AKIPRESS.COM - The remains laid beneath the monastery in San Angel, Mexico, for more than 50 years after the church shut its doors and the rotting bodies were forgotten about.

A town adopted a family of mummies after the gruesome 150-year-old corpses were discovered underneath a church, according to Mirror.

When Mexico's Reform Laws passed, many of its churches became secular and in 1861 the monastery was forced to close down – leaving the tomb of mummies behind.

Years later in 1917, the building re-opened as a school and the town found the dozens of coffins filled with the embalmed bodies of wealthy town folk from back when.

But when a local friar suggested they lay the bodies to rest by giving them a proper burial, the people in the town refused to let the corpses go.

They insisted that the mummies were fellow citizens and so put them pride of place on display in velvet coffins – where they've remained ever since.

Visitors flock every year to catch a glimpse of the haunting figures, including Elizabeth Harper, a lecturer at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

The bodies wear cravats, vests and jackets. “One of them even wears a jaunty hat with a bow,” Harper noticed. “Though dehydration has twisted their faces into grimaces, their bodies don't show signs of trauma brought on by poverty and dangerous living conditions.”