The first weekend of the new year held sad news for the state of South Carolina. On Saturday, the body of a baby was found inside the wall of a house in the midst of a remodel. The next day, a body (unrelated) was found in the freezer of an abandoned house. Early Tuesday, authorities said that house burned down—only two days after the gruesome discovery.
The blaze at the home in Norway is considered suspicious, but a cause has not been determined, Orangeburg County firefighters said. On Sunday, eight adults out riding four-wheelers decided to explore the abandoned home after hearing it was haunted, deputies have said.
The group spotted the freezer on the back porch of the home and when it was opened, an 18-year-old man told deputies he saw what appeared to be a body wearing blue jeans and socks and smelled a horrible odor, the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office said in an incident report.
Deputies determined there was a “badly decomposed human body inside of the freezer,” according to the incident report.
The body was not immediately identified. The Coroner’s Office said Tuesday it has not determined the sex or the cause of death.
The house was declared a crime scene and was turned over to authorities and the county coroner for investigation. The property owner was notified and was cooperating with investigators, officials said.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, someone remodeling a house in an old mill town in South Carolina found bones from a baby inside a wall, a county coroner said.
Authorities gathered the remains on Saturday from the home in Pacolet and will send them to a forensic anthropologist to study, Spartanburg County Coroner Rusty Clevenger said in a statement.
It wasn’t immediately apparent how long ago the baby died, or how old it was at the time. The coroner’s statement referred to the bones as “fetal human skeletal remains.”
“Based on our limited information, it is believed the remains have been concealed for a long period of time,” Clevenger said.
Coroner’s Office investigators will work with the anthropologist to determine the identity of the baby, how the child might have died and how the remains ended up inside the wall of the home on Milliken Street.
Law enforcement may be called to help if the coroner’s investigation determines something criminal may have happened, Clevenger said.
It will likely take several months to finish the work, the coroner said.