A scrawled note on the door read: "No!!! comment. Just stop knocking. You want a story read a book."
But who could beat the story of the house in this middle-class town, where the police say an exotic dancer at a nude juice bar had a severed hand, nicknamed Freddy, preserved in formaldehyde, and six human skulls?
The police said it was unclear where the body parts had come from, but that did not deter them from charging the dancer, Linda Kay, 31 -- who works at Hott 22, a strip club -- with unlawful disposition of human remains.
The police said they found the crudely hacked hand inside a Mason jar in Kay's bedroom last Friday after answering a call from a woman who said that an owner of the house, Sean McDonough, had threatened to kill himself with a hammer.
When the police finally arrived, McDonough was nowhere to be found, but Kay answered the door.
She became uncooperative, the police said, and they proceeded to search the house based on the phone call and found the jar containing the hand.
Captain Paul Brembt of the South Plainfield Police Department said that Kay conceded that she owned the hand, although she would not say where she got it. Nor were the police sure who owned the six skulls, which were found in an upstairs room.
The Star-Ledger of Newark reported the discovery of the hand and skulls on Tuesday.
Andrea Leipow, 25, an aspiring model, said she had lived at the house for a brief time, ending in April. She said that Kay had told her that a medical student who was a fan of Kay's dancing had given the hand to her as a gift.
Leipow said that residents of the house had nicknamed it "Lefty" or "Freddy" or, simply, "the Hand."
She said that the house's residents scared her, so she left.
"They had tons of weapons," she said. "They had a medieval mace, a shotgun, they had another sawn-off shotgun, pistols, knives."
For the past several years, Kay worked at Hott 22, where she went by the stage name Zilla.
Ira Weiner, a lawyer for the club, said that he often spoke with her.
"She's kind of an artistic person, with her own sense of aesthetics," he said. "But she's harmless. You know, what she collected was not a manifestation of her being vicious, it's just simply what she thought was cool or had some artistic merits."
Kay graduated from Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School in 1993. Her senior yearbook identifies her as a member of the swim team. Kay was released on US$100,000 bail on the day she was arrested. The police are not sure where she is.
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