It might seem like a strange job working with dead people and preparing them for the afterlife. You might argue that it would take a unique personality to be able to deal with that type of work environment. An undertaker might be known as a funeral director or a mortician; whichever way you want to say it, it does sound pretty morbid. With task involving embalming and burial, or cremation of the deceased, you would have to be professional to be suited to this job. But sometimes even being a consummate professional with much experience can’t make you ready for certain situations which may arise, as a German undertaker found out recently.

Imagine you are going about your normal duties as a mortician; you’re in the same room as the coffin after the occupant had just passed away a few hours beforehand when suddenly, the coffin lid slides open and the ninety-two year old lady in it (who is supposed to be deceased of course) puts her head up and says “Where am I?” I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t be surprised if I soiled myself.

All this went down after the ninety-two year old lady in question had been pronounced dead at a retirement home in the German city of Gelsenkirchen. She was then taken to the Munstermann funeral parlour (if you ask me that sounds like an almost comically morbid name to call such a facility).

Reports said that the woman had been found in her bed at the retirement facility and had stopped breathing, at least according to what the carer who found her thought. And so a doctor was called. Upon arrival, the doctor confirmed and then pronounced the woman’s passing before she was taken away to the funeral parlour.

This is where the fun started. The woman woke up and the mortician passed out. When he came to, the funeral director recalled seeing the elderly woman lying in the coffin with both eyes open, groaning. He immediately summonsed an ambulance which raced to the scene however, the woman became ill again and died in hospital.

A police investigation is being launched in to how the woman could possibly have been pronounced dead even though she clearly wasn’t. After the funeral director had called the ambulance, paramedics reported that the elderly lady most definitely did have a pulse at the time they picked her up.

The head of the retirement village where the old lady lived (but didn’t die, as it turns out) has given insight in to the attention that the incident has attracted. “This is terrible and inexplicable,” said Lother Burger, according to The Daily Mail. “We are being devoured by the press, we are being pilloried”.