The Ones Who Came Back Before They Actually Left
Being declared dead used to be a lot less scientific than it sounds, and for a surprising number of people throughout history, the first declaration turned out to be premature. A dropped coffin, a curious grave robber, or a twitching leg on an embalming table was sometimes all it took to prove the doctors wrong. Some of these people went on to live for decades before death finally caught up with them for real. Others only got a few more minutes. Here's 20 people who were pronounced dead, came back, and then, sooner or later, actually died.
1. Matthew Wall
In 1571, mourners in Braughing, England, were carrying farmer Matthew Wall's coffin to his funeral when a pallbearer slipped on wet leaves and dropped it. The jolt woke Wall from what was likely a coma, and he spent the rest of the procession banging on the lid to be let out. He went on to marry his fiancée and live another 24 years before dying for good in 1595, and the village still sweeps that same lane every October 2 in his memory.
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2. Anne Greene
Anne Greene was hanged in Oxford in 1650 after being wrongly convicted of killing her stillborn child, and her body was handed over to physicians for dissection once the execution appeared complete. When they opened her coffin the next day, she was still breathing, so the doctors abandoned their scalpels and revived her instead with warm cordials and hours of care. She was pardoned, married, had three more children, and lived until 1659.
3. Mary Webster
Neighbors in Hadley, Massachusetts, blamed Mary Webster for a local man's mysterious illness and dragged her out of her house in 1684 to hang her from a tree. They cut her down believing she was dead, rolled her in the snow, and left her there, but she got up and walked home once they'd gone. She earned the nickname "Half-Hanged Mary" and lived roughly another decade before dying of natural causes.
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4. Marjorie Halcrow Erskine
Marjorie Halcrow Erskine of Chirnside, Scotland, was buried in a shallow grave in 1674 so a light-fingered sexton could dig her back up later for her jewelry. When he tried to cut off her ring finger to get at a stubborn ring, she woke up screaming and made her own way home in her burial shroud. She went on to raise two more sons before eventually passing away for real.
5. Marjorie McCall
Marjorie McCall of Lurgan, Ireland, was buried in the early 1700s wearing a valuable ring that grave robbers couldn't resist. When they tried to saw off her finger to get it, the cut drew blood and startled her back to consciousness, sending the robbers fleeing into the night. She lived on for some years afterward, and her gravestone still reads "Lived Once, Buried Twice."
6. John "Half-Hanged" Smith
John Smith was hanged in London and left dangling for about 15 minutes before a sympathetic crowd demanded he be cut down. He was carried to a nearby house, where bleeding and other rough 18th-century remedies brought him back to consciousness, and he later described the sensation as a blaze of light followed by unbearable pins and needles. He earned the nickname "Half-Hanged Smith" for the rest of his natural life.
7. William Duell
William Duell was hanged at Tyburn in 1740 and, once pronounced dead, was sent to Barber-Surgeons' Hall in London to be dissected for medical training. A servant preparing his body for the anatomists noticed he was still breathing, and after a round of bloodletting, Duell was sitting up in a chair within two hours. His sentence was commuted to transportation, and he lived out his life in colonial America, dying of old age in Boston in 1805.
8. Margaret Dickson
Margaret Dickson was hanged in Edinburgh in 1724 and pronounced dead by the attending officials, then loaded into a cart for burial. Partway home, mourners heard knocking from inside her coffin and freed her, and because Scottish law didn't allow hanging the same person twice for the same crime, she was simply let go. Known ever after as "Half-Hangit Maggie," she lived another 40 years.
9. Joseph Samuel
Joseph Samuel, a convict in colonial Australia, was sentenced to hang in 1803 for a robbery that turned deadly. The rope broke on the first attempt, snapped again on the second, and unraveled on the third, at which point the governor took it as a sign from above and commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. Samuel's luck ran out for good in 1806, when he drowned during an escape attempt at sea.
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10. Essie Dunbar
As the story has been told for decades in South Carolina, Essie Dunbar collapsed from an epileptic seizure in 1915 and was pronounced dead by a local doctor, then buried the next day before her out-of-town sister could arrive. When the grieving sister showed up too late and begged to see her one last time, the coffin was dug back up, and Dunbar sat up very much alive. The tale has some shaky sourcing, since it wasn't reported until decades later, but local record-keepers say she lived until 1962.
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11. Wenceslao Moguel
During the Mexican Revolution, soldier Wenceslao Moguel was captured in 1915 and executed by firing squad, taking eight or nine bullets plus a final shot to the head meant to finish the job. He regained consciousness the next day among the bodies of his fellow prisoners and managed to crawl away and find help. Moguel later toured the United States telling his story as "El Fusilado," and he lived until 1976.
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12. Willie Francis
Willie Francis, a 17-year-old convicted of murder in Louisiana, was strapped into the state's electric chair in May 1946, but a faulty setup meant the switch failed to kill him. His lawyer argued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that a second attempt would be unconstitutional, but the justices disagreed by a single vote. Francis was executed successfully the following year.
13. John "Babbacombe" Lee
John Lee was sentenced to hang for murder in England in 1885, and the gallows trapdoor malfunctioned three separate times despite working perfectly in tests beforehand. Authorities eventually gave up and commuted his sentence to life in prison, and Lee was released in 1907 to a career of touring and lecturing about his ordeal. Research suggests he later moved to the United States and died in Milwaukee in 1945.
14. Angel Hays
Nineteen-year-old Angel Hays crashed his motorcycle into a wall in France in 1937 and was declared dead from his injuries, then buried a few days later. An insurance company grew suspicious of a policy taken out on him shortly before the accident and had his body exhumed, at which point examiners found him still warm from a deep coma rather than actually deceased. Hays recovered fully, later invented an escape-proof safety coffin, and lived until 2008, though he told the story a few different ways over the years.
15. Mildred C. Clarke
In 1994, 86-year-old Mildred C. Clarke was found unresponsive on her living room floor in Albany, New York, with no detectable pulse or breath, and a coroner declared her dead on the spot. She spent ninety minutes zipped inside a body bag at the hospital morgue before an attendant noticed the bag was moving. Clarke lived for about another week before she passed away for good.
16. Fagilyu Mukhametzyanova
In 2011, doctors in Kazan, Russia, told Fagilyu Mukhametzyanova's husband that she had died of a heart attack after collapsing with chest pains. Two days later, as mourners filed past her open casket during the funeral, her eyes fluttered open and she began screaming. She was rushed back to the hospital but suffered a second, fatal heart attack about 12 minutes after arriving, apparently brought on by the shock of the ordeal.
17. Velma Thomas
Velma Thomas of West Virginia suffered three heart attacks in 2008 and showed no measurable brain activity for more than 17 hours, prompting her family to say their goodbyes and begin planning her funeral. Ten minutes after she was taken off life support, while staff prepared to remove her organs for donation, she opened her eyes and moved her arm. Thomas set what doctors called a record for the longest documented recovery from clinical death, though later reporting on her case thinned out over the years.
18. Walter Williams
In February 2014, a Mississippi coroner examined 78-year-old Walter Williams, found no pulse, and pronounced him dead, sending his body to a funeral home in a bag. Workers preparing to embalm him a few hours later noticed his legs kicking inside the bag and rushed him to the hospital instead. Williams spent two more weeks with his family before dying of natural causes.
19. Janina Kolkiewicz
A doctor in rural Poland examined 91-year-old Janina Kolkiewicz in 2014, found no pulse, heartbeat, or reflexes, and signed her death certificate on the spot. She was taken to a funeral home's cold storage room, where staff found her moving inside the body bag roughly 11 hours later. Kolkiewicz returned home, ate a bowl of soup, and seemed none the worse for the experience.
20. Jahi McMath
Thirteen-year-old Jahi McMath was declared brain dead in California in December 2013 following complications from a routine tonsil surgery, and a coroner signed her first death certificate that same month. Her family disagreed and moved her to New Jersey, the one state that allows religious objections to override a brain-death diagnosis, where she remained on a ventilator for years. Jahi died a second and final time in June 2018, with a New Jersey doctor listing bleeding from liver failure as the cause.
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