News

A 50 year-old man who suffers from asthma passed out in South Africa on Sunday. His family, assuming the worst, decided not to phone the police or take him to the hospital. Instead, they phoned the private mortuary directly.
I'm guessing that either there was a conversational SNAFU, or the mortuaries in South Africa aren't so good with the follow-up. They picked up the man's body and transported it back to their cooler without question.
24 hours later, the man woke up in the cold, dark, sealed morgue.

He began screaming, and I'm sure you can't blame him. The morgue attendants fled in terror, but eventually "put on their brave faces" and returned to find, not a screaming ghost (as they had first assumed) but a disoriented and cold middle-aged man.

The victim was taken to the nearest hospital for hypothermia treatment. I can only imagine the conversation with his family members when he returns.
Before "The Serpent and the Rainbow" became a rather bad 1998 Wes Craven movie starring Bill Pullman, it was a fascinating non-fiction book by anthropologist Wade Davis on the possible origins of the zombie myth. Davis included a long and fascinating chapter on the topic of the "waking death" phenomena, and how difficult it can be to pronounce a body actually dead.
This theme was revisited in the also-very-excellent book Stiff by Mary Roach.