A video of a funeral in Indonesia has been freaking out viewers this week. As you can see above, as a body is laid to rest in the ground, though the glass window of the coffin it looks like the corpse is waving at the assembled mourners.
Apparently, nobody noticed it at the time, and it was only picked up when the clip was shared on social media, which became rife with speculation regarding the circumstances. Some declared it was merely the departed saying goodbye, while others were concerned that someone had accidentally been buried alive.
Of course, horror movie brains immediately leap to the ravenous undead, and making the moment even more eerie is the officiating priest reciting the famous passage from the Book of John: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, he will live even though he is dead.” A dead body suddenly reanimating right after such words are spoken is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to happen in a trashy zombie movie.
A rational explanation, of course, is that it’s possible for corpses to not remain stationary after death, as the process of rigor mortis and the release of gases can cause them to move, which incidentally is partly where the myths of vampires originate from along with the need to stake them down to ensure they remain dead. Another possibility is that the window simply caught the reflection of one of the mourners around the grave site, with the angle of filming making it look as though the movement was coming from inside the coffin.
It’s possible that it’s all a hoax, too, as it seems more than a little coincidental that the person filming chose to zoom in on the coffin’s window right as the hand was seen moving. Although with the current world circumstances, any kind of practical joke involving dead people seems more than a little insensitive.
In any case, this isn’t the only time Indonesia has recently been in the news in a story with a supernatural bent, with an area of the country making the decision earlier this month to lock people inside haunted houses as a punishment for breaking pandemic quarantine. In other news, I’m the king of segues.
Whatever the explanation for the video, it’s certainly unnerving to watch, and however skeptical you consider yourself to be, it might, if only for a moment, make you reconsider.
