NIZHNY NOVGOROD, Russia — Police have discovered the remains of more than two dozen women who were dug up from their graves by a man some described as a “genius.” The bodies were found this week in the home of 45-year-old Anatoly Moskvina, who lives alone in the city of Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia. The discovery was made when Moskvina’s parents visited him after returning from a vacation.

Russian media reported that Moskvina kept at least 26 bodies in his small, three-room apartment. They all belong to females aged between 15 and 26 who died years ago. The bodies were “dried up,” Interfax reported.

Life News reported [translated link] that Moskvina, who is a historian and was also involved in journalism, visited hundreds of cemeteries at night and dug up the bodies with a shovel. He then put the remains in plastic bags and dragged them to his home. Once the bodies were in his apartment, Moskvina dressed the bodies up as dolls. Photos released by Life News showed one skeleton wearing a dress, stockings and other clothing while another body appeared to have been dressed as a teddy bear.

More: MSNBC

Police in Pakistan have arrested two men for allegedly digging up a newly buried corpse and eating its flesh in a curry.

The two brothers are said to have cut the legs from the body of a 24-year-old woman and cooked the flesh in a steel pot. Some of the gruesome dish had already been eaten when police raided the brothers’ home in a remote part of Punjab province.

A senior police officer, Malik Abdul Rehman, told the Guardian the brothers had been eating corpses for at least a year, but some local media reports alleged that they had been human flesh eaters for a decade.

Rehman said that the brothers, Muhammad Arif, 40, and Farman Ali, 37, seemed to have taken up cannibalism as an act of “revenge” after their mother died and their wives left them.

“It became an addiction for them,” Rehman claimed. They boiled the flesh first, then cooked it in a curry, he said.

The investigation that led to their arrest was launched after the family of a 24-year-old cancer victim, Saira Parveen, visited her tomb on Sunday, a day after her funeral, to find the grave dug up and her body missing.

A police probe led to the brothers’ house, where they found the remains of Parveen’s body in one room, along with shovels, knives and other equipment, and the macabre meal. Previous victims include the body of a four-year-old girl, also taken from a local graveyard, the investigation found.

The clunky, oddball title is both intriguing and off-putting, the subtitle quaint and risible — evoking images of Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman excavating a plot in a downpour (“Young Frankenstein”) or possibly Oliver Hardy whacking Stan Laurel’s toe in the graveyard dirt (“Habeas Corpus”).

In this age of cremations, cryonic storage, and ashes shot into space, grave robbing seems to hail from another era. However, the theft of human remains persists as a rare but fascinating phenomenon.

On the stump in October to promote his first book, Colin Dickey found himself tapped just days before Halloween to comment on an Associated Press story by Patrick Walters about thefts from cemeteries: bronze fixtures by meth addicts, ritual objects by occultists, and even human remains by teens playing pranks or possibly hoping to sell body parts.

Medical schools had trouble finding bodies legitimately in the 1800s, Dickey told the AP reporter. People who stole bodies for training of physicians were called “resurrectionists. … People recognized the scientific need but couldn’t sort of get over the religious problem with it.”

Earlier the same month, AP writer Christine Armario reported that the skull of Ruth Keaton, who died in 1984 at the age of 34, was finally restored to her grave in Royal Palm Cemetery, St. Petersburg, Florida, after sitting for 28 years on a table in a stranger’s bedroom. Keaton’s resting place had collapsed while gravediggers were preparing another plot in 1981. They kept her skull, which ended up with Gary S. Thomas, a member of the “Satan’s Saints” motorcycle gang at the time. County deputies noticed the skull when they visited Thomas’s home on an unrelated matter Oct. 3, and another gravedigger who had witnessed the initial removal led them to Keaton’s grave. An appalled nephew of Keaton, born eight years after she died, nevertheless requested that authorities not prosecute Thomas.

Still, it’s a shock to open Dickey’s book and learn that the skulls of some very prominent people — composers Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Joseph Haydn; painter Francisco Goya; Renaissance scholar and theologian Sir Thomas Browne; and scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg — were dug up, stolen, mutilated, handed from one person to another, and perhaps in some cases mislaid or lost forever.

How could this have happened?

[continues at California Literary Review]