I was going to write about the UFO spotted at the stadium at the Notre Dame game the other day, but I think I’m becoming desensitized by all the UFO’s caught on film lately. I think they’re gonna have to actually land, give greetings, and break out in song to make my journal. That’s right, I’m setting the bar high!
So, what to write?
I pondered this a bit as my daughter and I set out to meet the bus this morning, Unexpectedly, Oliver (my Cavalier dog) burst out of the house the moment I cracked open the door. During the few minutes it took to wrangle him back inside, we heard a clunky engine sounding, which turned out to be the bus, as it whizzed right on past our house.
On to plan B. Rachel and I piled into the car, me in my bathrobe, the very image of glamour. On the way to school, we listened to the Hawk and Tom radio show, which is always good for a laugh. Today it was more like a guffaw that nearly caused me to crash my Subaru at the light. The news item they were discussing had a distinctly supernatural flavor to it and I knew I’d just been handed a gift from the Gods.
So, thanks to a series of annoying mishaps and an unimpressive alien apparently into college football, but unwilling to pay for a seat, I bring you today’s paranormal entry about a guy in South Africa, thought to be dead, come back to life. No, this is not a Zombie story….exactly.
This man who shall remain anonymous, for reasons you’ll understand soon, recently woke up inside a refrigerated drawer, inside a morgue. Like anyone who finds themselves in such a predicament, the man, in his sixties, was under no small amount of distress. He was freezing, he was trapped, and he had this annoying tag on his toe he was afraid to pull off, fearing it might be a punishable offense.
He screamed and he hollered, just to get a little attention. Fortunately, the attendants who worked at the mortuary heard him… and ran for their lives, fleeing the place like it was on fire. Apparently, they thought he was a ghost come to haunt them. Really, you’d think morticians would be made of slightly tougher stuff.
Eventually, the attendants came back with reinforcements. And the team bravely opened the drawer and released the man who was surprisingly not decomposing, after all. He was very much alive!
“Two workers heard screaming from the refrigerators,” Kupelo told ABC News. “They thought it was a ghost and they ran for their lives.”
And now, let’s backtrack a bit, shall we? How on earth could an alive man suddenly find himself deep frozen and packed away inside a mortuary drawer?
Only twenty-one hours earlier, Mr. Anonymous was in his home, having an asthma attack. It was so severe, he passed out. Now, either his family was happy to be rid of him, or perhaps they didn’t own any hand mirrors to place in front of his face to check if he was, in fact, still breathing.
Logically, the first step in a medical emergency would be to call for an ambulance to see if something could be done for the ailing man. I guess the family thought it would be far more convenient to just skip the life-saving middlemen and jump right on to the morticians. Hmmm….No messy CPR…no noisy ambulance disturbing the neighborhood, no dealing with hospital doctors or being around contagious sick people, and they’d only have to visit him just the one time at the funeral. So, naturally, they went with calling the mortuary. It’s really such a no brainer.
Now, some might be willing to place the blame on the morticians. Come on, people, morticians have a business to run and can’t waste their time and energy on trifling concerns such as whether or not their client is actually alive at the time they claim him.
This reminds me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The scene with the cart of dead people and the undertaker yelling, “Bring out your dead.” This old guy gets dumped on the top of the pile, but he’s alive and he screams to the undertaker, “But, I’m not dead!” So, the undertaker clonks him over the head, killing him, and goes on about his business, pushing his cart of dead people.
When news of the assumed dead guy found alive inside a freezing mortuary drawer incident reached the Eastern Cope Health Department, their spokesman Sizwe Kupelo, had this to say:
“This is why we’re saying as a health department that people should call health services to have their relatives declared and certified dead and not these private mortuaries,” Kupelo said.
Ya think? Who would believe the health department would have to actually make a public statement urging their citizens not to call the undertaker until they’re sure their loved one is dead. This story is so unbelievable in its stupidity, therein lies the paranormal element. No normal human being would ever do such a thing to a beloved family member. But just in case it should happen to me, I’d like it stated for the record, I want to be buried in my thermal underwear.