According to her son, the “deceased” Bella Montoya banged on the coffin from the inside, prompting relatives to open it. A 76-year-old resident of Ecuador was found alive at her own funeral: according to her son, she began banging on the casket lid and was rushed to the hospital. The woman lived for another week as doctors tried to save her life.
For the first time, doctors confirmed the death of Bella Montoya on June 9th in the town of Babahoyo. She was taken to a funeral home and placed in a coffin. “We even got a death certificate,” her son Gilberto Barbera told local media.
About five hours into the funeral, the woman’s relatives began “hearing sounds coming from the casket,” Barber told the Associated Press. After the casket was opened, family members saw that Montoya was breathing heavily. “We were all scared,” Barbary says. However, local media reported that the woman showed signs of life after her relatives opened the coffin to change her clothes before the funeral.
When it became clear that the woman was alive, relatives called an ambulance and she was taken to the same hospital where she had been pronounced dead.
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Montoya had been hospitalized for a suspected stroke prior to the incident. “She suffered cardiac and respiratory arrest and did not respond to resuscitation efforts, so the attending physician confirmed her death,” Ecuador’s health ministry said. During the course of her re-treatment, her condition stabilized, but not for long.
Montoya spent seven days in intensive care, and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health reported that she died Friday of an ischemic stroke. According to local media reports, the woman was mourned at the same funeral home and then buried in the local cemetery.
Ecuadorian authorities intend to conduct an investigation into all the circumstances of the incident and examine the procedure for issuing death certificates at this hospital, according to the Associated Press.
Bella Montoya is not the only woman to “come back to life” after the official announcement of her death. In February, a funeral home in upstate New York discovered that an 82-year-old woman who had been brought there was still breathing. Her death had been pronounced three hours earlier at the nursing home.