Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Chava Stirn had been living a solitary life in her Borough Park apartment, in Brooklyn, New York. Neighbors never saw her leave. Relatives left food at the door. Then the Super of her building went to investigate a leak coming from the apartment earlier this week.
He found the apartment cluttered with trash, but disturbing most of all was that Chirn had been living with the body of her deceased mother, Susie Rosental.
According to the law-enforcement sources of the "New York Post," Rosenthal had been dead for two or three years. Stirn has been dressing in her mother's clothes, eating meals with the body and even sleeping next to it.
Apparently, she would prop up the body at the kitchen table when she ate, but then laid her out in the kitchen on a bed made of trash bags at night. She would sleep in a chair, herself. Her own bed, like much of the apartment, was covered in trash and papers.
Reportedly, Stirn would not let the Super in to examine the apartment. Emergency workers had to knock down the door to gain entry. That is when the truth of the situation was discovered, with Stirn sitting in the garbage-filled apartment and wearing her deceased mother's black clothes.
As one source in the "Post" story said, it's like something out of Alfred Hitchcock's infamous thriller "Psycho."
"When I listened, she was screaming . . . 'I kill myself, I kill myself!'" one neighbor, Malka Lerner, told the "Post" when asked what she overheard from the apartment. Neighbors did not even smell the remains of Susan Rosenthal, and if it wasn't for the leak, the body would likely have never been discovered.
Chirn will receive a psychological evaluation at Maimonides Medical Center. The cause of Susie Rosenthal's death has not been revealed.
