Google me: Last rites - and wrongs - by world's bungling men in black

By JULIE MIDDLETON

It's not an area in which you want to believe people make mistakes, but undertakers are still human. Evidence: yesterday's story about the Blenheim funeral home whose client's coffin was damaged between funeral and crematorium.

Apparently the coffin slipped off a trolley (cringe) and was dinged. It was switched for another, but the family noticed and, quite rightly, complained. Police are investigating.

That family are not alone in suffering from funeral home errors. On the site taphophilia.com - billed as "a repository of morbid curiosities" - you'll find reports of similar stuff-ups galore, culled from media all over the world.

(Taphophilia means "the love of cemeteries".)

* In Manchester, England, a mortuary mix-up led to a family cremating the wrong body.

Confusion arose when two men named John Walsh died last July at Manchester Royal Infirmary. One of the men, who went by his middle initials N.M., wanted to be buried in a family plot. But the funeral directors picked up the wrong John Walsh and his body was cremated by the other family.

* Family and friends went to a Memphis, Tennessee funeral home for the wake of Paulene Parker. But Mrs Parker, who died of cancer aged 67, wasn't there. Daughter Pauline said: "They had a funeral yesterday and they buried my mom with a whole other family and everything. They just got the bodies mixed up and the lady they were supposed to bury is still here."

Even worse is this story: Grieving relatives of a Brazilian woman were shocked when her opened coffin revealed the body of a man, minutes before it was to be buried in Candeal, northeast Brazil.

The family of a dead motorcyclist are pressing charges against bungling undertakers in Antwerp, Belgium, after the man's cellphone began ringing in his closed coffin as they sat beside it in a chapel of rest.

Some of the relatives were so shocked they ran into the street, the Gazet van Antwerpen reported.

Meanwhile, ABC Action News in Florida claims "dozens" of people are suing a funeral home chain for mishandling loved ones' bodies.

Says lawyer Tom Carey: "We have cases where coffins are being reused. We have cases where multiple cremations are taking place and the ashes are just doled out with a shovel. We have cases where bodies are lost, where headstones are turned over and re-carved."

Rest in peace, indeed.