Sometimes, the truth is scarier than fiction. This photograph (yes, photograph, not CGI) is of Blanche Monnier, a French lady who was kept hostage for 24 years in a locked, covered room where she was forced to live in her own waste. She was rescued in 1901, after the police received a letter detailing how a lady was being held hostage in France.

The unknown letter read, to some degree:

Monsieur Attorney General: I have the honor to inform you of an exceptionally serious occurrence. I speak of a spinster who is locked up in Madame Monnier’s house, half starved, and living on a putrid litter for the past twenty-five years – in a word, in her own filth.”

The letter astonished the police. They went to the home and discovered an anorexic Blanche Monnier lying in a pool of excrement and trash on a couch in an upstairs room. The 55-pound, 49-year old Blanche was hiding under the sheets, terrified. She had not seen sunlight in 24 years. A witness to her discovery described it:

We immediately gave the order to open the casement window. This was done with great difficulty, for the old dark-colored curtains fell down in a heavy shower of dust. To open the shutters, it was necessary to remove them from their right hinges. As soon as light entered the room, we noticed, in the back, lying on a bed, her head and body covered by a repulsively filthy blanket, a woman identified as Mademoiselle Blanche Monnier. The unfortunate woman was lying completely naked on a rotten straw mattress. All around her was formed a sort of crust made from excrement, fragments of meat, vegetables, fish, and rotten bread. We also saw oyster shells and bugs running across Mademoiselle Monnier’s bed. The air was so unbreathable, the odor given off by the room was so rank, that it was impossible for us to stay any longer to proceed with our investigation.

Her 75-year-old mother Madame Monnier, was discovered sitting tranquilly in the lounge room. Police immediately locked up the home and took the mother and brother in for questioning. Blanche was immediately raced to the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Paris where specialists at first felt that she would almost certainly die.