Kicking "corpse" in body bag shocks funeral home

What if they thought you were dead--so dead they had zipped you up in a body bag and carted you to a funeral home for embalming--but you were still alive?

Growing up, I remember as a boy all those Edgar Allan Poe movies about premature burial (meaning interment of people they thought had died, but they hadn't really). Instead those supposedly dead men and women still had beating hearts, but for some reason coroners or whoever couldn't detect them. So the poor unfortunate souls were put in coffins and laid to rest in graves.

In the Poe movies, you'd get a ghastly inside glimpse of those buried-alive folks scratching and clawing at the inside of their coffins, breathing what little precious air they had left to breathe, screaming and crying--all to no avail.

Horror upon grisly horrors.

And now a 78-year-old man in Lexington, Mississippi came "within a pea" (as my grandmother used to say) of suffering the same unthinkable fate.

After a coroner pronounced Walter Williams dead a few nights ago, his nephew told ABC affiliate WAPT that he stood there and watched the funeral home people zip Williams up in a body bag.

Whereupon a thought-to-be-dead Mr. Williams was taken to a place that specializes in taking care of the dead.

But just before they began embalming him, someone detected a kicking inside the body bag.

Imagine what the embalmers thought!

"He was not dead, long story short," the funeral home manager said.

So why was the man (shown in the picture accompanying this blog post) pronounced dead in the first place? A coroner surmises that his pacemaker may have shut down temporarily (stopping his heart) when he examined Williams and made the call.

So they put Mr. Williams in that body bag, and somewhere between where he "died" and the funeral home, the pacemaker restarted.

"It was a miraculous moment," said the coroner, who is an elected official and not a medical doctor. "Never in my life have I seen anything like it."

Williams' family members rejoiced, of course, and his story made national news.

Nagging, haunting question: How many others (still alive) have been embalmed and buried?

By the way, click here for a narrator's reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Premature Burial."