Metro

Cemetery workers plunge into open grave

They wound up 6 feet under — and lived to tell about it.

Three workers at a Queens cemetery plunged yesterday into a deep grave — on top of a freshly laid casket — leaving one of them injured.

Raimundo Rodriguez, 49, had been working in a crew of four on the Harper family plot at the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village when the freak accident occurred, workers said.

The men had been removing the apparatus used to lower caskets into the ground at around 12:50 p.m. when suddenly, all of them “vanished.”

Rodriguez, a groundskeeper who has been with the cemetery for a quarter-century, plunged 6 feet down into the open grave, smashing his leg on the casket.

The two other workers landed on top of him.

“He was cleaning the grave site and wound up in the hole, and we are still trying to figure out how,” said Drew Nelson, a spokesman for the cemetery.

“I told him he was only the second person to rise from the grave,” Nelson quipped, adding that Rodriguez was in good spirits despite the scare.

“It could have been worse. I could have been dead,’’ said Rodriguez, who lives with his wife and three children in The Bronx.

He was treated at Elmhurst Hospital for a broken ankle.