Premature Obituaries

A premature obituary is an obituary of someone who was still alive at the time of publication. Wikipedia has provided us with a very long list.

• Ian Dury: The English musician was pronounced dead on Xfm radio by Bob Geldof in 1998, possibly due to hoax information from a listener disgruntled at the station's change of ownership. The incident caused music magazine NME to call Geldof "the world's worst DJ". Dury died in March 2000.
• Steve Jobs: On August 27, 2008, Bloomberg accidentally published a 17-page obituary. During a subsequent keynote address, Jobs joked about the accident by displaying on screen an imprecise quotation of Mark Twain (who was also the recipient of a premature obituary) reading "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated". Jobs actually died of pancreatic cancer on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.
• Rudyard Kipling: His death had been incorrectly announced in a magazine, to which he wrote, "I've just read that I am dead. Don't forget to delete me from your list of subscribers." Kipling died in 1936.
• Alfred Nobel (arms manufacturer and founder of the Nobel Prize): in 1888, the death of his brother Ludvig caused several newspapers to publish obituaries of Alfred in error. A French obituary stated Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and that Nobel "became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before" through his invention of dynamite. This distressed Nobel, who was concerned that when he truly died he would not be remembered well. This event led him to bequeath the bulk of his estate to form the Nobel Prize in 1895. Nobel died in 1896.
• Grady O'Cummings, civil rights activist and political candidate had his own obituary published in the New York Times in 1969. Four months later he held a news conference at which he stated that he had faked his own death due to threats against him and his family by members of the Black Panther Party. O'Cummings died on June 2, 1996.

See many more here