Visitors to a Greek cemetery were horrified when they apparently heard banging and muffled calls for help emanating from the grave where a woman had just been buried.
Police said a cemetery worker and two people visiting the cemetery in the northern town of Peraia on Thursday heard noises and a woman’s voice apparently coming from the grave where a 49-year-old cancer patient had been buried, shortly after her last relations had left following the ceremony. They called the police and dug up the coffin in an attempt to save the woman, but by the time they got her to the surface she had suffocated, according to Greek media.
A doctor summoned to the cemetery, who pronounced her dead, dismissed the claims that she had regained consciousness 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 been first declared dead earlier on Thursday at a private clinic in Thessaloniki, Greece’s main city in the north.
A coroner will examine the body. Relations of the dead woman in the picturesque seaside town, near 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 woman reportedly saw the earth moving and heard calls for help. The woman was visiting a relation’s grave in Sao Paulo. Video footage showed emergency services scraping dirt from the man’s body, who was still buried up to the chest, before hauling him out of the grave. It is believed he had been severely beaten in a fight then buried in an empty grave by his assailants.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
