Woman who bought house that turned into crime scene after man decided to decorate it shared eerie update years after
The woman who bought the Welsh house where something horrific was found in May 1960, provided an update on how it was to live there, decades later.
Leslie Harvey decided to carry out the good deed of spicing up the interior of his mother's home in Wales while she was in hospital, before stumbling across something terrifying.
Sarah Jane Harvey had kept an almost seven foot storage cupboard locked on the landing since he was a child, and the 29-year-old was intent on opening it when he was redecorating.
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And that's exactly what he did in May 1960, with the cupboard that his mother said contained wartime memorabilia from former tenants having actually none of that inside.
Instead, it was something far more disturbing.
The cupboard was home to a shrivelled mummified body, which was stashed behind some clothes and cobwebs.
As it extended from the floor to the loft vent, conditions were ideal in the cupboard for mummification to occur.
The corpse was in a nightdress and curled over, with an unrecognisable face after insects had their way with the remains, with police beginning their investigation soon after the discovery and going to her bedside in hospital to find out who the body was.
Harvey identified the woman as Frances Alice Knight, a former tenant and woman in her 60s that got a weekly allowance from her estranged husband and rented out a room in Harvey's room.
Partially disabled, Knight stayed there during WWII and Harvey explained that after making a cup of tea and going back upstairs, her tenant had died. Instead of reporting the death, she put the body in the cupboard and illegally collected her £2-a-week allowance after telling people Harvey had moved to a home in Llandudno.
It was later found by pathologists that she died from strangulation, due to a ligature mark caused by a stocking found as the cause of death.
Harvey wasn't charged for murder, instead being sentenced to 15 months behind bars after being charged with obtaining money by deception between May 1940 and April 1960.
She moved to a home after being released and died shortly after.
Paranormal Investigations UK visited the address decades later, when a man who lived there fled after finding out the truth.
The man's sister, Tracy Jones, bought the home in 1990 and rented it to him before moving in herself, explaining: "My older brother moved out - as far as I'm aware - because he found out about the mummy in the cupboard and he was scared.
"At the time, it made the house famous and they used to bring day trippers back and forth," she added.
Tracy's daughter, Cally, said that she thought the property was haunted by Knight, explaining: "You sometimes hear her coming along the landing, she's quite heavy-footed. Things go missing around the house and she sometimes likes playing with your hairdryer and electrical goods."
Retired police officer Raymond Vaughn, who led the case at the time, spoke to UK Horizons about what happened, saying: "The case was the most unusual case anybody including pathologies, all the police had ever encountered.
"It was the first mummified body I had ever seen and I shall remember it for as long as I live," he hauntingly admitted.
Topics: Crime, True Crime, UK News, Weird, Community
Joshua Nair