List of Premature Obituaries - Causes

Causes

Each premature obituary listed below has one of the following causes (where the cause is known):

  • Accidental publication: accidental release of a pre-written obituary, usually on a news web site, as a result of technical or human error. The most egregious example was when, in 2003, CNN accidentally released draft obituaries for seven major world figures.
  • Brush with death: when the subject unexpectedly survives a serious illness or accident which made them appear to be dead or certain to die.
  • Fraud victim: many people from Uttar Pradesh, India have been registered dead by officials who are bribed by relatives who want to steal the victim's land. The ensuing legal disputes often continue for many years, with victims growing elderly and sometimes dying in reality before they are resolved. (See Association of Dead People.)
  • Hoax: when a death is falsely reported, as a prank.
  • Impostor: when an ordinary person who for years has passed himself off to family and friends as a retired minor celebrity dies, it can prompt an erroneous obituary for the real (but still-living) celebrity.
  • Misidentified body: when a corpse is misidentified as someone else, often someone who was involved in the same incident or who happened to go missing at the same time.
  • Missing in action: soldiers who go missing in war are sometimes incorrectly declared dead if no body is found. In particular, a number of Japanese soldiers thought to have died in World War II in fact survived – typically hiding in remote jungle for years or even decades, believing that the war had not ended.
  • Misunderstandings: such as when a Sky News employee thought that an internal rehearsal for the future death of the Queen Mother was real.
  • Name confusion: where someone with an identical or similar name has died. Usually the subject of the obituary is famous; the deceased person is not.
  • Pseudocide: when the subject fakes his own death in order to evade legal, financial, or marital difficulties and start a new life.
Contents: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z The CNN.com incident See also References External links

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