When I was in college, my friend Jason kept a fake human skull and a ventriloquist dummy in the window of his ground floor apartment. He told me that the items would deter superstitious burglars. Maybe Jason was onto something. In Vienna last week, burglars fled from the basement of an apartment building after stumbling upon eight mummified human heads that a dentist who lived in the building kept in a chest for "research." From Reuters:
"The burglars were looking for loot when they discovered the heads," said a spokeswoman for Austrian police. "From what it looks like, they just left them lying and bolted away."
Austrian authorities said they were investigating whether there had been a breach of the regulations for storing research materials.
