5 Gruesome Secrets That Were Hiding in People’s Attics

5 Lizzie Borden Souvenirs

Someone killed a man and woman with an axe on August 4, 1892. The culprit was their daughter Lizzie Borden, say most people, and when her trial ended, evidence fell into the possession of lawyer Andrew Jennings. He chucked it in his attic. Specifically, he chucked it in a hip-tub, which was a type of tub people used to have for the dedicated purpose of soaking their pelvises when their butts or privates got infected.

Some 70 years later, Jennings’ daughter found the collection and donated to them to historians, because no sane person wants that stuff in their home. The “hip-bath collection” includes such delights as a blanket sprinkled with a victim’s blood...

...along with several samples taken from the victims. There are hair clippings matted with blood and stomach contents preserved on slides. 

The highlight of the collection, which the historical society chose not to put on display for the public, is definitely the hatchet head that investigators found at the scene of the crime. The hatchet’s handle was never found, with prosecutors suggesting Lizzie disposed of it elsewhere because it was covered in blood. That logic might not make much sense to you, and it didn’t make much sense to jurors either, which is why they acquitted her. 

4 A Murderer, Squatting for A Year

One day in 1941, a homeless guy named Theodore Coneys went to visit his old friend Phil, to hit him up for a money. Philip Peters turned out not to be home, so Coneys broke in, helped himself to some food and started robbing the place. Then he discovered a more long-term solution to his problem. The house had a tiny attic he could squeeze into, and he could simply live there, uninvited and undetected.

For the next month, he did just that. He’d slip down for food but managed to avoid Phil, his wife Isabella or their housekeeper. Then his luck ran out, and Phil spotted him at the fridge one day. This is actually not the only case we’ve heard of a homeowner catching a secret squatter raiding the fridge, and this one ended particularly poorly for the homeowner. The two men fought, and Coneys ended up beating Peters to death.

Then he crept back up to the attic and went on living there, while the house’s other occupants remained there as well, clueless. 

The police didn’t solve Phil’s murder, and over the course of the next year, the two women still in the house kept hearing noises without being able to identify them. The housekeeper eventually refused to live in the house, convinced it was haunted, and Mrs. Peters and the kid moved elsewhere soon after, while still retaining ownership of the property. 

We only know the truth about Coneys because police keeping an eye on the home later spotted him moving around inside. They entered and just barely reached him before he slipped back up into his attic crawl space. A court found him guilty of the murder, and he spent the remaining 25 years of his life in prison, which honestly sounds less painful than living in an attic. 

3 The Bones of Waterloo

Some 20,000 people died in the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, but the site of the battle doesn’t contain a lot of human remains at all. That appears to be because looters thoroughly swept through the carnage, and they even looted the bodies themselves. According to one controversial theory, looters used the bones of those soldiers in sugar production, to bleach the sugar white.

In 2022, a Belgian researcher visited the municipality of Waterloo to speak about this horrifying sugar story. Archaeologists had only ever found the remains of two people on that battlefield, said the researcher. Then when the talk was done, an aged man in the audience came up to him. “Dr. Wilkin,” he said. “I have bones of these Prussians in my attic.”

He’d had the skulls since the 1980s, when a friend gave them to him. This friend had “found” the skulls, which only raises further questions. We have to imagine that various people in Waterloo have been holding on to bones as war memorabilia, for centuries. 

2 The Head of Henri IV

King Henri IV of France, despite being a nice guy, was assassinated in 1610. French revolutionaries later dug up his corpse and chopped the head from the body. In 1919, a photographer at an auction bought a head that was supposedly Henri’s. And that is the closest we have to an explanation for how the head later came to be in the attic of Jacques Bellanger, a retired tax collector. 

Bellanger bought his house in 1953 and didn’t get to thoroughly exploring the attic till 2008. It was only then that he opened a wardrobe stored there and found the head wrapped in a towel and placed in a box. 

People were extremely skeptical that this head was Henri’s. But a team of scientists assembled to test it, a team including an osteo-archaeologist, an elemental toxicologist, a forensic anthropologist and a palynologist. The head really is Henri’s, they concluded. Even the palynologist said so, and you probably thought we just made that word up. 

If this were some king from thousands of years ago, maybe the head would have wound up in a museum. But Henri IV died recently enough for that to sound like sacrilege, so the head was now given a funeral and was buried in a royal basilica.

1 The Career Peeping Tom

Gerald Foos wanted to run a motel, for one simple reason: He wanted to spy on guests having sex. He first considered installing two-way mirrors, but when he discovered the Manor House Motel for sale in Colorado, he discovered a better solution. The building had an attic that ran over all the rooms, and by doing some creative construction on the ceilings, he was able to crawl through it and look at any guest.

He started running the motel in the mid-1960s, and he went on to spend decades spying on guests in its bedrooms and bathrooms. The first year, he observed 46 sex acts, noting them all in a journal. In 1993, he observed 296. Not all guests had sex, of course, and when guests watched TV, he felt bitter, as they were wasting their natural talents. 

Now that we’ve set up this disgusting tableau, you’re surely eagerly awaiting the story of how a guest finally spotted Foos and brought him to justice. That never happened. Hundreds of guests had sex in that motel as Foos watched and gratified himself, and none of them ever knew. The only reason we know about this is that Foos himself contacted a reporter from The New Yorker, who visited the motel one time and spied on guests having sex right alongside Foos. 

At the time, Foos was interested in The New Yorker publishing his journals, but he insisted that his own identity be kept secret. The reporter did not agree to those terms, which meant the story would presumably have to go unwritten. Then, 33 years later, the now 78-year-old Foos said he’d sold the motel, had nothing left to lose and was willing to go public. 

The lesson here is to avoid any motel that looks like it could be hiding attic vantage points. Heed this advice, and you’ll now only have to worry about the dozens of hidden cameras in every hotel room, which film your intimate moments and share the footage over the internet. 

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