Grief-Stricken Widow Sleeps With Dead Husband's Decomposing Corpse For A Year
In one of the saddest tales we have heard recently, it was discovered that a grieving widow who couldn't bear to live without her husband has been sleeping next to his corpse for a year. (GRAPHIC CONTENT)
By Sadho Ram — 23 Nov 2013, 01:27 PM — Updated over 10 years ago
A 69-year-old Belgian woman kept her husband’s body at home in their bed and slept next to it for almost a year
The 69-year-old unnamed Belgian woman never contacted the authorities to report the death of her husband Marcel, and instead chose to continue cohabitating with his decomposing body.
cafemom.com
Marcel H, 79 is thought to have died of an Asthma attack in November last year but his beloved wife, 69, was so devastated by his death she failed to report it.
Image via pagenanny.netIt’s thought that the 79-year-old man died of natural causes (possibly an asthma attack) last November.
cafemom.comThe wife, who has not been named, continued to sleep next to her dead husband in their bed until his grisly remains were discovered Tuesday.
Belgian authorities made the bizarre finding on 19 November
They were led to the apartment because the landlord claimed the couple hadn't paid their rent since last year. When they entered the apartment they made the gruesome find.
thefrisky.com
A blurred image of the mummified corpse a grieving Belgian woman slept next to for nearly a year.
Image via nydailynews.comNeighbors never reported a bad smell. The body had mummified.
Philippe Boxho, pathologist at the Forensic Centre of Liege said that the conditions in the apartment would have been horrendous as the corpse mummified
Philippe Boxho, pathologist at the Forensic Center of Liege said: "A body can mummify in a dry, warm environment.
nydailynews.com"It takes at least a week to reach such a state. In this case the body had rotten in the bed his internal organs had melted and liquefied. This liquid would have spread and the bed would have been swarming with insects as the body rotted, this would have been a real shame."
Marcel, 79, is believed to have died of an asthma attack in November last year .
Image via pagenanny.net"Even though the smell of human decay is quite specific, many people equate that smell to the smell of garbage and once the body has become rotten the smell does decrease significantly."
360nobs.com
Although this seems impossible, it has happened before
The body of a man who committed suicide in the cellar of his home in Belgium was found mummified 14 months (or 433 days) after his death. Hansch attributed this to the dry and well-ventilated environment.
examiner.com
Dr. Christian Hansch with the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Antwerp detailed an instance of mummification back in the 1970s.
"In such circumstances, the decomposition process is slowed down, while both drying-up and autolysis of tissues prevail," he wrote in a report detailing the find.
nydailynews.com