For a guy who's been dead exactly four months and four days, Jim Johnson looks pretty darn good.

The 63-year-old retired junior high science teacher lives with his wife (or "the grieving widow" as he sometimes calls her) and their cocker spaniel in a picture-pretty city row house. He's fit and smiling as he answers the door.

But, truth to tell, all this death stuff is getting kind of wearing.

Social Security declared Johnson dead back in February.

Actually, he thinks it was a funeral director in Georgia, where he has no connection, who made the initial declaration.

Sound confusing? You bet.

So is the rest of the mess that's rained down on Johnson in the past few months.

Johnson's bank debit card has been canceled twice. His name has been taken off a credit card account. An IRA account was alerted to not send him a monthly payment. A credit card he used while on a recent vacation had problems.

And, since March, his Social Security checks either have been returned or not been deposited by his bank.

Johnson has filled more than six pages with his neat handwriting, documenting each of the calls (30) and all of the visits (four) he's made to the local Social Security office and his bank, trying to get this mix-up sorted out.

He's given the document a title: "A Series of Curious Events." His dining room table, which is covered with neat piles of papers related to the issue, he says, is like "my field office in the Civil War."

"You think you've got problems?" he jokes, half-heartedly. "I'm dead."

After 30 years of teaching junior high kids, he says he has lots of patience and a good sense of humor.

Both are wearing a little thin.

Johnson's first hint that he was dead came during a trip to Stauffers of Kissel Hill back in March.

He and his wife, Nancy, had just returned from vacation, and Johnson went to get some groceries. But his debit card wouldn't work.

He called Fulton Bank, where he has his accounts, and got a new card. Then he got his monthly credit card bill, which was mysteriously minus his name.

"I called my bank," Johnson recalls. "They said, 'You're no longer on the account.'

"I said, 'It sounds like I'm dead.' "

Turns out someone thought he was.

The bank did some investigating and discovered that Social Security had indeed declared he was deceased.

"It was funny until I learned they had taken my money back," he says, noting his checks for March and April were sent to the bank but then returned.

He went to the local Social Security office and filled out an "Erroneous Death Report" form. Johnson learned that a funeral director in Georgia had notified Social Security on Feb. 24 of his death.

But notifying Social Security he was alive did not solve Johnson's problems.

Johnson has ended up calling everyone he does financial business with, to notify them he is not dead, to prevent additional problems.

"You have no day of peace. You wonder what's going on in the financial world, what's been compromised," Johnson says.

Clerks at the local Social Security office have been courteous and helpful, Johnson says, even contacting someone in Ohio to try to rectify the situation. Fulton Bank also has given his problem daily attention, he says, but of course the bank doesn't control what Social Security does.

Johnson finally ended up contacting U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts' Lancaster office in mid-June, to see if it could help him.

A staff member is going to bat for him.

In the meantime, Social Security has offered to send him a paper check, which he said he will take.

But as of early today, he had not received, either in the mail or at his bank, the June check, which is now eight days late.

A call to a regional Social Security office about Johnson's problem was not returned by press time.

However, both Laura Wakeley at Fulton Bank and Skip Brown at Pitts' Washington, D.C., office say Johnson's problem is unusual in their experiences.

Wakeley says it's more common for Social Security to think someone who is dead is actually alive.

Joanne Horn, a staff member at Pitts' Lancaster office, is trying to resolve Johnson's problems with folks at the Social Security administration, Brown says.

"We'll be talking to them the rest of this week," he says.

Johnson says he just wishes someone from Social Security would sit down and explain what happened to him and what steps they are taking to ensure it will be fixed.

He says he has the time and the ability to try to make sure the problem is solved. He wonders what would happen to someone else in his shoes trying to navigate the Social Security system and offices.

"I'm thinking of a poor soul who might be in a wheelchair who doesn't have the ability to get there easily," he says.

He has the faith this will be cleared up — hopefully soon.

"If this is the worst thing that happens to me, I'll be all right," he says.

CONTACT US: cstauffer@LNPnews.com or 481-6024