A Chinese woman who was thought to have passed away woke up six days after she had supposedly died.
95-year-old Li Xiufeng was found in bed motionless and not breathing by a neighbour two weeks after tripping and suffering a head injury at her home in Beiliu, Guangxi Province.
When the neighbour could not wake her up, they feared the worst and thought the elderly woman had died.
She was placed in a coffin, which was kept in her house unsealed under Chinese tradition for friends and relatives to pay respects.
But the day before the funeral, neighbours found an empty coffin, and later discovered that the woman had woken up, and was in her kitchen cooking.
“She didn’t get up, so I came up to wake her up,” the Daily Mail quoted the woman’s neighbour Chen Qingwang, 60, as saying.
“No matter how hard I pushed her and called her name, she had no reactions. I felt something was wrong, so I tried her breath, and she has gone, but her body is still not cold,” he said.
Since Xiufeng lived alone, Qingwang and his son made preparations for her funeral, and the 'dead' woman was left in her coffin two days after she was discovered.
The day before she was due to be paid her last respects, Qingwang arrived at her house and found her 'corpse' had disappeared.
“We were so terrified, and immediately asked the neighbours to come for help,” Qingwang said.
Neighbours searched her property before finding the pensioner in her kitchen cooking.
“I slept for a long time. After waking up, I felt so hungry, and wanted to cook something to eat,” she told villagers.
“I pushed the lid for a long time to climb out,” she said.
Medics said Xiufeng had suffered an 'artificial death', when a person has no breath, but their body remains warm.
“Thanks to the local tradition of parking the coffin in the house for several days, she could be saved,” a doctor at the hospital said.