List of premature obituaries

A premature obituary is an obituary of someone who was still alive at the time of publication. Examples include that of inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel, whose premature obituary condemning him as a "merchant of death" for creating military explosives may have prompted him to create the Nobel Prize; black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose actual death may have been precipitated by reading his own obituary; and actor Abe Vigoda, who was the subject of so many death reports and rumours tha
a website
was created to state whether he was alive or dead.

This article lists the recipients of incorrect death reports (not just formal obituaries) from publications, media organisations, official bodies, and widely used information sources; but not mere rumours of deaths. People who were presumed (though not categorically declared) to be dead, and joke death reports that were widely believed, are also included.

Causes

Premature obituaries may be published for reasons such as the following:
* Accidental publication: release of a pre-written draft obituary, usually on a news web site, as a result of technical or human error. The most egregious examples were in 2003 when CNN incorrectly reported the death of seven major world figures in this way, and in 2020 when Radio France Internationale published as many as 100 premature obituaries.
* Brush with death: when the subject unexpectedly survives a life-threatening illness or injury which made the person appear to be dead or certain to die; or if they were really dying but not yet dead at the time of publication.
* Clerical errors: due to clerical errors, almost 500 living people in the United States are inadvertently considered dead each month by the Social Security Administration.
* Faked death: when the subject fakes their own death in order to evade legal, financial, or marital difficulties and start a new life.
* Fraud victim: many people from different countries have been registered dead by officials who are bribed by relatives who want to steal the victim's land. The ensuing legal disputes often continue for many years, with victims growing elderly and sometimes dying in reality before they are resolved (see Association of Dead People).
* Hoax: when a death is falsely reported, either by an outside party or the subject themselves, generally as a prank.
* Impostor: when an ordinary person who for years has passed themselves off to family and friends as a retired minor celebrity dies, it can prompt an erroneous obituary for the real (but still living) celebrity.
* Misidentified body: when a corpse is misidentified as someone else, often someone who was involved in the same incident or who happened to go missing at the same time.
* Missing in action: soldiers who go missing in war are sometimes incorrectly declared dead if no body is found. In particular, a number of Japanese soldiers thought to have died in World War II in fact survived—typically hiding in a remote jungle for years or even decades, believing that the war had not ended.
* Misunderstandings: such as when a Sky News employee thought that a rehearsal for the future death of the Queen Mother was real.
* Name confusion: where someone with an identical or similar name has died. Usually the subject of the obituary is famous but the deceased person is not.
* Procedural death: when a person who is not dead is purposely declared legally dead by the government. In 1866, the Kingdom of Hawaii established a policy of declaring the kingdom's lepers legally dead, quarantining them in the leper colony Kalaupapa with no visitors for the rest of their lives.

A

* Alan Abel reported his own death in a skiing accident as an elaborate hoax on New Year's Day, , to get his obituary published in ''The New York Times''. Abel died on September 14, 2018.

* Ali Hassan al-Majid was supposed dead in , after British and United States officials reported that he had died in an air strike in Basra; al-Majid had been seen going into the building that was attacked, and corpses of his bodyguards were positively identified, though there was less certainty about the identity of al-Majid's supposed corpse. After obituaries of the Iraqi general, politician and first-cousin of Saddam Hussein were published in many newspapers, reports then circulated that he had escaped by boat, and subsequently been seen joking with staff in a hospital in Baghdad. Al-Majid was captured several months later, and sentenced to death in 2007 for war crimes. He was hanged on January 25, 2010.
* Rex Alston, a retired BBC sports commentator, garnered the unusual distinction of having his marriage announced in ''The Times'' the year after that paper had published his obituary, when his internal obituary file was updated and accidentally published in 1985. Alston was 84 at the time and lived another nine years until his actual death at 93 in 1994.
* Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, terrorist leader of ISIL, was erroneously reported dead, injured or arrested numerous times over a number of years by various governments, in media, and on Wikipedia, before his death in 2019.

B

* Arkady Babchenko, a Russian journalist living in Ukraine was widely reported on May 29, 2018, to have been shot dead. A day later, Babchenko appeared at a press conference with the Security Service of Ukraine, claiming to have staged his death to expose Russian agents.
* Lawrence Joseph Bader, an Akron, Ohio, kitchenware salesman who faked death by drowning. On May 15, 1957, he left his wife Marylou (five months pregnant) their three kids, and five years of unpaid income taxes, sailing out on Lake Erie, and vanished (right after increasing his life insurance policy). His boat was found abandoned, and the Coast Guard announced that no one could have survived. In 1960, he was pronounced dead. He turned up in Omaha, Nebraska as married broadcaster John "Fritz" Johnson. He was found by his 21-year-old niece, and caught when his fingerprints matched those of Lawrence Bader; "Johnson" insisted the rest of his life that he had no recollection of his life as Bader. He died of a tumor in 1966; the cancer, which had caused his eye to be removed in 1964, may have preexisted before then and caused genuine amnesia.
* William Baer, a New York University professor, was declared dead by his ''New York Times'' obituary in May 1942 as a hoax by his students.
* Bill Bailey: The BBC
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