Does this sound hinky re: a possibly absent neighbor? (Very long, sorry!)

Keeping in mind the answers from this thread on doing welfare checks for an absent neighbor, I present the following story.

Okay, here’s the situation. [del]My parents went away on a week’s vacation [/del] I live in your standard Manhattan doorman building. This is where neighborly behavior means let’s pretend we don’t all live side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, sharing walls with each other like cows for the slaughter so we can stay sane, got it? and we only say a brief murmured “hi there” in the elevators.

The exception to this: my sister and I, who each live a floor apart. I’m on the 9th floor, she’s on the 8th. Needless to say, we’re close, and I often stop by her floor to say hello.

For the past week, as I’ve left the elevator, I noticed that the apartment that happens to be directly below me (my downstairs neighbor, about whom I know nothing except she’s a single woman roughly in her upper 40s) has been targeted by our landlord’s friendly process server for not paying rent for two months (at least).

Instead of slipping the notice under the door, or taping up the notice folded up, the habit is to post the “You’re two months late, asshole, pay up by the end of the month or we begin eviction proceedings!” notice so that it’s completely visible to all and sundry, including the amount of your rent, your name, etc.

Anyway, this notice has been up for a week. Trust me, when we get these things–yes, I’ve been behind once or twice myself in 20 years–we rip that thing down ASAP. It’s embarrassing and public (as it’s intended to be, and I understand why–they want the money owed them).

But this neighbor hasn’t done so. Fine, I guess she’s just been away for a week, right?

However. I’m feeding my sister & brother-in-law’s cat while they’re away for the weekend, and have been down each day. Yesterday curiosity got the better of me and I brazenly walked up to the neighbor’s door to look a bit more closely at the details. Yes, I’m nosy. She lives directly underneath me and has the same apartment layout, so I was curious to see if she paid the same as I do.*

As I approached, I discovered that there wasn’t just the regular notice: there was also a folded/crumpled-up set of “Notice of Court Appearance” papers crammed against her doorknob, which when I turned my head I could see were dated early July.

No one could have entered or left that apartment without those papers falling to the ground. This means the clock rolls back to late July since anyone’s been inside/outside the apartment.

Maybe she just skipped town. Unusual but not impossible. However, weird thing #3 that I noticed today when I went to feed my sister’s cat: I saw a cockroach on the floor not far from the neighbor’s door.

I know what you’re thinking: “OH NO! A COCKROACH IN AN NYC APARTMENT!! CALL THE NATIONAL GUARD!” But see, the thing is, I haven’t seen a cockroach in my building in at least ten years. And until a couple of years ago, I was ill and a clutterer/hoarder, with garbage and yuck everywhere. (I’ve outlined this in a thread elsewhere on the SDMB.) If I didn’t have cockroaches, there are no cockroaches!

So this has me worried. Has she left food/pets/who knows what out that’s now rotting away for months and attracting vermin? Even worse: Is… is she attracting vermin, if you know what I mean?

I admit I went up to the doorway and took a sniff. I didn’t notice any, uh, smell, but we do have air conditioning. I’m not sure if that’ll prevent any major corpse-related odors from wafting outside, so I’m probably worried for no reason.

My question, at long last, is: I’m going to ask my super about whether anyone has seen this woman recently. If not, should I call the police for a welfare check? As I understand it’s not the landlord’s business and he’s not legally allowed to enter the apartment except in an emergency–as in, when the police ask him to. But am I worrying for nothing? Thoughts? The problem will resolve itself without me, but I don’t like the thought of a possible corpse rotting away right below me.

Anyone want to take any guesses as to what the story is here?

(This apartment seems to be cursed. The last person who lived there burned her kitchen up and was subsequently evicted.)

If nothing else, I need to mention the cockroach because fuck that noise! I live right above her, as I’ve said, and I don’t want those bastards crawling up into my place. They… they may already have done so. (choie promptly gathers cats around her for protection…)

  • And holy crap, is she getting ripped off! $2300 for 600 sq. ft! This is a semi-decent building on a nice block in the upper East 50s, and there have been some renovations done, but $2300 is unusual, to say the least. I’m rent-stabilized having lived here for 20+ years, so I’m really getting a major deal–$1000+ less–but I’ve looked into market prices for this building and $2300 is normally what you’d pay for an alcove studio, aka a “junior one” in apartment lingo. Girlfriend is getting ripped off. Assuming she’s alive…

Have you knocked on her door?

There’s no way you would miss the scent of a corpse rotting. A mouse dying in the walls can render a house unlivable. A person-sized corpse must be much worse (just guessing).

I don’t think you should do anything. Scenario 1: she’s dead–there’s nothing you can do and you’ll know soon enough if that’s the case. But after this much time, I’m pretty sure you’d know by now. Scenario 2: She skipped town, on vacation, etc. In any case, it sounds like the legal wheels are spinning and it won’t be much longer before they enter the apartment and start clearing it out.

Although I see no actual need to do anything, you could google the name from the notice and see if anything comes up–a recent Facebook post, for example–if you feel you ought to look into her absence. Although some might call this nosy or stalking, sometimes people who don’t mind their own business do save lives, and some online searching could give you a clue.

Scenario 3: she’s kidnapped and tied up in a basement in Cleveland.

Unlikely, yes, but if so, looking into it would turn out to be the best course of action.

Call the management agency. She’s either vacated or died on site or …something else any and all of which need to be attended to.

Many years ago I helped clean out a restaurant after the owner died suddenly.

No, she didn’t die in the restaurant, but there was a freezer half full of meat in there, and I guess the electricity had been turned off. Anyway, the freezer was unable to contain the smell. It overpowered you the moment you walked in the restaurant.

So I’m agreeing with those who say that if there were a dead human body in there, all the immediate neighbors would know about it, and pretty quickly.

Not guessing here. I know from experience. A corpse will smell like nothing you’ve ever smelt before, air conditioning or not. Two days. The stench was unbearable for at least a week after.

Thanks, guys! I figured it seems unlikely that she’s lying dead–I’ve read enough detective stories & seen enough Law and Order episodes to know that dead bodies are pretty rank. However, among my various neuroses is catastrophizing situations, so naturally my thoughts drifted to the worst-case scenarios.

AnaMan, yep, I did ring the doorbell but no answer. Not surprising, of course, if she’s away–or if she’s trying to avoid the landlord. (Although his process server tends to arrive at 7AM. I tend to be up early in the morning since I work many nights, and I’ve often heard him at some poor bastard’s door, banging his fist on it like a Prohibition-era copper raiding a speakeasy.) Seems like every other person here is a nutcase (myself included, I ain’t judging!) so it does seem like we get more Problem Tenants and evictions than one would expect at a building like this.

Very good idea about doing a little snoopery by checking out her name. God knows it’s not the first time I’ve done some unusual research to help a neighbor, although hopefully this situation will turn out better for my MIA downstairs neighbor than my foolish old neighbor from across the hall.

I’ll also see what the super says, just to ease my mind; maybe he knows she’s out of town. If nothing else, we should get a visit from the exterminator out of it!

Sounds like the most likely event is that she just decided to abandon the place without giving notice. Not everyone cares about being courteous, or they have so much other shit that’s affecting them that they simply don’t have the energy to care about it.

Okay, I have a morbid question: I assume there is nothing special about the smell of a rotting human corpse, right (other than that it is larger than most of the other rotting corpses we are at least semi-likely to encounter: dead pets, rats, mice, etc.)?

I’ve never smelled a human corpse, thank goodness. But there used to be dead animal carcasses on the street a lot in Cairo (there was even one rotary nicknamed “dead cat midan”), and boy … they had an unmistakably horrid stench.

Humans don’t smell different, do they?

I know, its a really gross question, but given the trope about how beyond-bad the smell of a decomposing human corpse is, I have to wonder.

No personal experience, but I had a friend who once helped search for a missing person, and when he came near the corpse he knew at once what it was. He grew up in rural areas and had smelt dead animals before, but this smell caused a sense of unease in him unlike say a dead cow.

Carnivores smell worse, and faster. I don’t know whether a dedicated vegetarian/Vegan would be different. But carnivores in general will have a ready supply of gut bacteria that can live on mammalian proteins in an anaerobic environment. So they will break down faster and produce more volatile gases than, say, a mouse. Dead rats smell far worse than dead mice, not just because of size; it’s a different smell. And anaerobic bacteria in general smell FAR worse than aerobic ones.

My Grandfather survived D-day, and my Dad served in Vietnam. One day my Grandmother forgot a pot of broccoli boiling on the stove and it boiled to mush then burned. When the stench hit us, my Grandfather went into full-on PTSD, shaking and retching and picking up kids and throwing them through the door into the yard. (Saving us, you see.)

Years later my Dad explained that the smell was a lot like that of a corpse, though not as bad.
ETA: I’ve often thought this must be why we respond so horribly to the “smell of boiled cabbage” in apartment building hallways and staircases. We find it intolerable in a way that other cooking smells are not.

Many years ago, when I was living in Queens, the (very elderly) gentleman living in the apartment below me passed away, apparently on a Friday. He was a widower, had had no children, and his only family (a brother) had passed away a couple of years previously.

Believe you me, nobody in the building - least of all me - was able to miss the fact that he’d passed away by Monday morning. In fact, I started smelling something by Saturday mid-day. Granted, this was New York, in a building without central air, in July, but there was absolutely no missing it.

I complained to the super on Saturday afternoon - politely. By Sunday evening, the whole damn building had complained to the super - increasingly less politely. By first thing Monday morning, the super (who was no happier than the rest of us about this, since her apartment was next door to the old guy), had the NYPD on site.* The super figured out which apartment was the problem (because the aroma was pretty. . . generalized) by process of elimination. The old guy in 3D was literally the only tenant who was known to be at home (as opposed to the couple on their honeymoon and the family at Disney) who did not show up at the super’s apartment door to complain.

  • This turned out to be even less fun than the poor dead guy. She was from one of the former Soviet Republics and had clearly not had enjoyable previous interactions with folks in uniforms. As soon as the cops showed, she had a minor nervous breakdown and lost her English entirely. I got to explain to the police what was going on, since I happened to be walking by when they showed up.

One of my jobs when I was a college student was working for a pet cemetery.

Seriously.

And one of the many jobs tossed my way was to do a “corpse run”. An old person’s pet died, and they were unable to remove it themselves, so off we’d go.

Some of the smells were beyond description. The runs when the station wagon’s A/C was broken were extra special.
Luckily, I haven’t had to smell a dead human, but if a little 30 lb dog could make me gag, I cannot imagine what a 200 lb person could do.

So, I think you are safe with no corpse.

Still, it might not be a bad idea to check with the management to ask what is going on. If the person has abandoned the place, depending on what is in there or they left in the kitchen, it could be attracting critters that would eventually find their way to your place.

She could have decided to commit suicide by enclosing herself in one of those large Ziploc bags they use for mattresses. That would explain the lack of smell.

You must investigate! Rappel down the side of the building and get in through her window!

The prohibition is generally against entering unannounced. Owners/property managers generally can enter properties with advance notice (24 hours, in writing is common) for routine maintenance, exterminating, etc.

Hey thanks everyone for the continued responses. Although for the descriptions of eau de corpse, not so much. :slight_smile:

Having checked out her name from the notice, I just did some searches for her. The name is an unusual one for NY–I can’t quite figure out why I find it so, but to me, it sounds like a southern/Midwest name. (Not “Bobbi Sue Jackson” or anything… can’t figure out why I have that impression.)

Anyhoo, I found no one in NY by that name, but three in Texas. (Aha! I was close.) So either the girl’s a transplant or she’s just off the grid. In short, no luck.

Didn’t see the super today so I’ll try and catch him tomorrow. She’s probably ditched, but if that’s the case I do want to make sure the place hasn’t got rotting food everywhere or something, because yeah, I’m too close for comfort.

You lost me at “standard Manhattan doorman building”. That is a foreign idea as the surface of Pluto to me.