Disturbing tales of mummified bodies left behind in forclosed homes.
Here's a phenomena that is ever so "of the moment," and which seems to be happening more and more often. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a homeowner stops paying their mortgage. The bank forecloses. Someone comes along and buys the foreclosed home, often at auction without having seen the property in person first. Apparently no one (either the bank, the inspector, or the new homeowner) inspected it very closely, because the new homeowner discovers the old owner's mummified corpse inside.
This story is as sad as it is disturbingly common. It used to be that if you suddenly stopped making payments on your home, things would happen. A bank officer might stop by. They might phone your emergency contact and ask for more information. Someone from the Sheriff's department would stop by and take a look around.
These days? Please. The banks are flooded with foreclosures. They don't even have time to list all the foreclosed homes for sale, much less the resources to check up on each home. And so many people are walking away from their mortgages, who can blame the banks from assuming that's what happened this time, too?
A timeline:
The seaside air in the coastal town of Roses, Spain helped preserve the body of a childless woman in her mid-50s who died in her home in 2001. Six years later a man named Jordi Giro bought the home at auction, sight unseen. When he entered the home a week later, he found her "mummified body sitting on the living room couch."
Only hours before a North Hollywood home was going to revert to the bank, a mortgage broker contacted police for a welfare check. Inside, police found 30 years' worth of garbage, plus a mummified body which they tentatively identified as 86 year-old Barbara Hunt.
A man buys a two-story stucco home at foreclosure auction. In the garage, he finds the mummified body of former homeowner Kathryn Norris inside her locked car.
The case of Norris is particularly interesting, not just because of the amazing and heartbreaking article in the St. Petersburg Times, but because she should have been discovered at several points. After her disappearance, her nephew called local police and asked them to do a welfare check. The police reported that her home seemed to be empty. Later, bank employees twice performed a "diligent search" and certified the home unoccupied.