Days after her funeral attendees were astonished to find her alive in her coffin, an Ecuadorian woman has passed away.
A physician in Babahoyo, where Bella Montoya, 76, had been taken for treatment, had initially pronounced her dead last Thursday.
She was brought back to the same hospital for treatment when visitors at her wake heard her knocking on the coffin.
The health ministry of Ecuador stated on Friday that she had passed away following an ischemic stroke after spending the previous seven days in intensive care.
She was under "permanent surveillance" at the hospital, according to the ministry's statement.
Gilbert Barbera, her son, told a local reporter, "This time my mother really did die." Everything in my life has changed.
Local media say that after Ms. Montoya's death on June 16, her body was returned to the same funeral house before being interred in a public cemetery.
The media in her area said that Ms. Montaya suffered from catalepsy, a disorder characterized by seizures, loss of consciousness, and the rigidity of the body.
The Ecuadorian government's health ministry has formed an expert group to investigate her condition.
Female body discovered alive in coffin
After Ms. Montoya's death was confirmed on June 9th, her body was transported to a funeral home in Babahoyo, to the southwest of the capital city of Quito.
The woman's relatives uncovered the coffin almost five hours later to change her clothes for the funeral, and she gasped for oxygen.
A few minutes later, she was taken back to the same hospital on a stretcher.
It's not just Bella Montoya who has been proclaimed dead only to "come alive" later.
An 82-year-old woman was discovered alive and breathing in a casket in a New York funeral home in February. Three hours prior, she had been pronounced dead at the nursing home where she was staying.