Barangay Paloma: October 2018

Credit to: Amazing Stories Around

Cemetery workers raced to a newly-dug grave after they heard banging and muffled shouting an hour after a 45-year-old woman was buried.

As they grabbed tools and anything they could find, they rushed to dig the grave up again after the woman woke up to find herself buried alive in a coffin.

But tragically, the un-named woman died before her would-be rescuers could reach her inside the plot at a cemetery near Greece’s Thessaloniki.

Now police are probing why the woman was pronounced dead by doctors treating her for cancer, only to be found alive. Her grieving family arranged her funeral at the graveyard in Peraia, a small town 16 miles south of Thessaloniki, Greece’s main city in the north. Shortly after the last relatives left the cemetery on Thursday, residents and a group of children playing outside reportedly heard a female voice shouting for help from inside the grave.

They called the police, and began digging up the grave to save her but she had suffocated to death inside the coffin, it was reported. However, a doctor who was at the scene and examined the woman’s body, said she had been dead for hours and could not have been revived.

Dr Chrissi Matsikoudi told Greek TV channel MEGA: “I just don’t believe it. We did several tests including one for heart failure on the body. It would have been impossible for someone in a state of rigor mortis to have been shouting and hitting the coffin like that.”

A coroner is expected to examine the body. Meanwhile, relatives of the dead woman say they are considering filing a complaint against the doctors responsible for her treatment at the cancer clinic.

Rosalia Lombardo (December 13, 1918 in Palermo, Italy – December 6, 1920), was an Italian child who died of pneumonia. Rosalia's father, Official Mario Lombardo, was sorely grieved upon her death, so he approached Alfredo Salafia, a noted embalmer, to preserve her.
Her body was one of the last corpses to be admitted to the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo in Sicily.

Embalming
Thanks to Salafia's embalming techniques, the body was well preserved.
X-rays of the body show that all the organs are remarkably intact.
Rosalia Lombardo's body is kept in a small chapel at the end of the catacomb's tour and is encased in a glass covered coffin, placed on a wooden pedestal.
A 2009 National Geographic photograph of Rosalia Lombardo shows the mummy is beginning to show signs of decomposition, most notably discoloration.
To address these issues the mummy was moved to a drier spot in the catacombs, and her original coffin was placed in a hermetically sealed glass enclosure with nitrogen gas to prevent decay.
The mummy is one of the best preserved bodies in the catacombs.

Technique
Recently, the mummification techniques used by Salafia were discovered in a handwritten memoir of Salafia's.
Salafia replaced the girl's blood with a liquid made of formalin to kill bacteria, alcohol to dry the body, glycerin to keep her from overdrying, salicylic acid to kill fungi, and zinc salts to give her body rigidity.
Accordingly, the formula's composition is "one part glycerin, one part formalin saturated with both zinc sulfate and chloride, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid."