In the US, families are preparing for Thanksgiving weekend — yams, turkey, the whole 9 yards. But on the other side of the world, Thailand might just be celebrating Easter weekend after a woman suddenly started moving in her coffin just before she was cremated.
A woman in Bangkok, 65, had been bedridden for over two years. And as is usually the case when you’re in such a condition, patients tend to lose track of their illness, and sadly you start preparing for the worst. For this woman, she agreed with her brother to ensure that if the time did come sooner rather than later, then they’d donate her organs to patients who need them.
The unidentified woman had reportedly stopped breathing two days ago. Over the last couple of months, her health deteriorated to the point where the family started making arrangements. But as we have already seen from survival stories sometimes — people can even survive an accident at the bottom of a ravine for five days without any assistance. And reportedly, the situation was similar with this woman because after they had pronounced her dead and placed her in a coffin to be transported to Phitsanulok province to be cremated, the transporters started hearing an ominous knock from her coffin.
The news of the woman’s survival first gained international attention when it was posted on the official Facebook page of a Buddhist temple called Wat Rat Prakhong Tham located near Bangkok. In the video, the woman was lying in a white coffin at the back of a pickup truck — arms and head moving, much to the shock of everyone around.
The AP was able to reach the Buddhist temple and have a word with a member of the staff. Pairat Soodthoop, the financial affairs manager of the temple, shared that the person who first came with the news of the apparent resurrection was her brother. Soodthoop said, “I was a bit surprised, so I asked them to open the coffin, and everyone was startled. I saw her opening her eyes slightly and knocking on the side of the coffin. She must have been knocking for quite some time.”
Stories about the human will to survive are as many as they are uniquely surprising. We never truly understand how much we value the gift of life personally until you hear a story about someone who literally knocked their way out of their own coffin or even lay in a pool of their own blood for an entire night after a crazy accident just waiting on anyone to bring them help. Stories like that just go to remind us that while we are here, we should make the most of it.
What is so eerie about this story, however, is the woman’s life was saved by fate and apparently great medical practices as much as it was saved by her sheer will. The brother had first approached the hospital with the body of his sister, who he assumed was dead, for organ donation, but they refused because there was no death certificate. He only went to the temple because it offered free cremation. The distance proved to be so far out that it gave her time to recover and knock her way out of her premature coffin.
