Jean Hilliard – Frozen for 6 hours

The Claim

A woman was completely frozen and recovered without so much as frostbite

The story of Jean Hilliard is one that still can’t be explained by science, and the level of her recovery is technically impossible. Her story starts on the 20th of December 1980, when she was driving to her friend’s house along ice-covered roads.

As she was driving along, she ran into a patch of ice and slid off the road into a ditch, unable to get her car back out. She didn’t have a phone to call for help, since it was 1980, so she decided to try to walk the 2 miles to her friend’s house.

The temperature was well below freezing, and the distance that she believed was about 2 miles turned out to be much farther. She eventually made it to her friend’s house, but was too exhausted from walking so far in the cold and collapsed in the driveway without even enough energy to call for help.

After collapsing at around 1 am, she lay there face down on the drive for 6 hours until her friend came out of his house in the morning to find her frozen stiff. He rolled her over to see if she was alive and found that she’d completely frozen solid, being so stiff that he couldn’t bend any of her limbs to get her into one of his car seats.

He loaded he diagonally in his car and drove her to Fosston Municipal Hospital, where doctors initially thought she was dead. They managed to detect a heartbeat and, even though it was going 4 times slower than normal, showed she was still alive, though they had no idea how to help her in such a bad condition.

The skin was frozen solid, and they couldn’t even get a needle to pierce it. There was nowhere to put a thermometer, as her lips and jaw were also frozen solid.

When her mother was informed Jean was in the hospital, she rushed down, only to be told by the doctors that it didn’t look good, and there was a very high chance she may have to have some limbs amputated.

She arrived at the hospital at about 8 am, with everyone expecting the worst. Doctors thought that, at the very least, the freezing would have caused major brain damage, and it looked like both legs would have to be removed, but suddenly, at about 1 pm the same day, she woke up.

She suddenly opened her eyes and asked for a glass of water, stunning the attending doctor and especially her mother. By the end of the day, she was able to move her arms again, and 2 days later, she had movement again in both her legs.

The hospital kept her in the intensive care unit for the next 6 days to monitor her, expecting that there may still be an amputation required, but no damage to the limbs or even the skin had occurred.

49 days later, she left the hospital, walking out on her own and after not losing so much as a single fingernail.

There are several reasons this story should be impossible, with the main one being that she didn’t lose anything. The reason people lose limbs in extreme cold is that when organic tissue freezes, the cells within it expand and burst, which is why people lose fingers to frostbite. When the cells expand and burst, this means that no matter how much medicine or treatment there is, you can’t bring a dead cell back to life.

Secondly, she was frozen with her eyes open and didn’t go blind. The eyes are filled with fluid, and such a large concentration of it freezing would certainly expand enough to rupture the vessels, but no such injury occurred.

Lastly, she didn’t receive any brain damage, with brain cells being one of the easiest to freeze and by far the most delicate. Even a tiny bit of frost within the skull would be enough to cause damage, but again, no such injury occurred.