In 1980, a Minnesota woman named Jean Hilliard was literally frozen stiff for several hours in subzero temperatures. No, it isn’t a hoax. Hilliard collapsed on a 22-below-zero night as she was trying to seek shelter after a car accident.
Six hours later, she was found “frozen solid” and was brought to a hospital.
According to the Montreal Gazette in one of the first reports published at the time:
She breathed shallowly two or three times a minute and her heart beat faintly eight times a minute.
Dr. George Sather said that “I thought she was dead, but then we picked up an extremely faint whimper. We knew there was a person existing then.
Jean’s chances of surviving were quite slim, and her body temperature didn’t even register on a thermometer, meaning her body temperature was less than 80 degrees F.
Snopes, the hoax-debunking website, who rated the story of Hilliard as “true,” featured this image, which has now been associated with Hilliard’s account:
“There was no evidence of a pulse or blood pressure,” Sather’s brother, Dr. Edgar Sather, told the Gazette at the time.
“Her body was too frozen to find a vein to get a pulse.”
