Back in 2015, there was a report about a man in Ghana named "Kwadjo Peter" (I have also seen his name rendered as "Kojo Peter", undoubtedly the differences come from alternate romanizations of the language) who supposedly came back to life after being dead for a month. According to his account, he died, spent some time as a spirit, including a trip to hell, before resurrecting. An example report of it can be found here. Elements of the story were corroborated by family members, who said he was indeed Kwadjo Peter. He even ended up getting on an episode of a religious TV talk show.
If all this is true, it's very notable, especially because he gave an account of what he experienced while dead, such as visiting hell. As is noted in that article:
"In the next world, Kwadjo claims he started flying and got infuriated by the fact that he could still see his family and friends but none responded to him whenever he called out their names. He claims he even tried holding his one-year-old son but it was to no avail. He then met a bearded man who directed him to follow him on a narrow path. He obliged and was shown the Biblical hell fire with Michael Jackson and Pope John Paul trapped in it."
If this was made up, then we can completely ignore it as well as any information he claimed to have obtained through the experience. But if it was real then we would want to sit up and pay attention to his claims.
It was years after the fact that I first happened to hear about it, and I tried to see if I could find information about it. Did they dig up the body to check to see if it had disappeared, which would verify the story? Did they perform a DNA test to see if this was the same guy? I just couldn't find any information about it beyond the initial reports. The most I found was this article which briefly mentioned it ("To cut a long story short it was a publicity stunt – no iota of truth"), but unfortunately without going into detail on it.
However, I did eventually find it, almost by accident. I missed it because the article in question giving the aftermath rendered his name as Kwadwo Peter, and I was looking for Kojo or Kwadjo because that is how the initial articles were writing his name. It seems like the spelling can vary. But the point is, it was found. But what was the final verdict? It was a fake.
The full scoop can be found here and I am incredibly grateful for that website as it gave me the critical information. His actual name was Emmanuel Osanyongmor, a guy who looked incredibly like the original Kwadjo Peter. After the original had died, various people told Emmanuel how much he looked like him. Inspired by this, he did research on Kwadjo Peter in order to pass on him and deceive Kwadjo Peter's family so they could be used as support for his claim. The hope was that the news about being a resurrected man would gain him fame and fortune. It initially worked, but people forgot about the story pretty quickly, dashing such hopes. Later on he felt so guilty about it he tried to kill himself, leaving himself in critical condition. All of that is mentioned in the above link, but several days after that post he ended up dying for real as a result of the suicide attempt; information about that can be seen here.
So that's the truth of it all. His claims about his resurrection, including visiting the afterlife, were made up. He was able to get away with it due to having a very strong resemblance to the actual person and conducting some independent research on the deceased so he could pretend to have knowledge of their life. This could have been of course also proven wrong by digging up the body, but perhaps because the story went away so quickly there wasn't enough incentive to do so.
Given the difficulty I had in finding this out, I thought it would be good to make a blog post on the subject. That way, should anyone try searching out "Kwadjo Peter" (rather than "Kwadwo Peter") they may stumble upon this article and get information about it.
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