Almost every week, according to their family, two sisters, Josephine and Valmai Lamas, pay a visit to their mother: to see her, to sit with her and to make sure that she is looking her best.

It is a devotion that transcends death and social convention, for their mother, Annie, died ten years ago.

Since then, she has been kept in cold storage in a funeral parlour in northwest London. Her body, which was treated originally in formaldehyde, has wasted since then, according to a relative of the sisters.

Below the waist, her corpse is said to have withered to a skeleton; above it, tight leathery skin stretches over the bones.

Still, Valmai, 52, a bank worker, is said to visit her every Saturday lunch-time to sit with the corpse in the funeral parlour. Her older sister, Josephine, 59, a caterer, is said to visit separately, to touch up her mother’s lipstick and foundation and to place fresh padding in her stomach cavity.

A family source told The Sun newspaper: “Enough is enough. Valmai and Josie have been diligently visiting their mother’s corpse for more than ten years but it’s getting ridiculous now. The body has degraded to the extent that it is just a skeleton with a bit of stretched scaly skin on the head. It’s horrific – like a character from a horror film that has had all its blood drained by a vampire.”

A postmortem examination of their mother’s death reportedly revealed that she had died from an embolism brought on by leg vein thrombosis. Josephine, of Chiswick, West London, and Valmai, of Harrow, were said to have been unhappy with the verdict, and asked a local funeral parlour to keep their mother’s body while they sought a second opinion.

For £20 a week, G. Saville and Sons of Wembley, have kept the sisters’ mother refrigerated. Phillip Saville, a funeral director, told The Sun: “We are simply acting on the family’s wishes and keeping Annie ‘alive’ in this way, for visiting seems to be what they want to do.

“No health and safety violations have been breached and the corpse does not smell. There are no laws saying people can’t keep a corpse for years after registering the death, though it is normal to bury the body after just two weeks.”

When contacted by The Times last night, a spokesman for the funeral parlour refused to comment. In addition to the cost of storing their mother’s body, the sisters are said to have spent £2,000 on five wooden coffins, four of which have rotted while they and their contents were awaiting burial.

Yesterday a source within the family was reportedly calling for a halt to the visits, and for their mother to be buried or cremated.

“They don’t seem to think that what they’re doing is in any way bizarre,” the source said. “But it’s disturbing. Josie asked a funeral home to keep her mum in cold storage until they were happy enough to bury her. But that is more than a decade ago.”

Josephine Lamas could not be contacted last night.

Valmai told The Sun: “I have always been a very private person and I am not interested in discussing any issues in my life.”

Dead, but not buried

Vladimir Lenin the Bolshevik leader’s embalmed body has been on display in Moscow since his death in 1924. When Josef Stalin died in 1953, his remains were put on display next to Lenin but were removed for burial eight years later

Jeremy Bentham the philosopher asked for his body to be kept in a cabinet. The cabinet, with his skeleton, in his own clothes and with a wax head, is in University College, London

Julie Ward murdered in southwest Kenya, 1979. Her father refused to bury her body while he continued his campaign for justice

Source: Times database

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