When French authorities received an anonymous tip in 1901 that a woman was being held prisoner at an aristocrat’s house in the city of Poitiers, they sent out officers to search the home. Behind the locked door of the pitch-black attic, they found a skeletal middle-aged woman lying on a straw mattress laden with her own excrement while insects and rotting food littered the floor.
The room’s odor was so rank that officers couldn’t even continue their investigation, but they were able to learn that the 55-pound woman still clinging to life after 25 years trapped in that same room was named Blanche Monnier — and that her captor was her own mother.
