The perils of buying a home at auction

There's all the usual things of course, toxic mold, bad plumbing, aging rickety electrical systems, leaky roofs, bad furnaces, cracked foundations, termites, squirrel infestations, getting a neighbor from hell, sinkholes, etc. These are all 98mph heaters coming right over the plate though. You kind of expect them.

Then once in a while you get thrown a completely unexpected perfect 12-6 curve, and it just leaves you standing there with the bat on your shoulder slack-jawed shaking your head.

... A French man opened the door to his recently purchased apartment on Friday to find the mummified body of a previous owner hanging in his new home.

According to AFP, the corpse had been hanging in the Bussy-Saint-Georges apartment undisturbed for eight years...

I imagine all manner of similar "prizes" are going to be discovered in the hundreds of thousands of boarded up foreclosed joints here if that backlog ever gets worked through.

The local sheriff deputies I've talked with say the local vacant homes are already being used as burglary booty stash areas so perps aren't caught with the stolen stuff at home. How much of a stretch is it for them to start collecting bodies too?

posted by Purp at 11:21 AM

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