Montana Zombie Alert: TV Station Blames Report Of 'Dead Bodies Rising From Graves' On Hackers

Programmers at a Montana television are retracting their report that zombies are victimizing local residents, blaming the news bulletin on computer hackers.

The website for KRTV in Great Falls, which broadcasts to the north central region of Montana, admitted that they warned the audience that “dead bodies are rising from their graves” in different counties across the state. It also claimed the living dead were “attacking the living” and counseled viewers not to “approach or apprehend these bodies as they are extremely dangerous.”

The network said the message was “bogus” and engineers were investigating how hackers penetrated the news station’s computers. At least four people took the joke (if that’s what it was) seriously and called police, urging them to investigate, according to the Associated Press.

It’s possible the prank came in response to the return of “The Walking Dead,” which premiered the second half of its second season on Sunday night. The show is popular enough to have drawn 12.3 million viewers, a record for the AMC program, even while being broadcast in competition with the Grammys. Another 4 million people tuned in to watch the show’s encore episode, which broadcast later in the night.

The good news for any Montana residents uneasy over the prospect of being killed and eaten by a ravenous horde is that if a zombie apocalypse really happened Montana would be relatively safe. The rural state’s population ranked at No. 44 among the 50 states, making it an unlikely place for flesh-hungry members of the undead to survive.