Family members of a dead teenager in Honduras were recorded rushing to smash open the girl’s tomb after they claimed to hear her screaming and clawing at her coffin.
Neysi Perez, 16, was pregnant and newly married when she suddenly collapsed at her Honduran home and began foaming at the mouth, the New York Daily News reports. Her mother thought she was possessed by demons, so she called for an exorcism — but it didn’t work.
Doctors declared Perez dead, and she was buried in her wedding dress. But her family says everything changed when they heard muffled cries from inside her tomb a day later.
“As I put my hand on her grave I could hear noises inside. I heard banging, then I heard her voice. She was screaming for help,” Perez’s husband, Rudy Gonzales, told Primer Impacto, a local news station.
In a video released last week by Primer, the family can be seen using a sledgehammer to break apart Perez’s concrete enclosure. When they exhumed her, she was reportedly motionless and cold to the touch, but they brought her to a doctor in the renewed hopes that she might still be alive.
“Everybody was claiming she was alive so I went through all the necessary procedures,” Dr. Claudia Lopez told Primer.
But it was no use. Doctors said Perez wasn’t coming back.
Perez’s loved ones swear they weren’t hearing things. They say a glass viewing window on the coffin was broken when they pulled Perez out, and her fingertips were bruised, indicating that she might have been trying to escape, the Daily Mirror reports.
Perez’s mother says she’s convinced her daughter was buried alive and that the doctors were too quick to declare her dead in the first place.
“After being declared dead for such a long time, everybody was saying that she had come back to life,” she said. “We were all so happy. I thought I was going to get my daughter back.”
