Man buried before date of death

Appleton's Highland Memorial Park cemetery, a place of quiet repose, has been drawing a few chuckles lately. "I thought it was Charlie's last joke. I thought that this was it, ultimately somehow he had a hand in it," Robin Urban said of his brother-in-law Charles Hendricks. Hendricks - Charlie to friends and family - died nearly a year ago, Dec. 16, 2009.

He was 57 and had a reputation for being a prankster, the life of the party. "Humorous, silly, good-hearted, joking, does the man ever become serious?" Helen Urban said of her brother. According to family, he may have pulled off one more gag from beyond the grave. Hendricks' headstone arrived around Halloween, just time for his Nov. 4 birthday.



"I was looking at it and reminiscing and all the memories and stuff," brother John Hendricks explained. But he says when he got in the car something seemed wrong. "I drove a few yards and started thinking about it, did that date say 2010? According to the marker, Charlie's not dead yet," Urban said emphatically. "I don't know what happened." Urban says said at first she wanted to fix the stone and fix it fast.

She found it hard to believe a mistake could get this far. "There's the person that took the order, there's the person that processed the order, there's the person that cast it," her husband said. Yet no one caught the one-year-off date, leaving the family wondering: Is this what Charlie wanted? "I just started chuckling and laughing," John Hendricks said. "That's my brother for me, one last pinch basically." The family is not in a rush to fix the stone. They'll keep it as is during the winter and address the mistake in the spring.

With news video.