Lady Baron
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 posted on 9-19-2004 at 06:05 PM
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Bizarre News
Drifter shows up during own funeral
ROB LAMBERTI, Special to The Free Press 2004-09-18 03:54:05
TORONTO -- They now call him Lazarus. John Dane Squires says he got the nickname after he showed up at his sister's Scarborough home Thursday
morning, six days late for a cup of coffee and a few hours early for his own wake.
The 48-year-old retired welder, who suffers from Hodgkin's Disease, was emotional yesterday talking of how much his family means to him.
"I'm not kidding ya, I'd be dead without them," Squires said.
His sister, Diana Branton, said Squires was to have gone to her home, but he didn't show.
Nothing unusual for the drifter, but when the family read in a newspaper someone with a similar physical description was struck and killed by a GO
Train last Friday, they called police.
A distraught Branton identified the body as her brother's.
A funeral was planned for Thursday, a makeshift memorial put up by the accident scene, an obituary placed in the hometown St. John's Telegram and
plans were being made to bury the ashes of the father of three grown kids in St. Phillip's Anglican Church's cemetery outside the
Newfoundland capital.
But no one told Squires he was supposed to be dead.
He arrived at his sister's home around 11 a.m. Thursday.
About 50 people were at the Giffen-Mack funeral home in east Toronto, but not sister Diana Branton, who couldn't bear to say goodbye.
When she looked out to see who was sitting in her brother's favourite chair on the front porch, she realized she wouldn't be saying goodbye
after all.
"It was pretty friggin' spooky," Squires said yesterday, holding up the prayer card bearing his picture.
"That's me. I was laid out dead . . . I was at the Giffen-Mack."
Family members were watching the casket get loaded onto the hearse outside the funeral home when they got an important phone call -- from the man they
thought was in the coffin.
"You know what my brother wanted to do when he found out everybody was at his funeral? He said, 'I should take a taxi and go up and sign the
guest book,' " Branton said.
She doesn't allow her brother to drink at her home, but she allowed the rule to be broken Thursday: "I said, 'My darling, drink it all,
drink the whole dang bottle.' "
"I just told him I loved him. I just wrapped my arms around him and I kept telling him I loved him," said Squires' daughter Trina.
"It was a gift. It was the biggest gift, the weirdest experience you could ever feel," she said.
"The shock is over. It still feels surreal, it's like some kind of spiritual blessing. How do you try and understand it?"
Neighbour Brendan Matthews was getting ready to go to the funeral when he saw a dead man walking.
" 'Oh, no,' I thought. 'Here he comes,' " Matthews said. "I came over and said, 'Hey, you're supposed to
be dead.' It was a stop-the-presses kind of thing."
Toronto police Det.-Const. Dave Stirling said Branton identified the dead man as her brother after viewing the body at the coroner's office
earlier this week. "There must have been a likeness," Stirling said. "It certainly is an unfortunate circumstance. It's certainly
a shock."
The deceased's body was taken from the funeral home and returned to the coroner's office for further investigation.
Police describe the dead man as being between 45 and 50, with long salt-and-pepper-coloured hair and a beard.
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Astaroth
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posted on 9-19-2004 at 06:50 PM
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whoa....freaky...yet i think it would be kinda cool to show at ur ow
funeral, give everyone the creeps...hehe
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Insomniac_Malik
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Registered: 9-3-2004
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posted on 9-19-2004 at 08:46 PM
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that'd be awesome. I bet the sister looked on the porch and thought she saw a ghost, lol.
[img]http://members.lycos.co.uk/photosigs/Malik2.gif[/img]
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