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 known cases when the dead regained consciousness before burial.
Imaginary death
"Lethargy" is translated from Greek as "oblivion" or "inaction". Science has studied this state of the human body very superficially. The external signs of the disease are simultaneously similar to sleep and death. With the onset of lethargy, the usual life processes stop in the human body.
With the development of technology and the advent of modern equipment, cases of burial alive are almost impossible. However, even 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 Blavatskaya described unique cases of deep "oblivion". So, on a Sunday morning in 1816, a Brussels man fell into a lethargic sleep. The next day, grief-stricken relatives had already prepared everything for burial. However, the man suddenly woke up, sat down, rubbed his eyes and asked for a book and a cup of coffee.
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And the wife of a Moscow businessman was in lethargy for 17 days. The city authorities made several attempts to bury the body, but there were no signs of decomposition. For this reason, the relatives postponed the ceremony. Soon the deceased regained consciousness.
In 1842, in French Bergerac, a patient took sleeping pills and could not wake up. The patient was prescribed a blood transfusion. After a while, the doctors pronounced him dead. After the funeral, they remembered taking medications, and the grave was opened. The body was turned over.
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 came 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 on the face of the corpse was an unusual grin. Fresh wounds were also found on the corpse, and the burial shroud was torn apart. It turned out that the pretended dead was alive when he was buried, and his heart stopped before opening the coffin.
A more impressive incident occurred in Germany in 1773. A pregnant girl was buried in one of the cemeteries. Passers-by heard groans coming from her grave. Not only did the woman wake up after a lethargic sleep in a coffin, but she 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, the English writer Wilkie Collins feared his own burial alive, so when going to bed there was always a note next to his bed. In it, the points were mentioned the measures that must be taken before considering him dead.
Gogol's lethargy
The great Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol also suffered from lethargy. To protect himself from an untimely funeral, he recorded on paper possible incidents that happened to him. “Being in the full presence of memory and common sense, I expound my last will. I bequeath my body not to bury until there are clear signs of decay. I mention this because even during the illness itself they found moments of vital numbness on me, my heart and pulse stopped beating,”wrote Gogol.
However, after the death of the writer, what he had written was forgotten, and the burial ceremony was performed, as expected, on the third day. Gogol's warnings were remembered only by 1931, during his reburial at the Novodevichy cemetery. Eyewitnesses said that there were noticeable scratches on the inside of the coffin lid, the corpse was lying in an unusual position, and he also had no head. According to one of their versions, the skull of the writer was stolen by the order of the famous collector and theatrical figure Alexei Bakhrushin by the monks of the Holy Danilov Monastery during the restoration of Gogol's grave in 1909.
Revived corpse
In 1964, an autopsy of a man who died on the street took place in a New York morgue. The pathologist, having made all the necessary preparations for the procedure, had only managed to bring the scalpel to the patient when he woke up. The doctor died from fright.
And in the famous newspaper "Beysky 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 a second time when he saw the environment around him.
In order to avoid the burial of living people in many countries, a bell with a rope is provided in morgues. A person who is thought to be dead can wake up, get up and call him.
Ritual burials alive
Many peoples of South America, Siberia and the 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 seek to lie in the grave in order to have the gift of communication 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 sealed with wax. After that, he was wrapped in a bear skin and buried. To make it easier for the shaman to survive the confinement, a special tube was inserted into his mouth with which he could breathe. A few days later the shaman was "released" from the grave, fumigated with incense and washed in water. It was believed that after that he was born again.
