Mummified baby remains a mystery

SECRET BIRTH?

MONTREAL• AQuebec coroner says the mummified remains of a baby found hidden in the basement ceiling of a Montreal-area home was most likely a hidden pregnancy dating to the 1940s.

But some details will probably never be known about the body of the full-term female fetus that was wrapped in newsprint when it fell on the head of a construction worker in January 2017.

Coroner Steeve Poisson said the autopsy was not able to determine how the girl died or whether she was born alive.

The remains bore no marks and a toxicology report wasn’t possible.

Montreal police found the body wrapped in a newspaper dated December 1948. The owner of the home in Westmount has lived there since 1978.

Poisson said the last person living in the home in 1948 provided a DNA sample for comparison with a partial umbilical cord found with the remains, but the results came back negative.

“According to the findings of the investigation the most plausible hypothesis would be a hidden pregnancy by a maid or the woman who lived there at the time and who, following the birth of the baby, would have hidden it in the ceiling of the basement, failing to bury it because of possibly frozen ground or dispose of it otherwise for religious reasons of the era,” Poisson wrote in his report.