It's like mother never left home.
Disposing of a Body is a difficult and complex matter. So why bother?
At least, if you keep them in your home (probably the place you killed them), you can hopefully know where they are and try to prevent people from looking for (or at least finding) them. Police Are Useless, after all. This may be the reason for someone literally being Stuffed into the Fridge.
Though, if the killer themselves moves on or dies, that's a classic setup for someone else to be accused via The Corpse Stops Here. Well, at least you Finally Found the Body.
This is a sister trope to Mummies at the Dinner Table. The person in that trope is behaving under the delusion a person is still alive. The body may or may not be in the home base (though it's often the case that they are).The person in this trope is simply (secretly) storing a body in their home base, and they know that the person in question is dead.
As for why they do it? Maybe they're afraid or Conditioned to Accept Horror. They may be doing it for icky reasons or pure pragmatism, especially if the killer is a Tiny Tyrannical Girl without options to move the body herself. It's also a subtrope to Body in a Breadbox, and it may involve Of Corpse He's Alive. Might evolve into a Corpse-Strewn Lair if the owner keeps adding "roommates."
Compare Constructive Body Disposal (when a corpse is stored in a building site that may or may not be a home base). Smells of Death will usually be mentioned unless the killer got very lucky and/or took precautions to avoid it.
As this is usually The Reveal, no spoilers will be marked.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Happy Sugar Life Satou keeps the dismembered body of the previous tenant she murdered, in plastic bags in a locked room of the apartment she lives in with Shio.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: In Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan, one story involved Naoko Osato accidentally killing her boyfriend Gunpei by pushing him into a metal golf club which pierced his head, then was forced to hide his body within her own household as it kept bleeding endlessly. She kept the body hidden in the attic from her family since then while having to dispose of all the blood the body spilled daily without anyone noticing.
- My Hero Academia: Vigilantes: Kuin Hachisuka lives in the home of her murder victims, keeping them propped up on the couch and calling them her parents. She lives off their credit cards until they max out and she moves on to her next victims.
Fan Works
- The Morrigan: As a child, Sophie Pulone's parents either killed each other or one killed the other and then themselves. Sophie, too young to know what to do, had to live in the apartment with their corpses until they were found by the police, which included stepping through the pools of blood while desperately trying to not look at the bodies.
Films — Live-Action
- Arsenic and Old Lace: Two spinster sisters take in lonely old men as boarders, then poison them one by one and temporarily stash each in a built-in window seat until one of their nephews can bury them in the basement.
- In Don't Breathe, after The Blind Man accidentally kills Cindy (whom he kept as a Breeding Slave in his house to have a child as a replacement for killing his daughter), he puts her body in a hole in his basement, which he then fills with concrete.
- In The Fourth Protocol, agent Petrovsky is given the order to kill the agent that assembled the disguised atom bomb in the house he's renting; given that he plans on setting off the bomb and incinerating the entire neighborhood in the subsequent explosion, he doesn't bother disposing of her body, he just places her in the bathtub.
- Hide and Seek: Sung-soo, fleeing from Joo-hee the murderer, takes refuge in Joo-hee's apartment. He opens a closet, and the corpse of his own brother Sung-chul comes tumbling out.
- Interview with the Vampire: Lestat gives Undead Child Claudia a doll on the same day every year, and the oldest have become quite tattered. When he and Louis take her to task for this, she temperamentally starts tossing her dolls off of the bed into a heap—uncovering the decomposing corpse of one of her kills in the bed, which only makes the argument worse.
- Jo: Brisebard finds himself forced by circumstances to hide Riri's body inside his house since people keep coming and going in and out his house, having no time to rebury him.
- Last Night in Soho: Sandie killed her victims in her flat (where she was also being pimped out and, later, pimping herself out), and then disposed of them under the floors and in the walls.
Literature
- In the second volume of The Cemeteries of Amalo, a woman going through the estate of a recently deceased friend has to go to a Witness for the Dead when she finds a desiccated corpse wrapped up and stowed in a bag in her friend's attic. The friend had previously claimed her husband disappeared, but was prone to wild stories including that she'd murdered him, so while the woman isn't happy, she's not really surprised.
- Horus Heresy: A scene in Konrad Kurze: The Night Haunter set some time after the Siege of Terra depicts the maddened Primarch of the Night Lords building an effigy of the Emperor within his fortress out of the dismembered body parts of dozens of people he's killed and partially eaten. The Emperor himself then seems to speak to him for a time through the effigy, although it's a little ambiguous whether it's real or a hallucination.
- Mommy Sleeps in the Basement: Paisley reveals to Mrs June that her father eventually killed her mother Claire (whom he also kidnapped and held prisoner for years) and stored her body in the basement under a block of cement.
Mommy sleeps in the basement under a big slab of cement.
- Tony Hill and Carol Jordan: Discussed in "The Wire in the Blood", when Jacko Vance compares himself to real-life English serial killer Fred West
, and says that he knew better than West not to keep his victims' bodies in his house, hence his decision to use Furnace Body Disposal.
- Troubled Blood: Janice suffocated Margot in the Athorns' flat and stored her in a cement block in the sofa for over three decades while the family continued to live around her.
Live-Action TV
- American Horror Story: Murder House: After Violet's suicide, Tate hides her body in the basement so that she (actually a ghost) won't realize she's dead. It stays there rotting. Constance finds it at the end of the season after the other Harmons have died, but she keeps it in there in order to lie to everyone that Violet took Michael to raise.
- Parodied on an episode of Coupling, when Jeff impulsively tells a girl that his girlfriend (who is out of town) is actually dead, in order to stop her flirting with him. The girl still ends up coming home with him and finds the girlfriend (who had come back early due to illness) asleep on his bed. Naturally, she assumes the worst.
- CSI: Downplayed. In the B-case of "Scuba Doobie-Doo," a building superintendent, who lives in one of the apartments, kills his nagging wife and stuffs her in the brine tank of the water filtration system in the basement.
- Desperate Housewives:
- Paul and Mary-Alice buried Deidre's remains after Mary-Alice killed her because she tried to take Zach back in their swimming pool. The chest containing her body parts stays there until Mary-Alice's suicide prompts Paul to dig it up.
- In a much less malevolent version, Karen McCluskey kept her dead husband's body (after his death from natural causes) in a freezer in her garage because he was still legally married to his first wife, and the discovery of his body would've left Karen destitute. Hijinks ensue after the power goes out, causing him to start defrosting.
- Des (2020): Dennis Nielsen talks about redressing one of his victims and keeping his body next to him on the sofa. He also did the same with body parts of his other victims.
- Dexter: New Blood: Implied Trope. In the penultimate episode, Dexter and Harrison discover Kurt's trophy room, which was already glimpsed in earlier episodes. After killing his victims by shooting them in the chest, Kurt embalms and preserves the corpses as best he can, then displays them in a windowed coffin wearing a white dress and looking quite angelic. He has done this dozens of times, all to preserve their "innocence". He gets very unhinged when one of his murders goes sideways and destroys the girl's face in the process. He proceeds to pummel the body as "punishment".
- Elementary: In "Pilot", Holmes discovers the Body of the Week, who had been reported missing, in a hidden room containing a large safe, after noticing that the safe's weight was causing the floor to bend towards it. The killer turns out to be a patient of her Psycho Psychologist husband.
- Homicide: Life on the Street: In the episode "Law and Disorder", a woman murders her boyfriend out of jealousy and keeps his body in a chest freezer in her house. The crime is discovered because two homicide detectives came to the house to question her as a potential witness to a nearby killing, and she thought that they'd come to arrest her for killing the boyfriend and spontaneously confessed.
- Inside No. 9: In "Hurry Up and Wait", Bev is revealed to have kidnapped and killed baby Ryan, keeping his skeleton hidden as one of her dolls in her huge collection in her bedroom.
- Law & Order: The episode "Rapture" begins with a man getting an e-mail from his uncle (which was meant to go out after the end of the world), confessing to the murder of his wife. The detectives search his home to find he had been keeping her in a freezer for years.
- Orphan Black: After Donnie accidentally kills Dr. Leakey while Remonstrating with a Gun, he and Alison bury him under the floor of their garage. They later have to dig him up again to retrieve a biotechnological implant in his body.
- In Pose, one of Elektra's clients died of an overdose while in her "care" (he had an abandonment fetish, and thus asked her to leave him in restraints for a while, during which he overdosed.) Feeling guilty about his death, Elektra kept his body in a trunk in her apartment for years. The body was finally disposed of by her children years later after she got arrested on an unrelated case and the police were looking for evidence of prostitution in her apartment.
- Saturday Night Live: The Tasty Toaster Tarts sketch features a child who killed his overbearing parents and hid their bodies in the fridge. And then he invites his friends over.
- Thirteen (2016): It's revealed that Ivy's kidnapper, Mark White, murdered his brother Dylan in a rage and forced Ivy to wrap up his body and help him to seal it in the basement. After Ivy's escape, the police discover Dylan's body, which leaves Ivy under further suspicion.
- Scott & Bailey: In Series 3, the Bevans have the corpses of their many victims, including their son, buried in the cellar. A full search of their house turns up their other daughter buried under their bedroom floor.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): "The New Exhibit". A man convinces his employer to store a set of wax figures in his basement. The figures are all of famous murderers. When the man's wife tries to destroy them, he kills her under the delusion that the figures did it, then hides her body under the cement in his basement.
- Unforgotten: Matthew Walsh, the victim of Series 5, is revealed to have been dismembered and stored in a freezer, which was kept by Rob in his flat for three decades until he died of natural causes and the freezer was thrown out. That resulted in the discovery of Matthew's body when it was discovered rotting on a construction site.
Video Games
- Fallout Shelter: The bodies of dead dwellers can be left on the floor until you have enough Caps to revive them, but the other dwellers in the room will suffer a large mood penalty, and make snarky comments about the smell and how great it is for morale to constantly walk past a dead body.
Webcomics
- Killing Stalking: Towards the end of the series, it was revealed that Sangwoo hid his mother's corpse inside the walls of his closet.
Web Videos
- Noisy Hill: James's creepy behaviour is such that, in his introductory inner narration, he states that Mary's body was just sitting there on their bed with her "rotting eyes" staring at him until the police removed it. The series parodies the fact that Mary's been Dead All Along, and most of the time treats James as already knowing this, which is part of the humour.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: In the Treehouse of Horror XXVI story, "Wanted: Dead, Then Alive", Sideshow Bob finally succeeds in killing Bart, and he then keeps his corpse in his house, doing things with it such as playing golf and hitting the golf balls into his mouth, or putting him on the couch and putting on Itchy & Scratchy for him to watch.
Real Life
- In Indonesia, a tribe of people known as the Torajans treat the concept of death as more of a sickness that results in the departed crossing from one place to another instead of accepting that they are truly gone. It is not uncommon for the body to be preserved, bathed, offered food and drink, and kept in the house for months or even years before being properly sent off with a burial.
- On a darker note, Gulag prisoners would often pretend that fellow inmates who had perished days ago were still alive and hide their status from the guards in order to get extra rations for themselves. Painter Nikolai Getman personally saw this happen during his time in one, as portrayed in "A Dead Man's Bread Ration".
- Several real-life serial killers have done this:
- In 1940s London, John Reginald Christie became notorious for murdering seven women and one baby girl, and keeping six of the women's bodies, including that of his own wife, stashed in his own flat or in the garden. He was caught after he moved out of the flat, leaving the bodies for the next tenant to find.
- Dennis Nilsen was rather infamous for this. After strangling Kenneth Ockenden (his second of twelve victims), he bathed and redressed him watching TV and sleeping with the corpse.
- On top of being a cannibalistic Serial Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer preferred to keep the corpses of his victims to have his way with them and turn the remains into his own shrine. After he got bored, Dahmer would dispose of the remains but upon his arrest, the cops discovered a bunch of skulls and severed body parts in his apartment.
- Of John Wayne Gacy's thirty-three victims, twenty-six of them were buried in the crawl space of his house.