By Tobin Barnes
Here’s the stuff of nightmares:
Guy wakes up in excruciating pain.
The source?
Medical examiners are beginning an autopsy.
That’s right, on him.
So says a Reuters news story from Caracas, Venezuela. Maybe you’ve read it.
“Carlos Camejo, 33, was declared dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue, where examiners began an autopsy only to realize something was amiss when he started bleeding.”
Amiss? Man, we’re talking “Twilight Zone” on crack.
“I woke up because the pain was unbearable,” Camejo said.
Yeah, a live autopsy could be brutal.
They moved him out into the corridor and that’s where his grieving wife found him.
Weird, huh?
So I’m thinking, hey, if anyone thinks I’m dead, pump about five bullets into me to make sure, okay. I’ll forgo any remote chances of a miraculous recovery to avoid waking up in a morgue refrigerator or cremation unit.
And I’m not the only one.
Back in the days before embalming, people used to freak at the idea of being buried alive. I’ve read how some people gave explicit directions that their hearts should be removed from their bodies after death to avoid the issue altogether.
I’ve also run across some urban legend-type stuff that you may or may not want to take with a grain of salt.
No, upon second reading, better take the salt.
According to London trivia expert Sam Bali, gravesites were reused in old England because of lack of space. They’d dig up coffins, take the bones out and compactly put them in a “bone-house,” then use the grave again. On the lids of one out of twenty-five coffins, he says, they found scratch marks of people trying to get out.
Uh huh.
Bali says they realized they’d been mistakenly burying people alive.
Yowsa!
So they came up with contraptions to avoid such a calamity, like tying a string to the supposed corpse’s wrist that led up through the ground to a bell. Whence comes our oft-used “saved by the bell” and “dead ringer.”
People paid to spend nights listening for the bell (or presumably “bells” on busy nights) were working “the graveyard shift.”
Trivialist Bali says that the origins of a “wake” are not far removed. And that the period between perceived death and burial was spent with people gathered around the body eating and drinking and waiting for the off-chance that the deceased wasn’t really dead.
Upon further investigation, however, I found that the word maven at word-detective.com thinks that’s just a bunch of hooey--that no one really expected the body to wake up at a “wake.”
Maybe the “dead ringer” stuff is just a bunch of hooey, too. Lot of hooey out there, as you well know.
But they’re good stories, nonetheless.
Creepy.
Kind of stuff that makes me want to have someone pump maybe five bullets in me before they call the undertaker. And if I don’t bleed, we’re good to go.
Tobin’s website:
http://tobin-barnes.blogspot.com
