Let’s say you have an apartment. One night, you wake up to find that a liquid is dripping from the ceiling onto your face. When it turns out that the liquid was bodily fluids from a decomposing corpse, your insurance lets you know that the damage to your belongings will not be covered by your policy. Yes, this happened to someone.

Her neighbor had died… his corpse sat there rotting, he was dead for days.

The autopsy report found the 34-year old likely overdosed”… His body was “moderately to severely decomposed.”
And over time, the decomposition allowed bodily fluids to leak, onto his floor, through the ceiling, eventually onto Sylvia and her things.

“The smell is nothing like you’ve ever smelled before. It’s not like a dead animal, it’s not like rotten food or something.. it’s just something beyond… You can’t even describe it,” says Sylvia. A biohazard team removed furniture and deodorized the place. But she says the smell of death lingered. It already had seeped into clothes, bedding and her mattress.

Her insurance company put her up in a hotel for two weeks until she could move — but refused to replace her belongings. Apparently, corpse fluid is just not covered.

“Unfortunately, the blood and bodily fluid damage to your contents is not one of the 17 named perils covered in your policy,” said the letter she received from Farmer’s Insurance.

CBS13 interviewed Farmer’s spokesperson about the issue, and he said that there really isn’t an insurance policy that covers corpse fluid damage. It just doesn’t happen very often. In this case, after being contacted by the media, they decided to make an exception, and are now considering a change to include bodily fluids.

Call Kurtis Investigates: Corpse Un-Covered (With Video) [CBS13]

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.