He acknowledges that the story had been “told and retold” over decades and that “improvements” in the telling were “by no means unlikely.” This is a historian’s honest acknowledgment that oral tradition tends to enhance remarkable stories over time, that details grow more vivid and more specific as they are repeated, and that the account he is presenting may not be identical to whatever actually occurred in 1915.

But the popular retellings of the story that followed Bondeson’s book often dropped the hedges.

The qualifications that he included were stripped away as the story traveled through the internet and popular media, and what remained was a dramatically presented but unverified account that read as straightforwardly factual.

This is a familiar pattern in popular history: the scholar who approaches a story with appropriate caution produces a version that is then simplified and stripped of its qualifications as it is retold for broader audiences.

The Essie Dunbar story, which Bondeson presents carefully as a probably-real event whose specific details have almost certainly been embellished, becomes in popular circulation a simple, confident narrative of premature burial and miraculous survival.