NEWSER) – Here's a macabre tale: A woman in central Russia kept her husband's dead body for three years and told her kids to talk to him and feed him, AFP reports. When her husband, a Pentecostal missionary, died in 2009, she simply left him on a bed in their apartment. She ordered their five home-schooled children to "'talk' to their father and 'feed' him with a broth she made," said investigators. "The children, who were worried for their mother and realized their father was dead, would tell her that he talked to them and ate the food."

They even covered the scent of his decomposing corpse with air fresheners, but finally had to dispose of him when the family moved to another town. So two of the kids, girls aged nine and 14, put him in bags and left him in the bushes—but his right hand and head broke off, so they dumped them in a garbage bin. Police later investigated but determined that the mother posed no danger to anyone, even though she was mentally unstable. Amazingly, an examination of the kids determined that they were still mentally healthy.