Russian historian, Anatoly Moskvin, has been arrested after Russian police discovered 29 mummified bodies in his home. The remains were dressed in brightly-coloured clothes and arranged in doll-like poses, making up a “gruesome tableau.” Moskvin has been charged with desecration of graves, because it turns out being insanely creepy isn’t a crime in Russia.

Moskvin had written several articles about cemeteries in the Nizhny Novgorod region (about 400km east of Moscow), which is odd enough given that he was a linguistic expert by vocation – specialising in Celtic culture, with 13 other foreign languages under his belt.

Says the Guardian:

A police video of the man’s apartment in the Volga river city of Nizhny Novgorod shows a gruesome tableau of what looks like dolls dressed in bright dresses and headscarves, some with their hands and faces appearing to be wrapped in cloth. Police said they were mummified remains.

There are a couple of conflicting reports about when exactly Moskvin was detained – the Russian national daily, Moskovsky Komsomolets, says that Moskvin was “detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones,” while the online crime news publication, Kriminalnaya Khronika claims that  investigators detained Moskvin after discovering the bodies in his home when they visited him to consult him about the desecration.

[Source: BoingBoing]