So A Guy Walks Into His Own Funeral ...

It's something most grieving relatives only dream about.

On Monday, the family of bricklayer Ademir Jorge Goncalves gathered for his funeral in Rio and received the shock of their lives when the service included an unexpected visit from Goncalves himself: and he was most certainly not dead.

The bizarre mix-up started the day before, when several people mistakenly identified the body of a man killed and badly disfigured in a car crash Sunday night.

"My two uncles and I had doubts about the identification," Goncalves' niece, Rosa Sampaio, told O Globo newspaper, as reported by The Associated Press. "But an aunt and four of his friends identified the body, so what were we to do? We went ahead with the funeral."

Brazilian custom dictates that a funeral for the deceased occur the day after the death. To make the ordeal even stranger, Monday was the holiday of Finados, when Brazilians visit cemeteries to honor the dead.

Since the funeral took place so quickly, Goncalves didn't have ample opportunity to let his family know he was very much alive, and had simply spent the previous night at a truck stop talking with friends over drinks of a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca — blissfully unaware of his own "death."

The funeral had already started Monday morning when Goncalves heard about it, so he had no choice but to rush to the service and burst inside in dramatic fashion. Sampaio, his niece, summarized the unbelievable service quite well.

"His mom looked at the body in the casket and thought something was strange. She looked and looked and couldn't believe it was her son," Sampaio said. "Before long, the walking dead appeared at the funeral. It was a relief."

A relief, or perhaps a miracle.

Photo courtesy of Scissors via Wikimedia Commons.