Traffic chaos as corpse falls from hearse
October 30, 2003A hearse overturned on a German motorway yesterday, smashing the coffin and dumping the corpse onto the roadway, along with a bag of coffin nails that brought traffic to a halt, authorities said.
"The driver had fallen asleep ... and yanked the steering wheel around when he woke up," said Jens O'Brien, spokesman for the regional government in Duesseldorf, western Germany.
"There were nails strewn over 50 metres, and the corpse fell out onto the ground."
The A40 motorway was closed for an hour, and traffic banked up for six kilometres, as police collected the nails and removed the corpse.
The hearse had been transporting the body from Wuerzburg, in southern Germany. The driver was slightly hurt.
