I've often wondered what would happen if someone found a dead body on Storage Wars. We'll still have to wait for that episode, but U.S.A. Today picked up on a mildly gross, mostly kind of sad story out of Tampa. Local news reports that it was bad luck and not foul play that led Ann Bunch's daughter to entomb her dead mom in a storage unit for 17 years.

Things went awry. There was a storm, the car broke down, and the Clearwater family ran out of money.

Bunch's daughter, Bobbie Barnett Hancock, didn't know what to do.

Her decision: take her 95-year-old mother's body to a unit at U-Stor Self Storage in Clearwater.

And Ann actually would have stayed there, if the manager of said storage unit hadn't been about to auction off its contents. (Dead body on Storage Wars. Wait for it.) At that point, Ann's granddaughter Rebecca Ann Fancher was forced to reveal the remains, which had been placed in a sensible box within the unit — lest you think Bobbie just dumped her in there.

Questionable choices aside, I have a lot of sympathy for everyone involved. Well, aside from Ann Bunch: she lived to a respectable 95, and she's certainly been too dead for the past 17 years to care where she was staying. Also, funerals are damn expensive — you could make some serious profit as a buyer of repossessed storage units for less than it costs to bury a loved one.

[Image via Shutterstock]