“I thought that we’d finally got rid of the old bat, but less than a month after we buried her, there was a knock on the front door first thing one morning and there she was! Standing there, large as life,” says an exasperated Ron Filch of his mother-in-law’s apparent return from the grave. “It was a real shock, I can tell you, even more so for my wife, of course, but there the old trout was, large as life, not decayed at all, despite a month in the grave! In fact, I’d swear she looks younger than she did before she kicked the bucket!” Indeed, Mrs Hilda Thring, who died at the age of eighty two, now looks in the prime of life, with baffled doctors who have examined her agreeing that she is now free of all the ailments that had plagued to her old age and contributed to her death. “They just can’t explain it,” Filch, a forty eight year old double glazing salesman from Crawley told his local newspaper, The East Sussex Pig Wrangler’s Gazette. “She obviously isn’t a zombie – she has a heart beat and doesn’t eat human brains. She certainly isn’t mindless either – the old bag spends all her bloody time criticising everything we do and moaning about prices, the weather, immigrants, single mothers and bloody kids. She’s bloody relentless – we get no peace!” But Hilda Thring’s sudden return has presented the Filch family with a multitude of problems. “We’re having to keep her – as she’s been declared dead, she apparently can’t draw her pension any more,” Filch points out. “All the money in her bank account was part of her estate and has been paid out to the beneficiaries of her will and her house was sold years ago to pay for her residential care – so we’re having to put up with her here, living in the spare room! It’s sheer bloody torture!”

Obviously, the question on everyone’s lips is: how and why has Hilda Thring returned from the grave? “At first, she wouldn’t tell us a damn thing – she just sat at the kitchen table drinking tea, complaining about the long walk from her grave and saying that she hadn’t liked it ‘over there’, so had decided to come home,” Filch says. “But after a couple of hours of this, the real story started to emerge – it seems that she was actually kicked out of the hereafter for anti-social behaviour!” But just what would constitute ‘anti social’ behaviour in the next life? “Knowing the old sod like I do, I first thought that maybe she’d had a drunken bar room brawl with St Peter – she had form for that sort of thing when she was alive. I remember her being barred from every pub in town after that incident on her seventieth birthday,” he muses. “Then I thought that maybe she’d racially abused the likes of Nelson Mandela, Gandhi or Martin Luther King – she did vote Reform UK at the last election and voted ‘Leave’ in the EU referendum. But it turned out to be even worse than that.” Ascending to the afterlife and finding her ‘spirit-self’ an image of her perfect ‘best self’ and newly re-energised, Mrs Thring found her earthly physical desires stirring once again. “Apparently, sexual desire isn’t allowed up there, because of the supposed purity of ascended souls – but that didn’t deter her,” sighs Filch. “She started making improper advances to various souls, complaints of sexual harassment were made to the management. It all came to a head when she felt up Jesus’ arse in a bar. That was the final straw and, after a meeting of the residents, she found herself evicted and back in her grave!”

Filch is still puzzled, however, as to why, upon being evicted from the hereafter, his mother-in-law didn’t simply find herself consigned to the ‘other place’ instead. “Ah well, you see, theologically speaking, the fact is that if your soul is initially sent to heaven, then you have already been judged, on the basis of your earthly deeds, that you are good enough to avoid Hell,” opines the Reverend Harold Osk, who was approached by the East Sussex Pig Wrangler’s Gazette to provide clarity on the issue. “So clearly, Hell is out of the question, as your latest misdemeanours occurred after your death and it is those earthly deeds that count when your fate is weighed up. So then, where else can you be expelled to?  Unless there is some limbo specially reserved for those kicked out of heaven where you suffer punishment, but nowhere near as severe as the ones handed out in Hell, the obvious answer is that you are just sent back to earth, back to your old body.”

Osk’s explanation, whilst logical in theological terms, raises questions of its own. Once resurrected, would you still be mortal, or just condemned to carry on forever in your decaying and increasingly decrepit body?  If you died at age 101, say, that would be a pretty grim prospect.  Even more so if you’d had something like Alzheimer’s or a terminal illness that left you in constant pain.  What if you had been horribly mangled in an accident to the extent that you had to have a closed casket funeral?  “These are all valid concerns,” the cleric concedes. “I feel, though, that the example of Mrs Thring provides us with some answers. It seems, after all, that she has returned somewhat rejuvenated and disease free. I think it fair to extrapolate from this that, regardless of the way in which you died and the state of your corpse, The Almighty would be able to reconstitute you – much as He would on the Day of Judgement itself. Obviously, being expelled from heaven is a somewhat different set of circumstances and I’d speculate that when this happens, the returnee is recreated in a state that will allow them sufficient time and energy to redeem themselves once more on earth, in order to gain a second chance at heaven.”

For his part, Ron Filch isn’t reassured by the Reverend Osk’s words. “His speculations are all very well, but how does he know that, with her soul barred from one place and ineligible for the other, the old bat simply won’t live forever?” he asks. “We’d be expected to support her for generations to come!” Filch has also begun to doubt that his mother-in-law was ever really dead, let alone evicted from the hereafter. “Maybe it was all some kind of medical error – you hear about people being wrongly pronounced dead all the time, then waking up in the morgue,” he says. “Even is she was dead, I just can’t imagine how she’d ever get into the hereafter, she was such a horrible and cantankerous old sod in life – never a good word to say about anyone, always rude, especially to foreigners and she never went to church.” With the apparently resurrected Hilda Thring’s presence causing increasing friction in the Filch household, Ron Filch has been led to rue honouring his mother-in-law’s funeral wishes. “She insisted on a horse-drawn hearse, a church service and bloody burial – it cost a fortune. Money now wasted!” he laments. “I can’t help but feel that we should just have had the old witch cremated. After all, the Catholics might be right and there’s no coming back from that – even if you get sent back from heaven!”