A UPI Story From the Old Days: “He’s still here. You want to talk to him?”

Posted by Frank T. Csongos on United Press International Friends:

Mac Porterfield, a fellow reporter in the early 1970s at UPI’s Charleston, West Virginia bureau, tells me this story:

Late one night, a stringer called to tell me about a man misdiagnosed as dead by a very young intern. Actually, he had gone into diabetic shock. He was dispatched to a funeral home.

As the mortician prepared to embalm him, the man suddenly bolted up on the slab and asked, “Where am I?”

I called the mortician who confirmed the incident, then he told me, “He’s still here. You want to talk to him?”

“Sure,” I said. “Put him on.”

The first thing he said was, “Buddy, do me a favor. Tell people I ain’t dead.”