Posts claim Croatian nurse who died in apartment wasn’t discovered for 42 years. They’re mostly right

Claim:

A story shared online in October 2025 accurately reported that the body of a Croatian nurse who died in her apartment went undiscovered for at least 40 years.

Rating:

Context

Based on contemporary news reports from Croatian news sources, the story is mostly true. Officials couldn’t be sure of all of the details since her body was discovered so long after she had died. Most notably, Golik could have died as early as 1966 or as late as 1973.

In October 2025, several social media pages shared a story (archived) of a Croatian woman whose body went undiscovered for years after dying in her apartment. According to the story, Hedviga Golik, a nurse, died alone in her apartment in Zagreb — then part of Yugoslavia, but now the capital of Croatia — in 1966. Her body allegedly went undiscovered for 42 years until found during renovations in 2008.

The story was widely shared on Facebook (archived) in October and the months prior (archived). It was also shared (archived) widely on Instagram (archived) and Reddit (archived).

This was a real discovery reported on by Croatian media, although some of the details shared in the social media posts are uncertain.

On May 13, 2008, Jutarnji List and Slobodna Dalmacija, both daily Croatian newspapers, reported that two days prior tenants of a Zagreb apartment building discovered the body of Golik, who hadn’t been seen for at least 35 years, in her tiny apartment unit. The story was on reported on that same day by Nezavisne novine, a daily newspaper in Bosnia, a neighboring country with a large Croatian population. Both Bosnia and Croatia were part of Yugoslavia before its dissolution in 1992. 

On May 14, Dnevnik, a Croatian television news program, and the Bosnian version of Mondo, a Serbian-owned media group in the region, also reported on the story. Jutarnji List published another update on May 15. Although it said autopsy results were expected that day, Snopes could find no further updates in local reporting.

According to Jutarnji, Golik was reportedly last seen by a neighbor in 1973. Mondo quoted that same neighbor, who by then lived in a retirement home, as saying she last saw Golik in 1967. Although Slobodna Dalmacija reported Golik was last seen by neighbors in the mid-1970s, it reported the neighbor from the retirement home told the newspaper that she had last seen Golik in 1963. 

Nezavisne wrote that Golik’s neighbors claimed that Golik had already been gone for two and a half decades by the early 1990s and thus her disappearance and death were in 1966. While Mondo didn’t give an exact year, it also reported that a neighbor told the local community in the early 90s that no one had lived in Golik’s apartment for 25 years.

All but one of the local news stories, Mondo’s being the exception, reported that Golik’s body was found in her bed. While her body had decayed beyond identification, documents in the apartment suggested that the body was the missing Golik.

According to local reporting, the gas company never issued a bill to that apartment because no one was using the gas. The monthly electricity bill was paid by an architect who died three months prior to the discovery of Golik’s body. The tenants of her apartment building jointly paid off the loan for Golik’s apartment in 1981 — which was part of the reason no one tried to enter the apartment and subsequently discover Golik’s body. 

Because they all chipped in to pay off the loan, each of the neighbors believed they had rights to at least one square meter of the apartment unit and “quarrels between neighbors constantly delayed entry into the attic apartment,” an anonymous tenant told Jutarnji. The last time someone tried to enter the apartment prior to the 2008 discovery, which only happened because of the need to divide the building into condominiums, was in 1998. At that time, one of the tenants posed as the City of Zagreb with a note on the door claiming that the tenants could not dispose of the apartment until its ownership rights were resolved.

Davor Strinović, deputy representative of Croatia’s Institute of Forensic Medicine, told Jutarnji at the time that if a person died in the winter, the person was wrapped in a blanket or well-dressed and the air circulation was greater, the smell of rot could have been less intense. Dnevnik wrote that there was a draft in the apartment from an open window. Even so, Strinović said he did “not understand how none of the neighbors noticed the stench from the apartment.”

The story didn’t make its way to English-language news sources until May 16, 2008, when Fox News picked up the story from The Associated Press’ news wire. That same day, The Daily Mirror, a British tabloid, and CityNews, a Toronto-area broadcast news station, also published stories about Golik. 

Several versions of Golik’s story from the 2025 social media posts claimed Golik’s body was found in an armchair in front of a TV and with a cup of tea still next to her. The stories from The Daily Mirror and CityNews appeared to be the first to claim Golik’s body was found in such a way. Snopes could not find any reference to a cup of tea in the Croatian and Bosnian news reporting from the days prior, and the reference to the armchair directly contradicted the reporting consistent across them that Golik was found in her bed.

Some social media posts included a likely AI-generated image of a skeletal corpse sitting up in a chair. None of the reporting from 2008 ever shared photos of Golik’s body. Since tenants reportedly found Golik’s body in a bed, it wouldn’t make sense for there to be authentic photos of it sitting up in a chair.