New owner finds the previous owner's corpse inside foreclosed home

A man who purchased a Cape Coral, Florida, house for $95,300 at auction made a startling discovery when he visited it for the first time: The mummified body of the former owner.

The dead woman, Carmen Garcia-Viso, had bought the house in 2002 when she moved to Cape Coral from Miami, People reports. Garcia-Viso was not close with any of her neighbors and no one is certain when she died; records show that the taxes hadn't been paid in three years. "Even when she lived there, we didn't know her," neighbor Javier Herrera told People. "She kept to herself. We figured she had died, but no one in the neighborhood knew her well enough to make sure she wasn't still in the house. I feel really bad about that."

The city occasionally mowed her lawn, thinking the house had been abandoned, and police checked the property twice in 2013, but no one ever went inside. The new owner, William Wilson, told news-press.com that the house was filled with old papers, boxes, and pizza containers, and the body was partially eaten by animals. He is now trying to figure out whether or not he wants to keep the property.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up