A man decided to renovate his house to surprise his mother, but instead sent her to the dock.
“A skeleton in the closet” is not always an idiomatic expression. Sometimes it can be an eerie reality hidden for decades. That's the horrific discovery that awaited 29-year-old Briton Leslie Harvey in his mother's home.
This shocking story was told by the Daily Star.
Leslie Harvey wanted to do a good deed by renovating his mum's home in North Wales while she was in hospital, but what he found revealed a dark secret she'd been hiding for 20 years.
When he opened the cupboard at the top of the stairs, he was horrified to discover mummified human remains. Suddenly, his sweet 65-year-old mum Sarah Jane Harvey became a murder suspect as her home turned out to be a crime scene.
Leslie himself had long since lived separately from his mother with his wife and young son, but he spent his childhood in his mother's house. The man recalled that he always wanted to know what was inside the huge wardrobe on the landing under the roof. But the wardrobe was always locked, and his mother said that it contained the forgotten belongings of former tenants to whom Sarah Jane rented rooms during the Second World War.
In May 1960, Leslie was finally alone in the house and thought that he needed to throw out the old wardrobe along with the junk that was stored there. When the man broke the lock and opened the door, he saw a wrinkled human foot under a thick layer of cobwebs and dust. He threw back the decayed blanket and saw a mummified body in a nightgown, folded in half.
Forensic experts later noted that the cupboard had been ideal for mummifying the body, due to the ventilation hole at the top and the draughts in the cupboard.
Mrs Harvey, who was initially questioned at the hospital, revealed that the body found was that of her former lodger Frances Alice Knight. Before the war, Mrs Knight, then in her 60s, had taken a room in Harvey's house after divorcing her dentist husband. Under the terms of the divorce, her husband paid her a weekly allowance of £2.
Mrs Knight was in poor health and often complained of muscle pain. According to Mrs Harvey, on one particularly bad night in 1940 she went to make her lodger a cup of tea, but returned to find Mrs Knight dead.
Instead of reporting the woman's death to the authorities, she moved the body to a cupboard and locked it for 20 long years. Mrs. Harvey told her neighbors that her tenant had moved to a nursing home.
As it turned out, Mrs. Knight's husband continued to pay his ex-wife's maintenance for many years, and Mrs. Harvey regularly received it by mail. During this time, the woman fraudulently received a total of more than two thousand pounds sterling.
After examining the mummified body, forensic experts determined that the woman had been strangled: a stocking had been tied around her neck, and a specific groove had been preserved on her neck. Therefore, the police accused Mrs. Harvey of murder in order to obtain the victim's money.
At the trial, Mrs. Harvey claimed that her lodger had a bad cold, and that the cure for a sore throat, as was “common knowledge,” was to wrap a stocking around the neck. The defense insisted that the prosecution had not provided “convincing evidence” that Mrs. Knight had been strangled with a stocking.
Mrs. Harvey was eventually acquitted of murder, but found guilty of obtaining money by fraud and sentenced to 15 months in prison. After her release, she went to live in a nursing home and died of cancer shortly thereafter. However, the story of the skeleton in the closet did not end there.
As it turned out, the property “with a dark past” was bought in the 1990s by Tracy Jones and she rented the house out to her brother. However, when the man found out what secrets the former owner was keeping, he simply ran away from home.
Later, the new owner began to live in the house with her family. According to her, at that time the “mummy house” was very popular, and tourists often came to visit them for one day.
Tracy's daughter Callie, who still lives in this house, told reporters that the ghost of Mrs. Knight lives in the house.
“Sometimes you can hear her walking along the landing, she steps quite heavily. Things disappear in the house, and sometimes she likes to play with your hair dryer and electrical appliances,” the girl said.
To this day, no one knows exactly how Mrs. Knight died and whether her restless spirit really cannot leave this old house. But even 65 years after the skeleton was found in Mrs. Harvey's closet, people continue to talk about it.
Recall that in the UK, residents of places where paranormal phenomena were previously recorded began to report that in the last few years they have stopped encountering ghosts. This has caused concern among experts. Specialists say that ghosts can be “recharged”.
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