Ramblings & ephemera

Living in a cave behind your house

From Reuters’s “Chinese fugitive leaves cave after 8 years” (5 October 2006):
A Chinese man wanted by police on gun charges has given himself up after hiding in a cave constructed at the back of his house for eight years, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The 35-year-old man from the southeastern city of Fuzhou had tunneled [...]

Dead five years before he was discovered

From Reuters’s “Body found in bed 5 years after death” (4 October 2006):
Austrian authorities have discovered the body of a man who apparently died at home in bed five years ago, a Vienna newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The corpse of Franz Riedl, thought to have been in his late 80s when he died, went undetected for [...]

Kaspar Hauser

From Damn Interesting’s “Feral Children“:
One of the more mysterious cases is that of Kaspar Hauser, who was discovered in Nuremberg, Germany in 1828. He was unsteady on his feet, held a letter for a man he had never met, and only spoke the phrase “I want to be a horseman like my father is.” The [...]

Dead for 3 years

From The Telegraph’s “Skeleton woman’ dead in front of TV for years“:
A woman’s skeleton was discovered in her flat three years after she is believed to have died, it emerged today.
Joyce Vincent was surrounded by Christmas presents and the television and heating in her bedsit were still on.
The 40-year-old’s body was so decomposed that the [...]