I’m planning on making a bit of a necromancer’s workshop/torture room in the cellar of Windstrad Manor and filling it with NPCs I don’t like but for some reason, the bodies keep disappearing. I use Dead Thrall to get the NPCs into the basemant then kill them again to store them there but whenever I leave the manor, the corpses are gone by the time I get back. So far I’ve only lost a few random bandits I grabbed to test things out but I’d to find a way to prevent this before I kill named NPCs like Grelod the Kind, Lemkil, Thonar Silverblood and so on.

I thought player houses never reset (storage is safe after all) but maybe bodies are treated differently? WIndstrad is the only house I've tried this in since I'm a very poor Dovahkiin but I assume it the same issue would crop up in the vanilla homes and the rest of the HF houses. Anyone know if there’s a way to fix this? It’s not a gamebreaking issue or anything but it is kind of annoying. I’m on PS3 so mods and console commands are out. Thanks!

I think that corpses do not count as "storage", but rather dead bodies that get cleaned up after a bit. I am not positive about this, but I've had bandits attack me inside my home and their bodies are gone in a few days time. Same with the Skeever corpses that happen every now and then in the cellar.

Poo. I thought it was something like that but I wanted to make sure. I'll keep messing around and see if I can find a workaround but I might have to make do with a tossing a few skulls, bloody rags and whatnot around. Thanks!

IMPROVISE!

Good luck

It all depends on what system you're using. On PC, some NPCs killed by using the console kill command don't get cleaned up.. they persist even after the cell removes all the other stuff flagged to be removed. There's also the intentional dead bodies placed in locations by Bethesda with generic names like Nord & Khajiit that don't get cleaned up either, but getting them into your house requires the PC console.