Ecuador: ‘Dead’ woman bangs on her own coffin during wake, mourners discover she is still alive

A 76-year-old woman who had been certified dead at an Ecuadorian hospital was discovered alive and knocking on her coffin during her own wake in the city of Babahoyo.

Bella Montoya, was certified dead by a hospital doctor after suffering a suspected stroke.

She was placed in a coffin and taken to a funeral home, where relatives gathered for a vigil before her burial.

The woman gasped for air when they opened the coffin after nearly five hours to change her clothes before the funeral.

“I lifted up the coffin, and her heart was pounding, and her left hand was hitting the coffin… We called 911 to bring her here to the hospital,” her son Gilberto Barbera said in a video posted on social media.

“My mum started to move her left hand, to open her eyes, her mouth; she struggled to breathe,” Gilbert Balberán continued as he recalled the moment he realised that his mom was still breathing.

A video filmed by a mourner shows her trying to breathe in an open casket, while another complains that the ambulance they phoned has yet to arrive.

Firefighters arrived minutes later and hoisted Bella Montoya onto a stretcher and transport her back to the same hospital, where she had been pronounced dead.

Her son recounted to local Ecuadorean media that his mother was in intensive care but was responding to treatment

“My mother is on oxygen, her heart is stable. The doctor pinched her hand and she reacted, they tell me that’s good because it means she is reacting little by little,” he is quoted to have said, by the newspaper El Universo. 

Mr Balberán stated that he took his mother to the hospital at about 09:00 and that “at noon, a doctor told me [she] died.”

He claimed that a death certificate had been issued, stating that she had died of cardiopulmonary arrest following a stroke.

Bella Montoya is not the only person who has “come alive” after being proclaimed dead.

An 82-year-old woman was discovered breathing while resting in a funeral parlour in New York State in February. She had been declared deceased three hours before in a nursing facility.

The Ecuadorian Ministry of Health has formed a commission to investigate the occurrence. The ministry went on to claim that a national technical committee was constituted in collaboration with the Health Services Quality Assurance Agency “to initiate a medical audit to establish responsibilities for the alleged confirmation of death.”