Boy Finds Mummified Corpse in Abandoned House

Plenty of kids poke around abandoned houses, but there's a 12-year-old boy in Dayton, Ohio, who probably won't be doing so again: The boy on Sunday opened the door of a closet in a house that neighbors thought was unoccupied and found a mummified corpse hanging inside, reports CNN. The body was identified as homeowner Edward Brunton, who apparently killed himself just months after buying the home in 2009. Officials say Brunton, who was in his late 40s when he died, was estranged from family and friends and was never reported missing.

After making the find, the boy ran out of the house to tell his mother. "My son came home and he said to me that he had gone into an abandoned house and he found a body," she tells WHIO. "When he first came across it, he thought it was a dummy, or a mannequin or something." She went to investigate, and says all seemed normal until she "crossed the threshold of the room [and] smelled it." Officials say the body, which was hanging from a belt, was leathery and skeletal. "Because of the location where he was found, it was relatively protected, sunlight protected, temperature protected and low humidity," the coroner tells WDTV. (The mummified body of a Michigan woman went unnoticed for years as well.)