Home for the Holidays, and Your Aunt’s Corpse Has Been Rotting On The Sofa For a Year

This holiday season there have already been at least two cases in the news of people “living with corpses”. And over the past few years there has been many more. Here Digital Dying takes a look at the phenomenon, which may or may not have to do with misplaced holiday spirit.

In Anderlecht, Belgium, neighbors had been complaining for months about a smell coming from a certain apartment. When the landlord finally entered the apartment to serve the lady who lived there an eviction notice he found the woman in the bedroom with the corpse of her husband. He had been dead over a year. The body was black and mummified. Photos on the Huffington Post show a crumbling yet remarkably well-intact supine figure. The corpse looked like a bog body, or the mummies found in ice floes.

Other Great Reads: China vs Egypt for “World’s Most Beautiful Mummy” Distinction

Apparently, the man, 79 year-old “Marcel H” had died of an asthma attack back in November 2012. His wife was so upset that she failed to report the death and continued to sleep in the same bed with her husband’s corpse. Because the body was well mummified, the odor never became too overwhelming.

“A body can mummify in a dry, warm environment,” a pathologist reported to the media. “It takes at least a week to reach such a state. In this case the body had rotten [sic] in the bed [and] his internal organs had melted and liquefied.”

“Even though the smell of human decay is quite specific,” the pathologist added, “many people equate that smell to the smell of garbage and once the body has become rotten the smell does decrease significantly.”

The other case recently in the news was in Wayne County, Michigan, just outside Detroit, where 64 year old Dennis McCauley was found to be living in a trailer for six months with the decomposing corpse of his neighbor, Annie.

It was actually Annie’s trailer, and when the landlord came to evict her for not paying rent he looked inside to find her decomposing body on the sofa bed. Investigators said that according to the medical examiner’s office, she died of natural causes.

McCauley was arraigned late last month on the following charges: failing to report a death, mutilation of a corpse, larceny, uttering and publishing, and identity theft.

Other Great Reads: A guide to proper funeral etiquette

Another Michigan story involved 67 year old Charles Zigler, who died in December 2010. For a year and a half his longtime girlfriend kept his mummified corpse propped up in a living room chair staring at the TV, which was usually tuned to NASCAR. All along, the girlfriend had been cashing in his social security checks.

In Japan, where both men and women often live well over 100, these sorts of scams are common. Back in 2010 police in Tokyo broke into the home of Sogen Kato. According to local records he was 111, the fifth oldest man on earth. But instead of a wizened old man, they found a skeleton in pajamas lying under a blanket.

The body was surrounded by yellowed newspapers, whose date the police said indicated when Kato likely may have died; November, 1978.  “Grandpa was a very scary man,” reported one granddaughter, who had visited his room a few months back and said she saw a skull. Police believe Kato’s family hid his death so they could continue to collect his pension checks, a sum that totaled more than nine million yen, or about 100,000 U.S. dollars.

One of the strangest incidences of “living with corpses” may be the case of Le Van, a Vietnamese man whose wife died in 2003. After she was buried Van started sleeping on top of her grave. When the weather got rainy he dug a tunnel down to the casket so he could stay dry. Then, in late 2004, more than a year after his wife passed away Van dug up the body and took it home with him. To keep the corpse fresh he molded her skin with plaster and clay and put clothes and lipstick on her. A story about Van in 2009 reported that the corpse slept in the bed with him, and that the eldest of his three children would come in every night and give their long dead mother a hug before turning in for the night.

As you gather around with your families this holiday season, you just might want to check and see if everyone is still living.