Mummified baby found in attic floor

[CHIMO]

Source: Globe and Mail Update and Canadian Press

TORONTO — Like anyone who renovates old houses, Bob Kinghorn had hoped to find treasure inside a bundle of old newspaper he pulled from the attic floor of a Toronto home Tuesday night.

Instead, he found the mummified remains of a baby, roughly the same size as his own four-month-old child, wrapped in the paper dated Sept. 15, 1925.

“When I first seen the package, I thought it was money,” Mr. Kinghorn, 37, said today at the front door of his Kintyre Avenue home, just two doors down from the house — an exact duplicate of his own — where he made the grim find.

“I've found coins, and I've found bottles and antiques and various things, but I've never found anything like this,” he said, holding the stub of a burned-out cigarette and wearing his tool belt. “And I was not hoping for this.”



Read more: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070725.wbaby0725/BNStory/National/home

[rurallib]

1. ....

:puke: :puke: :puke:

[Ian David]

2. I wonder if the baby's parents went out to play golf after he or she died like George & Barbara did.

[bleedingheart]

3. according to the article the occupant during that time

was later confined to a mental institution.

Could have been the murder of a child born at home...perhaps the mother was unstable and smothered or harmed the child???

I had a friend whose mother tried to kill him when he was born...his older sisters caught her putting him in the oven...(it was on)... she was confined for life to a state institution....
the worst part of the story...she had mental problems before her last pregnancy...but upon doctor's orders...she got pregnant because the doctor thought it might "straighten her out"...

[aquart]

4. But why wasn't a 4-month-old child buried?

How could the smell not have been a clue? This was a married couple with a legal child? There is no information on the date of the mental institution confinement. Nor is there information on the age at confinement. She could have had alzheimer's and been institutionalized shortly after he died because there was no one to care for her.

TWO people lived in that reeking house for 14 years after that baby died. What on god's earth happened that they never even buried the baby in the yard? Or the basement? And no one asked where the kid was?

[bleedingheart]

8. denial...

as for the birth...my mother was born in 1932 and she was born at home...if the parents had not gone to the authorities and no one had reported the birth...the child's existence could have been unrecorded.

Additionally...the child could be someone else's...who knows...but really it is a tragedy.

[Hekate]

5. How sad. Small clues are in the article, though, like the mental illness of the wife...

The baby was well-hidden, and the mummification in a dry attic space would have ended up leaving little smell that couldn't be explained away by rats or the like.

It looks like infanticide, doesn't it? Which might argue for a birth kept secret in the first place. I'm sure investigators will be looking for birth records of the time, but if the birth was never reported, then neighbors and relatives wouldn't notice that the baby was missing.

A married woman with post-partum psychosis or other mental illness could have done this, with possibly her husband helping to cover it up so his wife wouldn't be taken away to prison or insane asylum. Given the times (1925), it's also possible that the infanticide was done by a woman of the household who gave birth out of wedlock, which carried a terrible social stigma.

I seriously doubt anyone went out to play golf afterward.

As I say, very sad.

Hekate

[SoCalDem]

7. Possibly a love-child of a teenager?

Births were mostly at home back then., and perhaps the family "held her prisoner" and when she killed the baby (or maybe it just died...lots of babies died back then..especially "secret babies), they sent her away?


There were no antibiotics back then..and many diseases that infants died from.. But if the baby's birth had not been recorded/acknowledged, then the death would probably be the same..

[Raine]

6. Very sad

I hope that they are able to find out what happened to that poor little baby.