Margorie McCall; Lived Once, Buried Twice

Everyone can recall at least one unexplained mystery that they’ve come across while browsing the internet. Some of them are true, while others are either completely chimerical, or a somewhat exaggerated version of true, often more mellow events.

A lot of the time, they have something to do with the world of the dead, people who are dead, or people who have a certain obsession with making people dead. Haunted graveyards, experiences with ghosts who love slamming cupboards, serial killers who follow no rhyme or reason, you name it.

Sometimes, though, these stories involve average folk and their more or less average chronicles.

One of those rare stories is centred around a woman, largely known as Margorie McCall. Now, we do not know if she was a real person, or simply a folktale from ye olde Europe. What we do know, however, is that her story is extremely intriguing, and rather hilarious as well, like many historic anecdotes are wont to be.

So, without any further ado, let us delve right into the story of a woman who lived once, but was buried twice.

The year is 1695. A family crowds around a woman lying on her bed. She is pale, she is feverish. The woman’s children are weeping, and her husband’s face is shadowed by grief. The doctor looks at them, and his eyes are grim. He tells them that there isn’t much hope.

Those who fall into the clutches of this fever rarely rise again.

The family waits all night, scrubbing at their faces periodically with their sleeves, trembling with trepidation. The doctor visits again in the morning, and goes straight to the chamber where the woman lies unmoving.

She is pronounced dead.

The village decides that its best if her body is disposed of quickly, lest the sickness spread. She is placed into her coffin, and all her worldly possessions are removed, save a valuable ring. The disease had made her fingers swell, therefore her husband was unable to remove it.

Swiftly, and without much fanfare, she is laid to rest.

Now, this period in Irish history was quite well known as being a time when Grave Robbers roamed the lands. They dug up corpses to sell them, and perhaps find the valuable goods that were sometimes buried with them.

Thus, in the dark of the night, we find that some thieves show up at the very cemetery Margorie was buried in. They dig up the very grave the poor woman had been buried in, and find nothing of value except the ring, and of course, her dead body.

They attempt to remove the ring first, but much like Margorie’s husband, they fail. They give up, and one of them suggests the novel idea of cutting her entire finger off.

The blade cutting off Margorie’s finger is what shocks her back to life. She sits up, lets out a blood curdling scream, and consequently scares the living daylights out of the robbers, who either fall dead on the spot, or flee immediately.

Margorie McCall, covered in dirt and her own blood, stands up, dusts herself off, and begins the trek back to her home.

As she knocks on the door, her husband, who sits behind it, remarks to his children,“If your mother wasn’t buried in a grave right now, I could’ve sworn that that was her knock.”

Of course, when he opens the door, the very woman stands in front of him, muddied and bloody. Some say he falls dead on the spot, and fills the grave his wife had vacated only a few hours prior, while others claim that he simply falls in a dead faint, and his hair goes grey overnight.

After this entire fiasco, Margorie actually went on to live quite the happy life, and even had a few more children. Good for her!

All of the evidence, or lack thereof, points to this story being entirely fictitious. Of all the sources we have checked, only Mr. Jim Conway, a local historian, seems to believe that the escapade is, in fact, very true.

Whether or not it is true, I think we can all agree that this is one hell of a tale.