Earlier this week, family members of 76-year-old Bella Montoya gathered to mourn her at a funeral parlor in Ecuador. About five hours into the funeral, they heard a strange sound coming from the coffin.
When family members opened the coffin, they found Montoya gasping for air. Paramedics returned her to the hospital where, only hours earlier, she had been declared “dead” by doctors due to complications with a stroke. Montoya remains in the hospital in intensive care.
While we only hope that incidents like these remain few and far between, Montoya is hardly the first person to “come to life” in a coffin at a funeral home. According to CNN, earlier this year, an 82-year-old woman was pronounced dead at a nursing home on Long Island, NY, only to be discovered breathing at the funeral parlor a few hours later. Luckily, in these cases, the two were found alive before premature burials.
As unfortunate and nauseating as it is to hear, people have been buried before their time, so much so that specialized coffins were once used to alert those on the surface that the coffin’s occupant still drew breath. As medical technology advances, it begs the question of how this could possibly happen.
