Reports that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II leapt up out of her coffin shouting ‘Surprise serfs!’as mourners filed past as the supposedly dead monarch lay in state in Westminster Hall have been dismissed by officials as ‘yet another crazed conspiracy theory’. Despite government spokesmen pointing out that the whole lying in state was streamed live and no such incident was recorded, several supposed ‘witnesses’ have taken to social media claiming to have seen the ‘Royal resurrection’. “Look, I was there – when the lid flew off of that coffin and she jumped up, there were screams of terror from the mourners and people started running everywhere in panic,” tweeted ‘Bumwhistler’. “The members of the Royal family standing vigil looked like they were going to shit themselves in fright and King Charles could be heard shouting to the guards to ‘Bloody kill the old sod – I’ve been waiting too long for this for her to come back now!’.” But the ‘resurrection’ apparently proved short-lived. “The strain of hiding in that box then jumping up so energetically proved too much for Her Majesty and she suffered a fatal heart attack, falling back into the coffin,” ‘Charlie Nutsack’ posted on Facebook. “Then all these officials ran into the hall and started nailing the coffin lid back down! Obviously, by that time they’d stopped the livestream and subsequently edited it to remove the Queen’s resurrection.”

The fact that such a ludicrous story as the Queen faking her own death to perpetrate a practical joke, then ironically die in the middle of it, could gain so much traction is, according to top psychologist Trevor Henck, a symptom of the mass hysteria the UK has been suffering since her death. “There’s no doubt that the UK, thanks in large part to the media’s saturation coverage of the event, been obsessed with death of Queen Elizabeth, poring over details of her lying in state and the arcane rituals of her State Funeral,” explains the Chair of Psychology at Leamington Spa College of Animal Husbandry. “She has been elevated to the status of some kind of national Grandmother figure – regarded in the misty-eyed, nostalgic, way that people revere their vague childhood memories of their own Grannies. Speaking personally, I can safely say that unless Her Majesty was fond of sinking pints of Guinness at the Hare Skinner’s Arms and engaging in a drunken chorus of ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ while dancing on a table in the saloon bar, a Woodbine hanging from the corner of her mouth, she was nothing like my Grandmother.” This adulation of the late Queen has, argues Henck, been positively Medieval. “The tales of the miraculous supposed resurrection of Her Majesty are hardly surprising in this context,” he muses. “Such tales of corpses returning to life while laid out are rife in Medieval folklore. As are the miraculous properties of dead potentates – maybe this explains the huge queue to view the Queen’s coffin and the number of elderly and infirm in it. Perhaps the phenomena was the result of people dragging along their old, sick relatives in the hope that simply being in the divine presence of the dead Queen could restore their youth or cure their ills?”

What the psychologist really fears is that many in the UK could find themselves in the grip of a ‘Royal Death Cult’. “We saw a surge in suicides after the death of Princess Diana,” he notes. “I fear that it could be even worse in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, with her elevation by the media and Royal lackeys to near saintly-status – people could well decide that they can’t live without her divine presence in the world, so decide to join her!” The pageantry of the Royal funeral, he believes, might also contribute to this ‘Royal Death Cult’, with people so impressed and caught up in the ceremonies and the scale of it trying to set up their own versions before taking their own lives. “Trust me on this – there will undoubtedly be a spate of people taking their own lives dressed as the Queen, making sure that they expire on their kitchen table so that the neighbours can come in and walk round them while their cats stand vigil,” says Henck. “Then they’ll have their body carried on a ceremonial wheelbarrow to the local church, accompanied by a troop of the local boy scouts, before being interred in a magnificent home made tomb in their allotment, as a guard of honour of locals from the pub stand by.”

Despite the magnificence of the Queen’s actual funeral, there will still some who were disappointed by it, claims Henck. “These were the people so caught up in the hysteria and ‘Royal Death Cult’ that they expected something more along the lines of the internment of an Ancient Egyptian Pharoah,” he says. “Before the actual event there were wild stories flying around social media that Her Majesty was to be interred in a giant pyramid built by benefits claimants on the South bank, her golden sarcophagus drawn there by more slaves, well, benefits claimants. According to these stories, her Royal servants were to ritually slaughtered and buried with her, along with her corgis, obviously.” Other stories claimed that the Queen was to be cremated on a huge funeral pyre to be built in Hyde Park, or that her body was to be cast out to sea on the former Royal Yacht ‘Britannia’, which would then be set ablaze and allowed to sink in a Viking funeral.

Henck’s claims of ‘mass hysteria’ and a ‘Royal Death Cult’ have, however, been dismissed by other commentators. “The truth of the matter is that this supposed hysteria and morbid fascination with the Queen’s death rites was confined to a relatively small proportion of the population,” opines the Sunday Bystanders political correspondent Henry Tobler. “Most of us were heartily sick and tired of it after the first couple of days. Damn it, they had to close the whole country down and put the funeral on every TV channel to try and get people to watch it – even then it got lower viewing figures than England’s 2020 European Champions final appearance!” Nonetheless, according to one social media user, Henck was right that viewing the Queen’s coffin could effect medical miracles. “I queued with my wife for six hours to see Her Majesty’s coffin, we were utterly knackered, but as soon as we were in the coffin’s presence I felt a new energy course through me and felt the stirrings of a miracle in my underpants,” claims Tony Bellend on Facebook. “It was my first erection after four years of impotence – I could feel that it was massive. My wife and I barely got out of Westminster Hall before I tore her clothes off and made mad passionate love to her on the pavement. If a monarch dying can give me a bonk on like that, then role on the next one, I say! It was well worth the £1000 fine and four year suspended sentence for public indecency!”