Savasan-huh? It seems a concerned onlooker in Lincolnshire, England, took corpse pose a little too literally.
According to a Facebook post by Seascape Cafe at the Observatory — a cafe that is also a community space, art gallery and exercise studio — police rushed to the business shortly after a yoga class wrapped Wednesday around 9:30 p.m. because a concerned passerby mistook the final resting position the entire class was participating in for a “mass killing.”
The final resting pose, also known as corpse pose or savasana, typically occurs at the end of a yoga class, in which people lie on their backs with their eyes closed in order to sink into a meditative state.
The unidentified person “reported a mass killing in our building. Having seen several people laying on the floor,” the Seascape Cafe Facebook post reads. “Which actually turned out to be the Yoga Class in meditation.”
“We are not part of any mad cult or crazy clubs,” the post continues. “All in all this situation turned out positive and we are of course grateful.”
Lincolnshire police confirmed to Sky News and the BBC that officers received a call about the incident at 8:56 p.m. from a caller “with good intentions.”
Millie Laws, who taught the yoga class, went into more details about the incident with The Washington Post Friday. Mills told the Post that seven students were lying on their backs for about 30 minutes as she banged on a shamanic drum in a dark room lit by just candles during Wednesday’s hour-and-half restorative yoga class. She told the newspaper that she was also wearing a flowy top that could have resembled a robe.
Mills said she noticed a couple outside the studio walking a dog and peering through the window at what must have been a very bewildering scene for them.
“They reported to the police that they’d seen somebody walking around in a room lit up with candles and what looked like dead people lying all over the floor,” Laws told The Post. “The couple thought it was some sort of ritual mass killing.”
Mills added to The Post that the class had already ended by the time a horde of police officers had shown up, and that the yogis experienced a “lovely relaxation session with no interruptions, thankfully.”
The cafe also thanked the police on Facebook for their “prompt resp
