Mourners were pressed around a wooden casket in the yard of a family home in rural Guatemala when the girl laid out inside it started to move.
Yuleidy Ixcotoyac, 15, sat up in her coffin during her own wake on Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026, in El Jocote, a village in the municipality of Sacapulas, in the department of Quiché. Roughly eight hours earlier, her father had decided she was dead on the road. Footage of the moment has since spread on social media far beyond the Guatemalan highlands.
The ordeal began in the early hours of Oct. 10, when the teenager felt a severe pain in her chest and lost consciousness. Her father, Abraham Ixcotoyac, an evangelical pastor, loaded her into his vehicle and set out for a medical center. Nearing the municipality of San Pedro Jocopilas, he pulled over and checked her.
“She was no longer breathing, and I couldn’t feel her pulse on her wrists,” the father said.
A Coffin Bought Without a Death Certificate
Convinced his daughter had died on the road, Ixcotoyac never completed the trip. The teenager was never examined by a doctor, never entered a hospital or health center, and no death certificate was issued. Instead, her father drove to a funeral home, bought a coffin and carried her body back to the house, where relatives, neighbors and members of his congregation had already gathered to mourn. Burying a loved one soon after death is a common custom in Guatemala, which is why the casket was purchased immediately.
The wake was set for 2:30 p.m. the same day.
The Moment the Window Was Opened
The girl’s mother, Lesvia Ríos, said she had refused to accept that her daughter was gone. As she wept over the casket, the family opened the small viewing window set into the lid — and saw movement inside. The teenager, dressed in a pink T-shirt, sat up in the box and began to speak.
Stunned relatives lifted her out and handed her a cup of water. Grief collapsed into something else entirely; loved ones shouted “hallelujah” as the video rolled. Ixcotoyac told the local channel TV Sac that he was standing in the patio when shouting broke out. By the time he reached the coffin, his daughter was being pulled from it.
Accounts place the awakening between seven and eight hours after the family considered her dead.
Conflicting Accounts and Official Silence
Some reports asserted that the girl had been declared dead at a hospital; her father has been emphatic that she never entered one. There is no official confirmation that her death was ever certified through a documented clinical evaluation, which means the episode cannot accurately be described as a medically verified resurrection. Deep loss of consciousness and other conditions can be mistaken for death and require professional assessment, and without verifiable clinical data the cause of what happened to Yuleidy cannot be established.
Guatemalan health authorities have not commented on the incident. In the region, the case has reopened a conversation about the importance of professional verification in any medical emergency.
Yuleidy, meanwhile, is conscious and recovering at home. Describing the minutes before she blacked out, she said: “My heart started hurting really badly, it felt heavy and then I blacked out, like I fainted,” she said. She told local media that she was given oxygen afterward and that her hands were still trembling.
Both parents have publicly attributed their daughter’s awakening to a miracle rather than to a mistake, and the teenager said she thanks God for being alive. Online, the reaction has been far more divided: some viewers called the footage miraculous, others said the girl had been left traumatized by what happened to her, and still others dismissed the entire account as a religious fabrication.