A Thai family received the shock of their lives this month when the man they had cremated 7 months before casually waked through the front door as if nothing had happened.

Sakorn Sacheewa, a 44-year-old man from Thailand’s Si Ka Ket province, returned home after two years working on a fishing boat, in a different part of the country.

He had never once contacted his family during that time, so he didn’t really expect the warmest of receptions, but being treated as a ghost never crossed his mind either.

Only that’s exactly how his family reacted when he walked through the door on December 17, touching him to make sure he was real. He later found out that to them he had been dead for 7 months.

Back in May, Sakorn’s family had been contacted by police in Nang Loeng, where he worked, and notified that he had died of a digestive disorder.

They were asked to come identify and pick up the dead body. They travelled to the Phra Nakhon district of Bangkok, where they received a death certificate and later went to pick up the body from the Faculty of Medicine Vajira Hospital of Navamindradhiraj University.

The swollen dead body the family was shown was difficult to identify, but one of Sakorn’s cousins, 33-year-old Nakornchai Pimklang noticed that the cadaver’s teeth didn’t match those of Sakorn, who had two front teeth missing.

He mentioned this to an official, who instructed the family to just pick up the body. They did so, taking it home to Si Ka Ket, where they held religious rites for three days, before cremating it.

Meanwhile, the real Sakorn Sacheewa was alive and well, working in Nang Loeng, as he had done for the last two years. A couple of weeks ago, he decided to quit his job and return home, not knowing how shocking his homecoming would be for his family.

After hearing the story of his death, Sakorn said that, at one point, a co-worker from Myanmar stole his identification card and disappeared, but he simply reported it missing and was issued a new one by the local authorities. He never imagined that someone would ever use his stolen card to impersonate him.

Sakorn Sacheewa’s main concern right now is to get resurrected by the Bureau of Registration Administration, which pronounced him officially dead 7 months ago, based on his death certificate.

There’s just one problem let for the police to solve now – to find out who the man cremated in Sakorn’s place was. They hope to learn this by analysing the bone relics left from the cremation.

Interestingly, this isn’t the only “resurrection” we’ve featured on OC this year. Back in January, we wrote about 82-year-old Vilasa, an Indian woman who returned home 40 years after being laid to rest by her family.