Woman’s corpse sat undisturbed with TV still on and tea cup beside her. For 42 years, no one noticed

In May 2008, police in Zagreb, Croatia made a shocking discovery when they broke into a small attic apartment. Inside, they found the mummified body of Hedviga Golik, a former nurse who had been dead for more than 40 years. The scene looked like it was frozen in time from the 1960s.

Hedviga Golik was born in 1924 in Rijeka and worked as a nurse before moving to an 18 square meter attic apartment in Zagreb’s Medveščak neighborhood in 1961. People who lived near her said she was strange and kept to herself. She almost never talked to other people in the building and had wild mood swings. A neighbor named Katica Carić helped her buy groceries, but they never spoke face to face. Golik would lower a bucket with money and a shopping list down the stairs, and Carić would leave the food at her doorstep.

According to WikiPedia, when police finally got into her apartment in 2008, they found her body lying on her bed, wrapped in blankets, in front of her television. Her teacup, which she had been drinking from, was still sitting on a table next to her chair. The apartment was covered in spiderwebs but nothing else had been touched. Doctors could not figure out exactly how or when she died, though they think it was around 1966.

Why nobody noticed for more than 40 years

How Golik’s death went unnoticed for so long is still a mystery. Zagreb police said they had a record of her going missing from 1973, but nobody ever officially reported her missing. Neighbors thought she had moved away. Some believed she had joined a religious group in Macedonia or moved to Belgrade to live with family members.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine said she most likely died during a cold season. Her attic apartment was cut off from the rest of the building, and the cold, dry air let her body turn into a mummy instead of rotting normally. A doctor named Davor Strinović said the smell of a dead body should have been easy to notice at first, though neighbors said they only smelled something bad when the apartment was finally opened.

The electricity in her apartment was never turned off during those 42 years, which is very strange. The bills were paid every month by the man who designed the building. He also lived in Zagreb and died just three months before Golik’s body was found. Similar cases have happened in other places, including a prop body used in a TV show that turned out to be a real corpse with its own weird story.

Neighbors had been fighting over who should get the apartment since the early 1980s. They seem to have known she was dead but could not agree on who should claim the space. In 1998, someone who lived in the building put a fake official note on her door. The note said she had no family to inherit the apartment and that trying to claim it would be a crime. 

The neighbors believed this fake message and stopped trying to take the flat. A police spokesperson said they had no idea how someone reported missing so long ago was not found in the same apartment where she lived. Golik’s body was buried the day after they found it, and no family members ever came forward to claim her. Her story is like other mysterious unsolved cases that still puzzle people today.