You don’t expect to find human remains when remodeling a house or cleaning out a basement. But these folks did. Here are their macabre—but fascinating—stories. This article was first published in Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

Body #1

A carpenter named Bob Kinghorn was doing renovations on a house in a Toronto, Ontario, neighborhood in July 2007 when he found something wrapped in newspaper beneath the floorboards of the home’s attic. He opened it…and found a mummified infant inside it. “It was all crunched up in a fetal position,” Kinghorn later said to reporters. “It was pretty horrific.” The deceased child, a boy, had lain hidden in the home for more than 80 years. (The newspaper it was wrapped in was dated September 12, 1925.) Medical examiners said the boy appeared to have died shortly after being born, but there was no way to determine a cause of death. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) investigation into the discovery found that the owners of the house in 1925 were Wesley and Della Russell, and that in 1934, Mrs. Russell had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Toronto. Four days after arriving there, she spent the afternoon repeating, “I’m a murderer but I can’t get away. I’m a murderer but I can’t get away.” (She died in a sanitarium 19 years later.) The CBC also located a 92-year-old niece of Russell who was living in the house at the time of the baby’s death. She couldn’t add any details to the story, but thought the baby must have been the child of Della Russell’s younger sister; she did not believe her kind Aunt Della could have been involved in the boy’s death. The mummified remains lay hidden in the floorboards through a succession of homeowners, all of them unaware of its presence. (The baby was buried at a Toronto cemetery in October 2007, in a ceremony attended by more than 100 people. Bob Kinghorn was the sole pallbearer.)

Body #2

In August 2010, Gloria Gomez, manager of the Glen-Donald Apartments in the MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, found three abandoned steamer trunks in the building’s basement. The Glen-Donald was built in the 1920s, and had been the home of some of the city’s most elite residents over the decades, including some Hollywood stars. Gomez broke into the old trunks using a screwdriver, excitedly hoping to find antique treasures. Inside the first two trunks: nothing. The third contained some things, though—stocks, a fur stole, photographs, postcards…and two leather doctor’s satchels. Inside the satchels: the bodies of two small infants, a boy and a girl, wrapped in newspapers dating to the 1930s. Medical examiners said one of the infants appeared to have died shortly after birth, and that the other may have been stillborn. Police were able to determine that the trunks belonged to a woman named Janet Barrie, who’d been the live-in nurse of George and Mary Knapp from the 1930s to the 1960s. Police located one of Barrie’s relatives, who agreed to provide a DNA sample…which proved that Barrie was the mother of the dead children. Why the remains were hidden away in a steamer trunk remains a mystery. The identity of the children’s father couldn’t be determined, but there is some suspicion that it was George Knapp: he and Jean Barrie were married after Mary Knapp died in 1964. Barrie and Knapp continued to live in the Glen-Donald apartment until George Knapp died in 1968. Barrie then moved away, leaving the steamer trunks behind. She died in Canada in 1992.

Body #3

In October 2003, Stephen and Deena Roberts of Brownwood, in central Texas, decided to remodel the unused second-story attic of the large A-frame home they had been living in for three years; their two children were growing up, and needed their own bedrooms. As they inspected the attic, Deena noticed something she’d never seen before: a small door in the back of a built-in closet. She opened it, peered into a musty crawl space, and saw a plastic garbage bag. Inside the bag: a paper bag holding the mummified remains of a newborn baby. The couple immediately called the police. The garbage bag was sent to medical examiners in Austin, Texas, and they found the remains of two more newborns inside the bag. After years of investigation, the following facts were determined: the house was built in 1987 by James and Doris Bowling; the couple lived there until they died—James in 1999 and Doris in 2000—after which their three adult children sold the family home. Two of those children were located by investigators. They agreed to give DNA samples to police…and the infants were proven to have been their siblings. (The shocked Bowling children said they knew nothing about the newborns.) Even more macabre: medical examiners determined that all three newborns were born and died around 1960—roughly 40 years before they were discovered—meaning that James and Doris Bowling brought the deceased infants with them when they moved into the house in 1992. How the infants died and why the Bowlings never reported the deaths to authorities remains unknown.