Disrespecting The Dead Can Be Quite Costly

When Catherine McGuigan from Potters Bar, Hertfordshire began digging an extension in her cottage, she thought she had budgeted for every contingency.

Workmen found what they thought was an old pipe which turned out to be ten skeletons buried under her dining room.

Miss McGuigan,42, who had moved out of the cottage during the building work, called police and within minutes her cottage was cordoned off for a forensic search of the hole beneath her dining room.

She now faces a £30,000 bill to give them another resting place as no one else will take responsibility for the bodies.

It is thought up to 40 more bodies could be buried at the cottage on the site of Quaker burial ground from the 1700s.

The Ministry of Justice, the Government body that has responsibility for burial law and practice, told her it was an offence to "offer indignities to the remains of the dead" and warned of health and safety rules.

Miss McGuigan has now ordered coffins from an undertaker and is looking into arrangements for a mass cremation or a burial in a nearby field.

"The undertaker has quoted me £800 per body," she says.

"When it was just a couple of bodies this was fine we all had a good laugh about it. But now I am very concerned that if, as expected, I find 40 bodies, I could be facing a bill of some £32,000."

However the caring and over sensitive IT specialist plans to carry on with her £150,000 extension, which includes a gym, cinema and a shagatorian .

"It's been a very happy home and I've done too much work to let a load of dead bodies stop me now," she says.

Research at a local library has revealed the cottage was built over an old Quaker meeting house.

Because the worshippers were non-conformists and as the society of friends isn't a real religion they were not allowed to bury their dead in church graveyards, so they used the garden instead much like serial killers would.

It is thought that the Quaker meeting house and grave yard was also built over an old Indian burial ground full of old indians.