Welcome to Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and

Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book,

all of these amazing tales are right there on display,

just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. For as long as humans have walked the earth, we've wondered what happens after we die,

but in the mid-1970s a poor merchant from Northern India found out the hard way.

His name was Lall Beharie.

In 1977 he was 22 years old and getting ready to expand his small handloom business.

In order to apply for the bank loan, he traveled to his birth city to collect proof of identity.

But when he met with his local village officer who controlled the documents, he got some shocking news.

Lal Bahari was dead, the bureaucrat told him.

The official registry indicated that he had died just the previous year.

When the surprise wore off, Bahari started asking questions. This wasn't a joke, and it wasn't an innocent clerical error either.

Behari would soon learn that he was the victim of a bizarre and sinister form of fraud.

His own uncle had bribed public officials

to falsely record Bahari's death,

allowing Bahari's cousins to inherit a plot of ancestral land

that should have gone to him.

The young businessman could accept the loss of the tiny plot of land, which didn't even amount

to an acre, but being dead, just even on paper, presented a serious problem.

If Bahari couldn't prove that he was in fact alive,

...