Cancer victim 'came back to life' in her grave

  

Visitors to a cemetry in Greece claim they heard a woman shouting from inside her coffin and dug her up, only for her to die for a second time.

By Rory Mulholland, Paris10:06PM BST 26 Sep 2014

Shocked visitors to a Greek cemetery were left horrified when they heard banging and muffled calls for help coming from the grave of a woman who just been buried.

Police said a cemetery worker and two people visitors heard a woman’s voice from inside the 49-year-old cancer patient’s grave on Thursday.

The sounds were reportedly heard by the passers-by shortly after the last relatives of the deceased had left her funeral in the northern town of Peraia.

They are believed to have dug up the grave to try to save her, but by the time they got her out of the ground she had suffocated inside the coffin, according to Greek media.

A doctor summoned to the cemetery pronounced her dead, but dismissed claims that she had revived and had called for help.

“I just don’t believe it,” Dr Chrissi Matsikoudi told a local television news station. “We did several tests including one for heart failure on the body.”

It would have been impossible for “someone in a state of rigor mortis to have been shouting and hitting the coffin like that,” she said.

The mother of two, who has not been named, had was declared dead before her funeral at a private clinic on Thursday in Thessaloniki, Greece’s main city in the north. A coroner will examine the body.

Relatives of the dead woman in Peraia, a picturesque seaside town next to Thessaloniki international airport, were reported to be considering suing the doctors responsible for her treatment at the cancer clinic.

Last November a man who was found buried alive in a Brazilian cemetery was freed after a passer-by reportedly saw the earth moving and heard calls for help.

The discovery was made by a woman visiting a relative's grave in Sao Paulo.

Video footage showed emergency services scraping dirt from the man's body, who was was still buried up to the chest, before hauling him out of the grave.

The man was seen moving his arms and hands as he was pulled out of the ground by stunned rescue workers.