A New York woman spent three years living with her dead mother, admitting she would prop her up for meals at the table and even slept next to her corpse at night.
Police revealed how Chava Stirn laid out the bones of her mother Susie Rosenthal on a bed of rubbish bags in their kitchen after she died in 2011.
Ms Rosenthall, who died aged 61, was brought to the kitchen table for dinner and had her daughter place her body of bones on a chair next to her while she slept at night.
The body went undetected until a caretaker stopped by the Brooklyn apartment to carry out maintenance services.
Police were forced to break down the door to the flat after Ms Stirn refused to open up to authorities. Police then found the 28-year old’s mother in a chair surrounded by bags of rubbish.
According to the New York Post, neighbours said they never smelt anything suspicious, and a relative of the young woman would regularly take her food. Locals assumed the woman was a recluse.
Another neighbour told the paper how they would hear Ms Stirn shout to herself:
“When I listened, she was screaming ‘I kill myself, I kill myself!” said Malka Lerner, 41.
“I never saw her or her mother. They never came out.”
A police officer attending the scene referred to the incident as one of the strangest cases he has yet worked with:
“It’s a scene right out of Psycho…This is one of the weirdest cases I’ve ever seen.”
Ms Stirn was later taken for a psychiatric evaluation, while the cause of death for her mother Susie has not yet been determined.
