Well here is another story garnered from the Fortean news. It is not a nice story so you can give it a miss but it takes place in the little town of Helmsley. Helmsley is a few miles from Pickering where we would go for food shopping. But every now and then we would go to Helmsley to have coffee, it also had a good delicatessen as well, and was not too far from Rievaulx Abbey.
A story had arisen in 2018 about a body being found in one of the cottages there. It turned out that a Japanese family, three adult children and their mother lived in the cottage but had been hiding the body of one of the children who had died. Speculation was rife, builders whilst working on the attics next door had said they smelt a funny smell but we never did find out the truth about what had happened.
Well Fortean Times fills the story in. Apparently the mother and one of her daughters went to the chemist and bought 'excessive quantities' of surgical spirit, and the chemist said he could also 'smelt the smell of dead bodies on them. The police went round and indeed in a bedroom they found the dead daughter and a funeral was arranged.
Now you could say this was a criminal offence, a body has to be buried by law. The three were taken to court but the judge said because of the unusual circumstances and that the three defendants 'suffer from an extremely rare mental affliction' and would therefore not be charged.
Helmsley is a very pretty little town and yet beneath its surface strange stories lurk. A typical market town.
