Airbnb Renters Find Rotting Corpse

A 19th-century Airbnb rental in the Paris suburb of Palaiseau came with three stories, seven bedrooms, a swimming pool, a "lovely forest with a jogging trail"—and a badly-decomposed corpse. Friends who rented the property to host a birthday soiree on Saturday had to cancel their plans when they found the body of a woman in a shallow grave in a garden, reports the Week. She was found "hunched in a dug-out area, her head against the ground, covered in branches, and surrounded by wood stumps … at the bottom of the property which opens out into a woods," police tell the AFP. A prosecutor tells the AP that the branches had been deliberately placed.

The woman, aged between 30 and 50, was clothed and wearing a "ring with a large stone" on her finger, but her shoes and identification papers were nowhere to be found, police say. Authorities add the body may have been in the garden for several weeks. Officers couldn't immediately determine a cause of death because of the advanced stage of decomposition, per the Telegraph, though the prosecutor's office says "all the signs suggest that this was a criminal act." The renters were interviewed by police on Sunday. The property listing has since been removed from Airbnb; the Telegraph notes it isn't clear who owns the property. (This teen duped an Airbnb host to throw a birthday rager.)