A woman was buried alive in northern Greece after doctors treating her for cancer mistakenly pronounced her dead.
A cemetery in Italy (Reuters) Reuters

A 75-year-old Italian widow died near Naples after she fell 4 metres (12ft) into her husband's grave.

Antonietta Testa from Pompeii was cleaning the grave when a marble plate broke and she fell in.

A fire crew rescued the woman and she was transferred to hospital with fractured hips and femur. The shock and bleeding caused her to have a heart attack and she died.

Authorities have launched an investigation.

In a bizarre twist, unsympathetic Pompeians turned the tragedy into farce by choosing numbers for the Italian lotto based on a mystical numerological interpretation of the death.

According to the "Smorfia" ("The Grimace"), a chart that interprets the cabalistic meaning of numbers, there is a close correspondence between acts, events, gestures and animals - which often occur in dreams - to numbers.

In this case, 6 means "facing the ground", 72 is "wonder", 73 "hospital", 89 "cemetery" and 90 is "fear".