who massaged his heart 10,000 times and gave him electric shocks. Zhao Guoyu, 43, a farmer in Gaoyang village near Tianjin, China, suffered nine massive heart attacks within three hours in hospital. It is allegedly the longest time a patient has stopped breathing and still recovered. South China Morning post, 14 Nov 1996. A 93-year-old woman was rescued from cremation at a mortuary in Gungzhou in southern China's Guangdong province when a mortuary worker tried to tie an identification tag to her hand and realised she was breathing. Doctors found the woman was suffering from low blood pressure brought on by diabetes. Her condition was said to be improving. [R] 4 Feb 1997. FT --- Yahoo! Headlines Friday June 2, 3:07 PM Jockeys recovering after fatal plane crash (just a good headline) The Electronic Telegraph Friday 28 January 2000 'Dead' women survived 3 hours under ice By Celia Hall A YOUNG doctor told yesterday how she was brought back from the dead after she had been trapped under ice for nearly an hour and a half. She had the lowest body temperature recorded in a human survivor. Dr Anna Bågenholm, 29, an off-piste skier, had plunged into a frozen river, near Narvik in north Norway and was technically dead for three hours. On reaching hospital her body temperature was recorded at 13.7°C - more than 23 degrees below normal. Now the trainee surgeon from near Gothenburg, Sweden, has made a good recovery and has just returned from a heli-skiing holiday in Canada. But when she arrived at hospital she had no heartbeat, no blood circulation, was not breathing and her pupils were widely dilated and unresponsive to light. Prof Mads Gilbert, of the University and Regional Hospital of Tromso, who led the team that saved her life, said yesterday: "The message to doctors from this remarkable survival is - don't give up. Her low temperature is a record. We have broken through a barrier, we have searched the records and we can find no one who has survived such extreme accidental hypothermia." However, when she came out of sedation Dr Bågenholm was paralysed. She said: "When I woke up I could only move my head. I could not move my body at all. Being able to ski again was not the first thing I thought about. But it was in my mind. All I thought was I would spend the rest of my life on my back. I was very angry with my colleagues who had saved me. But I have apologised to them now." Her family and doctors knew that Dr Bågenholm's mental faculties where unimpaired when her father asked her for her PIN number. When they tried her bank card the number worked. Prof Gilbert said: "We wondered what we had done. This young doctor was unable to move. We did have some second thoughts." He describes in The Lancet today how Dr Bågenholm, fell head first into a river when skiing down a waterfall gully last May. Her head and upper body became wedged below the ice and her companions, both doctors trained in emergency procedures, could not get her out. They called the Narvik hospital, where they all worked, for help on a mobile phone. She was seen to be struggling below the ice for 40 minutes before she became still and it was another 39 minutes before two rescuers from the hospital arrived. She was extracted when her colleagues cut a hole in the ice down-stream and pulled her clear. She was clinically dead. She was given oxygen at the scene and taken to Narvik and transferred to Tromso. Once in hospital she was ventilated and given a cardio pulmonary by-pass, her blood being warmed before it was returned to her body. She then needed her blood to be oxygenated outside her body when her lungs would not work. An hour after arriving at hospital her heart started beating again. Her resuscitation took a total of nine hours and she needed intensive care for another month, followed by months of rehabilitation. Prof Gilbert said that about 100 specialists and nurses had been involved in her round-the-clock care. He said: "We think she was breathing for the first 40 minutes in an air pocket in the flowing water. So she was taking in oxygen as her body slowly cooled down. She was also extremely fit. But we had lots of very narrow escapes with her: her lungs failed, her kidneys failed, her intestines failed. We just did not give up." Through intensive rehabilitation, Dr Bågenholm has regained the use of her limbs and was back skiing at Christmas with her ski sticks taped to her hands as she improved her ability to grip. Eights months after her ordeal Dr Bågenholm does not have normal use of her hands and for the time being cannot continue her training as a surgeon. She said: "We really do not know why the motor nerves [which control movement] have been affected. Everyone has a different explanation. My hands tingle all the time, my fingers do not have proper feeling. So for now I cannot examine patients. I am happy that they saved me. I am going back to work for the first time tomorrow to do paperwork. If I cannot be a surgeon there are other things I can do as a doctor. But now I am going skiing." The Philippine Star Online 7 Feb. 2000 'Dead' man wakes up just in time before autopsy By Jaime Laude Bringing out the dead is never an easy task, especially when dealing with one very uncooperative "cadaver." Two Pasay City police officers and several employees of a funeral home went through a hair-raising experience early morning yesterday when a man they thought was lying dead in a street gutter suddenly "returned to life" while about to be transported for autopsy. SPO1 Hector Bongat and PO1 Roberto Sombregon of the Pasay City Criminal Investigation Unit were in Barangay Tramo shortly after 7a.m. when they found a man lying on his side with bloodstains on his forehead. They had been dispatched to the area after the station received a call that there was a dead man near the Tramo River. Within minutes, a van from a Pasay City funeral home arrived to pick up the cadaver. While being prepared for loading onto a stretcher, the "dead" man suddenly stood up and asked what was happening. He would, however, fail to elicit any response from those around him as the cops and funeral home employees were still too shocked to comprehend what had just taken place. There was so much confusion that the police officers even failed to get the man's name. And after everyone had recovered their wits, the "dead" man simply said he was fine and that he was going home. One police official, who was amused by the whole affair, said his investigators theorized that their mystery man was drunk and was about to relieve himself near the Tramo River when he slipped and fell. "His head apparently hit a water pipe and then he lost consciousness," the official said. "We knew he was about to relieve himself because of his unzipped pants." http://www.philstar.com/datedata/d10_feb10/gen15.htm Boy is revived after 40 minutes under water 09:30 Friday 28th April 2000 http://www.pa.press.net/news/story/sm_2742.html A two-year old boy who fell into a river in south-west France was brought out alive after 40 minutes under water. Divers found the boy, Dmitri, in 13 feet of water underneath a boat tied to the quayside in the town of Taillebourg and revived him using heart massage and artificial respiration. Saintes Hospital officials say he was saved by the cold. "Hypothermia reduces the amount of oxygen needed by the cells, especially the brain. There was also a reflex which blocks the wind-pipe, and that meant he did not breathe in any water," a paediatrician at the hospital told Associated Press. Tests have shown that Dmitri's brain is still functioning but doctors warn it may have been permanently damaged. http://www.africanews.org/PANA/news/20000602/feat16.html "Dead" Woman Talks And Walks Back To Life June 2, 2000 Raphael Tenthani PANA Correspondent BLANTYRE, Malawi (PANA) - A woman in Malawi's southern district of Mulanje, some 68 km from the commercial capital, Blantyre, presumed dead by her relations, pleasantly surprised them when she sat up and started talking some 16 hours into her "death." Josephine Mose, the sister to the "resurrected" woman, said Margaret had been sick for over a year and died around 0700 (0900 GMT) Tuesday. "We prepared the body for burial and all was set for the funeral service when we noticed her shaking," Mose said. She added that mourners in the funeral parlour, who were singing hymns and praying for her, got confused and frightened when Margaret sat up, looked surprised at the gathering for a few minutes, and started talking to them. Margaret later told the official Malawi News Agency (MANA) that she did not know what was happening during the 16 hours that she had been "dead." She, however, said that in her sleep she saw visions of her late parents. Superstitious neighbours felt Margaret was bewitched by some people who confused certain instructions of the potions, leading to her "resurrection." But Amon Nkhata, a clinical officer at Mulanje District Hospital, said Margaret might have just become unconscious. "There are cases when a person becomes unconscious for over 20 hours and later regains consciousness," he added. http://www.iol.co.za/general/newsview.php?click_id=79&art_id=qw96300078023 3B243&set_id=1 The Independent [South Africa] | 7 July 2000 Morgue treatment makes 'dead' man hopping mad A South African lawyer representing a Lesotho man is threatening to sue Pelonomi hospital in Bloemfontein for certifying his client dead and then placing him in a morgue for three days while still alive. Hospital records confirmed that Jako Lekorotsoana was admitted after a hit-and-run accident in 1996, certified dead on arrival and put in a morgue, SABC television reported on Friday. "I was put in a fridge but I arose," he said. "Everyone in the mortuary ran away in terror when I gained consciousness after three days." His lawyer, Mojafela Ramphai, said there were many irregularities in the hospital records. - Sapa 22/10/00 02:00 http://www.spiritdaily.com/doctor.htm Former doctor and now a Methodist minister says he too was once 'dead' for three days by Michael H. Brown ... the result of better emergency care and medical technology. ... some of them are indeed impressive (we reported the case of a man named Stanley Villavicencio who some say was also dead for three days), and also extraordinary is the case of Dr. George Rodonaia, a medical doctor from the former Soviet Union who was "killed" in 1976 as he made plans to leave Russia for the U.S. What made this the most extraordinary claim was not only Dr. Rodonaia's credentials (he had a Ph.D. in neuropathology), but the fact that he was in a morgue for three days before coming to as doctors were pressing an autopsy knife into his body. Rodonaia, an atheist at the time, was hit by a car that jumped the sidewalk. "The first thing I remember about my near-death experience is that I discovered myself in a realm of total darkness," said Dr. Rodonaia. "I had no physical pain, I was still somehow aware of my existence as George, and all about me there was darkness, utter and complete darkness -- the greatest darkness ever, darker than any dark, blacker than any black. I was horrified. I wasn't prepared for this at all. I was shocked to find that I still existed, but I didn't know where I was." ... "So there I was, flooded with all those good things and this wonderful experience, when someone begins to cut into my stomach," said Dr. Rodanaia. "Can you imagine? What had happened was that I was taken to the morgue. I was pronounced dead and left there for three days. An investigation into the cause of my death was set up, so they sent someone out to do an autopsy on me. As they began to cut into my stomach, I felt as though some great power took hold of my neck and pushed me down. And it was so powerful that I opened my eyes and had this huge sense of pain. My body was cold and I began to shiver. They immediately stopped the autopsy and took me to the hospital, where I remained for the following nine months, most of which I spent under a respirator." So powerful was the alleged experience that Rodanaia took a second Ph.D. in the psychology of religion and then became a priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church. On arriving in America he became an associate pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Nederland, Texas. 17/10/00 10:37 Allison has twice woken up on a mortuary slab. Now her biggest fear is being buried alive By Julia Llewellyn Smith It is one of our most fundamental fears.The terror of being buried alive and waking up inside a tomb is one that haunts us all. We console ourselves that such situations only exist in fiction. But, for Allison Burchell, such a prospect is based on a terrifying reality Allison BURCHELL, 65, has been pronounced dead three times. Twice she has woken up in a mortuary, surrounded by dead bodies. Every day, Allison lives with the fear that she may "die" again and that, this time, she will wake up inside a coffin covered with earth. "It is the most terrifying thing imaginable," she says, her voice quaking with emotion. It was in 1952 when Allison, then 17, from Horsham, West Sussex, "died" for the first time. "I went to the pictures to see an Abbott and Costello film," she recalls. "I sat in the back row and the film commenced. I remember laughing and falling to the ground. I could still hear the film going and everybody laughing, but I just couldn't do anything. "The film finished and everyone got up and went home. It was one of the usherettes who found me. An ambulance was called, they took me to the hospital and put me in the ward for a time and then the sister told the nurses to prepare me for the morgue as they had pronounced me dead. I was petrified and I just wanted to hit that sister, but there was nothing I could do. "While the nurses were getting me prepared for the morgue, they were holding a conversation about their boyfriends. They had no idea I could hear everything they were saying. I was paralysed but, in my head, I was calling them all the names under the sun. "They took me to the morgue. I knew there must be people around me who were dead. I was lying there thinking, 'What's the next step to being in the morgue?' waiting for someone to come and measure me for my coffin. But, then, I did finally come out of it. There were all these corpses around me and I just didn't know what to do. I just sat there and then the attendant came in and I think he got a bigger shock than I did." When a nurse came to take her back to the ward, Allison astonished her. "I said, 'I heard what you were saying and I think you should leave your boyfriend'," she chuckles. "You should have seen her face." NOW married with four children and living in Melbourne, Australia, Allison spent nine months in hospital, before being diagnosed with severe narcolepsy catalepsy, a rare condition. Although the narcolepsy, which causes extreme drowsiness, could be controlled by medication, there was no cure for catalepsy, which leaves the sufferer totally paralysed yet fully conscious. "You can see and hear everything going on around you, but there's no way to convey to anyone that you are not dead," Allison says. The second attack occurred a few years later. "This time, the morgue was off from the hospital and when the doors shut, it felt like being closed in a tomb," she says. When Allison came round, she fumbled through the darkness to the door, only to find it locked. "I was banging on it but there was nobody there to hear me," she says. "It dawned on me that somebody had to die before they'd open the doors, so I was wishing for someone to die. When the door finally opened, I was out like a shot." She was released from hospital just a day later. Allison's next major attack happened in the mid-Seventies while living in Melbourne, Australia. She collapsed on a hot summer's day and a neighbour called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived and pronounced her dead. Luckily for Allison, her 15-year-old son Stephen returned home just as his mother was being put in the ambulance. As Allison lay there paralysed, he begged the paramedics not to certify her dead. She says: "I was so worried because, in Australia, they don't just put you in a mortuary, they put you in a cold unit and I knew I'd freeze to death. So I was thinking, 'That's right Steve, keep pleading because if I'm not dead when I go in the ice-box, I will be when I come out'." At the hospital, sceptical doctors dismissed Stephen as a hysterical teenager but eventually agreed to put Allison in a ward cubicle. A few minutes later, she came round. Despite the evidence of Allison's case, mortuary workers say the chances of being buried alive are impossible, since the signs of death are so distinctive. But a television programme, Premature Burial, to be screened on Channel 5 tonight, shows that, in the past, such incidents may have been more common. Historians point to the case of George Haywood, a teenager from Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, who was working in his father's fields when his skull was accidentally penetrated by a pitchfork. Though the injury did not appear too serious, George's condition deteriorated and, a few days later, he was pronounced dead. In fact, he was still conscious and could feel himself being lowered by the undertaker and hear the sound of earth falling on his coffin lid. As they left the funeral, two doctors began arguing about the causes of George's death. They decided to exhume the body and perform an autopsy. George was on the slab and the doctors were about to cut out his tongue, when he finally succeeded in moving his eyelids. After his experience, he became a jeweller, moved to America and eventually died at the age of 82. But such cases are not only the preserve of another age. In 1996, Maureen Jones, 65, a widow from Thwing, East Yorkshire, was getting ready for bed when she collapsed. She lay on the floor all night and was discovered in the morning by her son. He called Dr Marion Meeson who pronounced her dead and called an undertaker. Maureen's four children were informed of her death but, as they waited for the hearse, a police officer called to the scene saw Maureen's leg twitch. He gave her a heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and affirmed that her heart was still beating. Maureen was sent to hospital in Scarborough where she regained consciousness two days later. She had been in a diabetic coma and, during the night, began to suffer from hypothermia. She and her family were left traumatised by the incident. "I'll never get over it," she says. Dr Meeson has since faced disciplinary action. While Maureen's case was the result of bad practice, other incidents cannot be easily explained. George Rodonaia, 46, was a doctor in the former Soviet republic of Georgia when, in 1976, he was run over by a car in what he believes was a murder attempt by Soviet authorities, who feared he was about to defect to America. A death certificate was issued. George's family began to grieve and his corpse was put in a mortuary fridge over the weekend. On Monday morning, it was put on the autopsy table. But when the doctor began to cut open George's abdomen, he opened his eyes. "The experience for my family and friends was devastating," he says. George spent nine months in hospital recovering. A former agnostic, he became a committed Christian as a result of his experience. He believes that he did die but was then resurrected by divine intervention. "I'm not scared of anything any more," he says. "I would be very happy to be dead because I already saw it and it was so good for me. But God didn't allow it, so I'm still alive." Today, he is a baptist minister in Texas. While George and Maureen are extremely unlikely to "die" again, for Allison the fear that she may be misdiagnosed is a very real and everyday threat. She keeps a medical letter explaining her condition in her purse, along with her medical card, but is not confident it would be found. "The only safe thing to do would be to have it tattooed on the soles of my feet. My one big dread is that I will be buried alive, It's always at the back of my mind. I have now decided to be cremated, so if I am still alive, I won't have time to think about it." Premature Burial, Channel 5, tonight at 10.50pm. --- FT Peter Archer, 47, was arrested for running naked down a street in Melbourne, but he was released when it was discovered that he was fleeing from a mortuary where a doctor had officially pronounced him dead. Irish Independent Sun, 19 Mar 1996. [forteana] Dead man thumbs lift to his own funeral http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_136894.html?nav_src=newsIndexHeadline A dead man in Kazakhstan shocked his family and friends by rising from his grave and hitch-hiking home to his own funeral feast, according to press reports. The man had been buried in a shallow grave two days earlier after apparently being electrocuted and killed as he tried to steal power cables. He regained consciousness, however, and rose from the ground naked except for his burial shroud. He had difficulty thumbing a lift after spending two days in the ground, the Express K daily reports. Last updated: 20:01 Wednesday 6th December 2000. ALMATY, Kazakhstan (Reuters) -- A Kazakh man who was electrocuted and buried has shocked his friends and family by turning up for his own funeral feast. The man was wrapped in a cloth shroud according to Muslim tradition and buried in a shallow grave after apparently dying while trying to steal power cables in eastern Kazakhstan, local media reported Wednesday. But two days later he regained consciousness and rose naked from the ground, Express K daily said. The paper said he had difficulty flagging down a vehicle to take him home. --- FT104 6 I'm Back: Abdel-Sattar Abdel-Salem Badawi, a chauffeur in his 60s, suffering from fibrosis of the liver, was pronounced dead in the Nile delta city of Menoufia, 65 miles (105 km) north-west of Cairo and was put in a morgue refrigerator. Revived by the cold, he awoke from a coma after 12 hours, slid open the coffin lid and began chanting verses from the Koran and shouting fro help. No-one heard, but then three hospital orderlies came in to remove his body and found him standing up. One of them fell dead from shock. Mr Badawi voed never again to go to hospital. /AP, AFP 15 July 1997/ FT131 08 Coming back From The Dead The absence of a heartbeat is not a certain sign of death as these cases from FT files demonstrate... Ann Elisabeth Bagenholm, 29, lay trapped under a sheet of ice in a freezing mountain stream for an hour and 20 minutes, her head just out of the water. When taken to hospital, she had no detectable pulse and her body temperature was down to 13.6C (56.5F) instead of the normal 37C (98.6F), but the Swedish surgical assisstant survived, despiter her heart having stopped beating for nearly four hours. Nobody is thought ever before to have recovered after their body temperature had reached such a low point. The lowest authenticated body temperature on record until then was 14.2C (57.5F) for a Canadian girl who in 1994 was accidentally locked out of her home for six hours. Miss Bagenholm was cross-country skiing near Narvik in northern Norway last May when she plummeted into the stream and lost consciousness. Two friends tried to get her out but her skis were wedged under the ice. As one summoned help on a mobile phone, the other held her head above water. They tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, to no effect. A helicopter arrived with paramedics, who said that Miss Bagenholm's heart had stopped beating- probably at the moment she hit the icy water. She was flown to hospital in Narvik, where a team of doctors tried to revive her. Finally, some four hours after her accident, her heart started beating again, but it was many hours before her body temperature returned to normal and she was in a coma for 10 days. Five months later, she had a little difficulty moving her hands and nerve problems in her elbows, but expected to make a full recovery. /D.Mail, 8 Oct 1999/ Kerry Sweeney, 33, From Scarborough, North Yorkshire, was spotted floating face down off Blackpool beach on 17 October 1997 and was pulled from the water 14 minutes later, but her heart had stopped and police called in the coroner. Two hours later, however, before an investigation could get under way, her heart resumed beating. /News Of The World, 19 Oct 1997/ For more resurrections from drowning, see FT45:28-29 On 9 August 1999, Ali Abdel-Rahim Mohammad, 34, an Arabic teacher, woke up in a morgue refrigerator in Egypt. He had blacked out while swimming in the Mediterranean at Alexandria, and was pronounced dead, according to the Al-Akhbar newspaper. Three hours later, he was awakened by a loud bang. "I found myself locked inside tight walls of metal and whispers of people I did not recognise." he said. A doctor carrying out an autopsy on another body in the morgue had pulled open the drawer where Ali had been laid out. The "drowned" man was too frozen to speak, but made his situation clear by grabbing the doctor's hand. After the medic fled in panic, Ali stood on his frozen feet and left the morgue to call his family in the southern Egyptian city of Malawi- only to find that friends who had accompanied him to the beach had already told them he was dead. This was the story told by Associated Press. Agence France Presse, on the other hand, called the man Ahmed el-Sayed Ali, reduced his age to 29, said he came from Minya in Upper Egypt, not Malawi, and asserted that he had been unconscious in the mortuary for five hours, not three. The doctor in this case was lucky. Back in July 1997, a man in a coma, pronounced dead, awoke after 12 hours in a morgue refrigerator in Menoufia, near Cairo, and called for help. The paramedic who found him died of shock [FT104:6]. The "drowned" victim in this case was also lucky. Last february, businessman James MacCarthy, 43, fell into a coma while being driven to hospital in Ghana by his relatives who, believing him dead, deposited him in the mortuary. Some time later he was found dead in a refrigerated drawer. He had bruises to his face, neck, hands and legs, suggesting a struggle to get out of the mortuary drawer before dying of cold. Many conditions mimic death- catalepsy, epilepsy, apoplexy, hypothermia, shock, smallpox, cholera, and electrocution by lightning. Tim Craig, a cadet in the Merchant Navy in the early 1960s, recalls a death off the West African coast. As there were two doctors on board to sign the death certificate and no refrigerated space, it was decided to commit the body to the deep. The cadet was detailed to assisst the bo'sun in the funerary preparations. The bo'sun used a leather glove and needle to sew a heavy canvas shroud around the body and when he came to the final stitches around the face he pushed the large triangular needle right through the nose. "That's the law of the sea," he explained to the cadet. "The last stitch through the nose, if that don't wake him up I know he's dead." Premature burial is a genuine risk- sometimes, however, the victims of this macabre fate survive. A two-year-old girl, buried in easter Ivory Coast after being pronounced dead from a mystery illness, was recovered alive from her grave three days later on 24 August 1997, according to the daily newspaper /Le Jour/. Grave diggers brought little Minata Lafissa back to her village of Yakasse-Feyasse after hearing her sighs while digging a grave nearby for someone else. The report said the child had been sickly from birth and recalled that in 1970 an old man was heard sighing in the grave in the same village. He had died by the time he was unearthed. A Saudi man narrowly escaped being buried alive last August when he sneezed loudly just as his relatives were preparing to seal him in his grave. Jaber Mohammed al-Abdelli had been hit by an illness that threw him into a coma. His family washed the body and wrapped it in a burial shroud. /[AP, AFP] 10 Aug; Ghana review international, Feb; Sunday Telegraph, 8 MAr 1999; Independent, 15 Jan 1996; [R] 26 Aug 1997; National Post (Toronto), 2 Sept 1999. For resurrection roundups, see FT49:55-60, 63:38, 75:18, 98:17, 104:6