In 2008, the occupants of a Zagreb apartment building proposed converting it into a condominium. The only resident who failed to agree was Hedviga Golik, a former nurse who had once occupied a one-room apartment in the building’s attic. Withdrawn, temperamental, and alienated from her family, Golik had not been seen in decades and was thought to have left the area. A dispute among the other tenants had prevented any of them from laying claim to the apartment.

When three representatives broke open the door that May, Golik’s body was lying on the bed, wrapped in blankets, a teacup by her side. She had died in 1966 and lain there for 42 years. The building superintendent, a former boyfriend, had been providing the unit rent-free, and the building’s architect had routinely paid the electricity bill.

She was buried the next day. A police spokesperson said, “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.”

In 2015, archaeologists discovered a pair of human skeletons in a cave in southern Greece, where a human settlement had flourished in the Neolithic age. The two, a man and a woman in their early 20s, had been embracing for 5,800 years.

“They’re totally spooning,” anthropologist Bill Parkinson told National Geographic News. “The boy is the big spoon, and the girl is the little spoon: Their arms are draped over each other, their legs are intertwined. It’s unmistakable.”

Archaeologist Anastasia Papathanasiou added, “It’s a very natural hug; it doesn’t look like they were arranged in this posture at a much later date.” How the two had met their end is unknown.

More embracing skeletons.

A memorably creepy ghost story is told of Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava:

One night when Lord Dufferin had accepted, in Ireland, the hospitality of a friend, he awakened suddenly, preyed upon by an indefinable restlessness. He got up, went to the window, which was lighted by the moon, and saw distinctly in the shadow below him a man bearing a large burden on his shoulder. This man was walking slowly. When he passed before the house, it became manifest that he bore a coffin; he lifted his head; his face was so repulsive that Lord Dufferin was greatly struck. His gaze followed the apparition as it drew away, and he went back to bed, where he had great difficulty in going to sleep once more.

The morning of the next day, he questioned his host, but the latter could give him no enlightenment. He knew no one corresponding to the description of the person carrying the coffin, and no burial was awaited in the village.

Some years later Lord Dufferin was appointed Ambassador to France. Determined faithfully to discharge the duties of his high position, he went, one day, to a diplomatic reception that was to be held in the Grand Hotel in Paris. His private secretary conducted him to a large lift before which there were several state officials standing respectfully in line. Lord Dufferin, passing them, bowed, and was about to step into the lift, when he gave an involuntary start. The employee who operated the cable was ugly, surly-looking, and had precisely the features of the mysterious apparition of the Irish village!

Moved by an instinctive impulse, the ambassador drew back; he retraced his steps, uttering some words of excuse, and, on the pretext that he had forgotten something, asked them to take up those who had gone on before, without waiting for him; he then went to the hotel office to make inquiries as to the person who had caused his very natural emotion. But he did not have time. At that moment a terrible crash was heard, mingled with cries of anguish. The lift, reaching a certain height, had dropped suddenly to the bottom of the shaft, crushing or mutilating those within it.

It appears that none of this is true — there was a lift accident in the Grand Hotel in 1878, but that was years before Dufferin arrived there, and the rest seems to have been made up. It’s such a striking story, though, that Dufferin himself used to relate it as a personal anecdote.