We’re pretty close to our family. We share a lot with them, try to visit them as often as we can and plan to keep their rotting corpses in our home upon their respective deaths. Because that, friends, is how you show you love someone. Besides, as a literary reference, it’d be a fitting homage to our hero, William Faulkner. And, you know. We tend to feel peckish, sometimes, at night. Margaret Bernstorff, a 94-year-old woman in Illinois, thought it would be a fitting memorial to keep her dead family members holed up in her home. She would entertain guests on her porch and, when asked about her family, she would say they were busy and on a trip. The idea to keep them at home was, evidently, decided on by all the Bernstorff siblings before their deaths:

Police have ruled out any foul play or financial wrongdoing behind Margaret’s and other family members’ apparent decision to leave the decomposed bodies of three siblings in their home as much as several decades after the first one died. For now, it seems like a “well-planned decision they (family members) stuck to going on 30 years,” Eddington said Tuesday.

Now we kind of understand why Cindy McCain is always photographer next to that smiling bag of sawdust. It’s romantic, in a way. And how did investigators find all this out? Ah. Ready for a scary story?:

Around the time of Elaine Bernstorff’s death, family members made a decision to keep the body inside the home, moving that sibling’s body to the attic, Eddington said. As the remaining siblings grew older, they apparently no longer had the physical abilities to move bodies of the siblings after they passed away, leaving them in a bedroom and a reading room, he said.

Eddington said the situation came to light after the woman, experiencing difficulty completing financial transactions involving her other siblings, contacted an attorney to give her a hand. When the attorney told her that a death certificate was necessary, the woman reportedly told him that she couldn’t do that because “they are still here,” Eddington said. “At that point he was hoping it was a dementia type thing rather than what it was,” he said.

THAT IS TERRIFYING. And the perfect backdrop for a Southern Gothic novel. We’ll just move the whole thing to Georgia, invent a character named “Silas,” fix ourselves a mint julep and get to work.

Evanston chief: Kin agreed bodies should stay in home [Pioneer Local]