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Nova Scotia lawyer insist he isn’t dead, despite rumours to the contrary

Jim O'Neil said he is alive and he's not sure why people believe he's dead.

Like Mark Twain, the report of his death "has been grossly exaggerated."

Amherst, Nova Scotia lawyer Jim O'Neil isn't sure why people think he's dead, but wants to make it clear that he's not.

"I don't know how it happened but last Friday I received a call from the local sheriff, a couple of calls, messages, urgent. I called back and she said, 'You're alive,' and she was happy and I said, 'great, I'm alive,'" O'Neil told CBC News.

"She explained to me that apparently someone had posted on Facebook that I was dead, that I died the night before. It went viral and it went through Tim Horton's and the whole town believed I was [dead]."

O'Neil sent out a mass email to his entire contact list to attempt to correct the rumour, but admitted to CTV News that it's hard to correct lies once they've gone viral.

"This couldn’t have occurred even five years ago to anybody, but with the Internet, things spread so quickly, just in no time at all," he said. "When something goes viral, that’s it, it’s out there."

"It's like the biblical guy who goes on the mountaintop, releases a bag of feathers and then says, 'Go find them.' Well, you can’t, they are just all over the place," he added.

O'Neil told reporters that it's important to have a sense of humour about news of your own death.

"I may appear to be lifeless on occasion," he wrote in an email to CBC News. "Please spread the word that I am not now dead, nor have I ever been dead."