A routine wellness check produced a grisly discovery in Petaluma Tuesday, as police found a woman had been living with her mother’s dead body in the house for more than a year.

A shocking story from Petaluma Tuesday, when the Petaluma Police Department received a call from a concerned neighbor that a resident on Windsor Drive had not been seen in several weeks, and packages were piling up on the porch. So they headed to the house to do a welfare check-in, and they found her. But that’s not all that they found, as KRON4 reports they also found her mother’s dead body, which had been in the house decomposing for apparently more than a year.

KTVU actually did some reporting and visited the house, getting footage of the scene above, while officers were still on the premises. “Officers were called to the 200 block of Windsor Drive about 11 a.m. on Tuesday and saw piles of 20 to 30 packages stacked up on the porch, which KTVU also observed upon visiting the home,” that station reports.

Neither the woman nor the deceased mother are being named yet. But Petaluma Police Department Lieutenant Jeremy Walsh told the Bay Area News Group that the daughter “had been living inside the house the entire time and was well aware of her mother’s body being located inside the house.”

According to a press release from the Petaluma Police Department, the body was “in the advanced stages of decomposition,” and the “adult female contacted inside the residence cooperated with officers and confirmed the victim had died of natural causes in April of 2021.”

Right now this is all being classified as just an “unattended death investigation,” and police say that “there are no outstanding suspects or safety concerns in the neighborhood.” But for obvious reasons the house has been red-tagged, and the daughter has been hospitalized for medical evaluation and treatment.

The story is reminiscent of another one from last year in which squatters were found living in the Las Vegas house of a woman who died in her living room chair, and there was evidence that they'd left her there for a while before burying her in the backyard. And then there's an awful Vallejo tale of a 22-year-old man whose father died and he stashed the corpse in order to continue collecting his pension.

Related: Ack! Mummified Body Found Inside Wall of Old Oakland Convention Center [SFist]

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