The workers found the man hanging in the garage (Picture: WFLA News Channel 8)

Two Florida men hired to clean out a vacant house mistook a hanging corpse for a Halloween-style hoax – and took it to the dump.

Workers Israel Lopez, 50, and Adam Hines, 30, told authorities they were tidying the house in Spring Hill at the request of the landlord when they came upon the corpse in the garage.

The pair cut it down, believing it to be a mannequin, before hauling it to the local rubbish tip where a landfill worker realised it was a body and called the police.

Police identified the body as belonging to Jeremy Witsoth, 33 (Picture: WFLA News Channel 8)

‘Both individuals as well as the property owners believed the lifelike mannequin was a distasteful Halloween-like hoax left by the former renters,’ Hernando County Sheriff’s office said in a statement.




‘They cut the mannequin down, placed it on top of a pile of garbage in the back of the pick-up truck and proceeded to the landfill.’

Hernando County Sheriff’s officials said on Thursday that 33-year-old former tenant Jeremy Witsoth apparently committed suicide several weeks ago in the property, and that the body was ‘in a state of decomposition similar to mummification’.