Remarkable Stories Of Humans Who Hibernated

Mysterious Universe

In the winter of 1981, teenager Jean Hilliard was on her way home at around midnight when the family car she was driving ran off the road near Lengby, Minnesota. Unable to free the vehicle, she made the dangerous decision to leave the car on foot, and attempt to walk to the nearby home of her friend, Wally Nelson.

Hilliard trudged along in the snow, her cowboy boots slipping occasionally and slowing her progress. She began to grow tired, and was nearly to the point of collapsing by the time she could see the shape of Wally’s home off in the distance.

Whether or not Hilliard could make it or not in those final moments may have been far from her mind, but there in the frigid early morning hours, she collapsed into the snow, only 15 feet from Nelson’s front door.

The following morning, Wally was leaving his home at approximately 7 am when he saw Hilliard’s body in the snow. He quickly lifted her up, and finding her body quite literally “stiff as a board”, he loaded her into the back of his car at an angle (“diagonally”, as he told reporters after the incident), and hurried her off to the hospital in the nearby town of Fosston, and probably with little hope that she might be revived.

Once Hilliard was admitted to the hospital, doctors found her flesh so frozen that hypodermic needles couldn’t puncture her skin. However, almost miraculously, her body had maintained a low pulse throughout the evening, and as Hilliard was admitted to the ICU her heart had been beating at a mere 12 beats a minute, with a body temperature of around 88 degrees. Her caretakers wrapped her in an electric heating pad, and hoped to slowly thaw the frozen girl.

Despite the odds, Hilliard not only revived, but suffered few of the lasting affects many would sustain after such an ordeal, namely that of amputation. ”At worst, I might lose a couple of toes,” she told the New York Times. Also quoted had been Dr. George Sather, who marveled over her remarkable ability to survive what seemed impossible: 

”I can’t explain why she’s alive,” Dr. George Sather, who helped treat the young woman, said today. ”She was frozen stiff, literally. It’s a miracle.”

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Reposted with permission