To the people who found the room, it looked like a scene from a horror film. Last month, staff at the University of Cologne in Germany discovered a basement room in the institute of anatomy filled with more than 100 human corpses and plastic buckets labeled, “noses,” “newborns” and “shark head,” the Guardian reported. It appeared they had been abandoned for a decade or longer.
A staff member told a German newspaper that the cooling system had broken and that the room smelled putrid.
An investigation is ongoing, the Guardian reported, and the corpses of people who had donated their bodies to science are slowly being identified.
As rumors swirled around the university about the macabre findings last month, Professor Jürgen Koebke, 66, the former director of the institute of anatomy, was found dead under a bridge in Cologne. Authorities believe the professor, respected by staff and students, stabbed himself to death.
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