In true Psycho-style, a Brooklyn woman spent three years living in a cramped apartment with her dead mother, propping her up at the dinner table and sleeping next to her skeleton every night. Chava Stirn, a 28-year-old-woman lived beside the corpse of her mother Susie Rosenthal every day for three years.
The daughter reportedly had her mum’s skeleton stacked on bin bags in the kitchen when she was eventually discovered earlier this week. It was reported that she used to drag a chair into the kitchen at night to snooze next to her mum’s remains.
According to the New York Post, Stirn even dressed like her mother, wearing the same black outfit and shoes the 61-year-old was wearing when she died.
The eery living arrangements have been compared to those featured in the hit 1960s Hitchcock thriller ‘Psycho’ (quite apt, if you ask me). Neighbors in Brooklyn didn’t suspect anything was wrong until a caretaker tried to investigate a leak coming from the apartment on Monday afternoon and alerted the authorities.
Stirn refused to open her door, so emergency workers knocked it down and found her in a chair, looking disheveled, surrounded by waist-high piles of rubbish. She is understood to have lived with her mother before she died and never left the house, according to neighbors.
A relative reportedly used to leave food outside her door, because Stirn would never let anyone inside. The cause of Rosenthal’s death is being investigated, while the daughter has been taken to Maimonides Medical Center for psychological tests.