A woman in Thailand shocked temple staff when she started moving in her coffin after being brought in for cremation.
Wat Rat Prakhong Tham, a Buddhist temple in the province of Nonthaburi on the outskirts of Bangkok, posted a video on its Facebook page, showing a woman lying in a white coffin in the back of a pick-up truck, slightly moving her arms and head, leaving temple staff bewildered.
Pairat Soodthoop, the temple’s general and financial affairs manager, told The Associated Press on Monday that the 65-year-old woman’s brother drove her from the province of Phitsanulok to be cremated.
He said they heard a faint knock coming from the coffin.
Thank God that everyone insisted on a death certificate. One regulatory misstep in this story and you either gut or burn someone alive.
That being said, knocking coming from the inside of a coffin is top 10 on my list of things that would make my blood immediately run cold.
Apparently dead people waking up happens from time to time. Sometimes vital signs are really hard to detect without hospital equipment.
And usually they do actually check to make sure someone is dead before harvesting their organs.
That’s why you always do a wake!
Holy crap! Is that where the term comes from or is this just a really good pun?
It means to keep watch and part of that is to make sure they are really dead.
Making sure they are really dead could be done a couple of ways…
Since embalming happens before a wake, I guess someone has “made sure” they are really dead before the wake even begins…
Really loose recollection and paraphrasing;
Trace contaminations in alcohol could lead heavy drinkers to pass out in a coma-like state for potentially days at a time. Given the frequency, holding a wake to be absolutely sure it wasn’t one of these poisonings became a useful custom.
And then of course, changes and regulations mean the contaminations are weeded out of the process, but the ritual itself persists because of human habit.
Of course now they generally embalm before a wake… So no one is waking up for their wake…
TIL that’s why it’s called that.
That “usually” is making me a little uncomfortable.
It happened often enough that embalming became commonplace to ensure that the dead couldn’t wake up.
Or double tap, just to be sure.
I would hope that whoever would be in charge of organ retrieval would check for those things regardless of death certificate, but at least it didn’t get that far.
Actually, it probably would have been better for it to get that far, for a medical professional to actually assess her earlier…
The organ harvesting makes no sense in any case. You can’t run a corpse 300 miles down the highway and expect anything salvageable.
True, but I think that the dude was just trying his best to fulfill their wishes. Grief leads people to do odd things sometimes.
Makes me think that there was a reason that he didn’t try to get a death certificate.
Eh, I doubt there was ill intent here. Sounds like dude is poor and doing his best. Otherwise, why bother to try to get a free cremation or organ transplant? A random hole in the ground would be a much more effective hiding spot.
Except that is murder to anyone who didn’t see her dead