Everyone knows that when you enter a haunted house, you never open the freezer. But apparently eight teenagers in South Carolina didn’t get the memo.
On January 3, the eight crazy kids rode their four-wheelers to a rural area of Orangeburg County and entered an abandoned house that was purported to be haunted — occupied by spirits of the dead. The youths were just looking for a night of innocent scares and maybe a few laughs.
What they got was a very real decomposing corpse.
Corpse in the Freezer
“It was scary,” said one of the teens, Madison Childers, who probably wishes she’d gone to see a movie that night instead. “You couldn’t tell it was a person, because I think it had been in there for months.”
By “in there,” Madison meant a deep freezer that the friends found on the back porch at around 5:40 in the evening. One of the boys opened it, and the kids were met with the most disgusting sight they’d ever encountered in their lives: a decomposing corpse.
The body was totally unrecognizable. It had decayed so much that the teens might not have known it was human were it not for the blue jeans and socks it was wearing.
Oh, and the putrefied flesh that was riddled with maggots.
“There were maggots everywhere,” said Madison Childers.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the smell. It was one of those smells that was so bad, you could feel it in the back of your throat and in the pit of your stomach.
The boy who opened the freezer said it smelled like rotting meat. Another boy, Corey Antley, said the stench was overwhelming. “As soon as the seal broke loose, it was just a horrifying smell,” Corey said. “It’s something you won’t forget, really.”
Not surprisingly the eight friends have been struggling with trauma since they discovered the corpse. One of the teens, Riley Robinson, told local news station WACH Fox 57 that he “didn’t know what to do” and that he was “speechless.”
“I heard that once you smell a human you can’t ever forget it,” Riley said. “And I can still smell it right now.”
The teenagers contacted the authorities and the police are now conducting an investigation. In a statement, Orangeburg County Chief Deputy Coroner Sean D. Fogle said that his office is attempting to identify the body, as well as to determine the sex and cause of death.
The owner of the abandoned house is said to be cooperating with police.