When a 60-year-old grandfather woke up Sunday inside an undertaker’s refrigerator, he began yelling in protest.

Two mortuary attendants ran out of the building in South Africa, convinced he was a ghost.

The asthmatic man, whose name has been withheld, lost consciousness while asleep at his home in a rural village near Libode in the Transkei region, according to health department spokesperson Sizwe Kupelo.

“His family thought he had died,” Kupelo told ABC News. Relatives did not call paramedics, but instead phoned the mortuary, assuming he was dead. The morgue’s owner told the Associated Press that the worker who picked up the supposedly dead man “examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing.”

Funeral home owner Ayanda Maqolo was there when the elderly man woke up and started screaming after having been in the refrigerator with other corpses for at least 21 hours. Two workers heard screaming from the refrigerators, thought it was a ghost and they ran for their lives.”

“He asked, ‘How did I get here?'” the owner recalled the man saying. The owner added that the chilling experience even gave him “nightmares.”

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” he told AP. “But today I’m much better.”

The chilled but unwilling customer was taken to a nearby hospital and treated for dehydration.

“Doctors put him under observation and concluded that he was stable,” said Kupelo. “He did not need further treatment.”