After succumbing to a fever of some sort in 1705, Irish woman Margorie McCall was hastily buried to prevent the spread of whatever had done her in. Margorie was buried with a valuable ring, which her husband had been unable to remove due to swelling. This made her an even better target for body snatchers, who could cash in on both the corpse and the ring.
The evening after Margorie was buried, before the soil had even settled, the grave-robbers showed up and started digging. Unable to pry the ring off the finger, they decided to cut the finger off. As soon as blood was drawn, Margorie awoke from her coma, sat straight up and screamed.
The fate of the grave-robbers remains unknown. One story says the men dropped dead on the spot, while another claims they fled and never returned to their chosen profession.
Margorie climbed out of the hole and made her way back to her home.
Her husband John, a doctor, was at home with the children when he heard a knock at the door. He told the children, “If your mother were still alive, I’d swear that was her knock.”
When he opened the door to find his wife standing there, dressed in her burial clothes, blood dripping from her finger but very much alive, he dropped dead to the floor. He was buried in the plot Margorie had vacated.
Margorie went on to re-marry and have several children. When she did finally die, she was returned to Shankill Cemetery in Lurgan, Ireland, where her gravestone still stands. It bears the inscription “Lived Once, Buried Twice.”
what did i just read
Irish women are strong as fuck
“I lived, bitch” irl
The funny thing with this post and a lot of comments is that I don’t know if people realize this happened to a few people than just this woman. Death back then was a mere concept of you’re not breathing? Heart stopped? You’re dead. They didn’t need more than that until later when technology advanced and death needed to be defined better. They especially needed to better determine death when more people came out from graves when someone would try to rob it. They got the idea to use a bell in case the person came back and rang it. It was in 1896 when a cemetery was being moved and a doctor determined 2-5% of the people in that one cemetery were buried alive. I sadly don’t have exact number of the full cemetery since it was being discussed in my class, but it’s wild how often this happened
