Dennis

I was so fascinated by the idea of a dead girl walking through the front door to horrify and relieve the gathered mourners that I made a short film about it.

At the beginning of Burrough’s The Gods of Mars (the second in the series), John Carter’s nephew writes of his uncle Carter’s death and the rather strange request made in the will: the door to the tomb was designed to be opened only from the inside.

The reason being that in the first book, when John Carter appears on Mars thanks to astral projection, he leaves his catatonic body behind in a cave. At the end of the book, Carter returns to find his body still where he left it in the cave. Presumably, had anyone found it, they would have thought him dead.

Having to returned to civilization, Carter makes sure that, should he go gallivanting on Mars again, there’s no possibility of being unable to free his body from the tomb he’s designed.

Granny Weatherwax of Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld series has the same problem. Whenever Granny Weatherwax “borrows” the mind of another creature to see the world through their eyes, she falls into a catatonic state. In times past, she was mistaken for dead and buried. For Granny Weatherwax, being the powerful witch she is, being buried is an extreme but not insurmountable inconvenience. After those embarrassing experiences, whenever Granny borrows, she now leaves a note on her torso that reads “I ATE’NT DEAD”.

Would that all people not quite dead could do so.

Nope. No recorded instances of that, as far as my research showed.