Bela Kiss Pickled Drum Corpses

In the early 1900s, Hungarian tinsmith Béla Kiss lured at least 24 women to his home in Cinkota in Budapest, strangled them, and preserved their bodies in metal drums filled with alcohol, which he told neighbors contained gasoline. In 1914 he left to fight in World War I, and two years later police opened the drums and found the mummified corpses, many of them women he had met through lonely hearts ads.

Authorities learned he had also tried to pickle the bodies in beer and had swindled his victims out of money before killing them. By the time his crimes were discovered, he had vanished from the front, and despite claimed sightings over the years, he was never definitively captured or heard from again.

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